How to Turn a Demonstration Into a Broad-Based Movement (Updated)

Send in your brown shirts. Trump really screwed up this one:

First there was a Wall of Moms united to protect the peaceful Black Lives Matters protesters in Portland. The footage was absolutely amazing.

Now there is a "Wall of Vets" providing further backup. The group of military veterans joined the Moms and other groups on Friday night, standing united and in full force with signs showing support for the BLM movement. These veterans ranged in age from 20's to senior citizens to disabled.

This is what it's like in Portland, as of last night:

Portland right now. Stunning. pic.twitter.com/g2U5B8aFI3

— Joshua Potash (@JoshuaPotash) July 25, 2020

Those are not Proud Boys with tiki torches. Those are the good guys.

A short history:

Feds started abducting protesters and a wall of moms formed.

They gassed the moms, so dads brought leaf blowers.

They beat a Navy veteran who just wanted to speak with them, then a wall of vets came together.

They attacked volunteer medics, so nurses showed up in scrubs. https://t.co/cQBCjojxq2

— ACLU (@ACLU) July 25, 2020

And he wants to try the same thing in Chicago?

Update:

Via Digby, an article on a very interesting survey done in early June. This paragraph is pretty revealing:

The reasons persuadables moved from opposing to supporting the protests, Prull said, can mostly be attributed to the demonstrations growing and becoming largely peaceful by their second week, with human stories of everyday police brutality saturating the media environment. Trump’s strongman performance on June 1 did almost nothing to turn public opinion against the demonstrations. Instead it likely backfired. “Between those two dates, the big driver that I see is the protests becoming larger and even more peaceful each day,” Prull told me. “The story was being told by people who are being hurt by police every day, and the empathy with that, and frankly the reasonableness of that, was breaking through. And then the president tear-gassing protestors outside the White House lawn, I think, was a nontrivial part of this. You had the draconian response of the government, and then the protests just seemed even more reasonable when it was a bunch of regular people being tear-gassed in the middle of Washington D.C. for the sake of a photo op.”

Trump is playing to maybe 30% of the populace -- the same 30% that's been against everything since Independence. (They were probably against independence, as well.) The rest of the country is leaving him behind.