Not like this, Nancy Pelosi. Please, not like this.
On Tuesday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), whose part-time job has been owning Trump, held a Bible while calling for Trump to stop the hate-speak and the combative tone he’s had since national protests calling for an end to police violence against black and brown people erupted last week.
During the great Bible-off of 2020, Pelosi clutched a Bible while asking that the president “reach across the divides of race, party, region and religion to help the country heal.”
“We would hope that the president of the United States would follow the lead of so many other presidents before him to be a healer-in-chief and not a fanner of the flame,” she said, the Hill reports.
From the Hill:
The appearance of a Bible was no accident. On Monday evening, just before a curfew took hold in Washington, Trump had strolled just north of the White House to the boarded up St. John’s Episcopal Church — a target of arsonists the night before — where he held a Bible aloft while the cameras clicked away.
“It’s a Bible,” he said in short remarks. “We have a great country. That’s my thoughts. The greatest country in the world.”
Trump’s photo-op has prompted plenty of scrutiny, particularly from Democrats already up in arms over his threat — made moments before from the Rose Garden — to deploy the military to douse the violent protests that have raged across the country in response to the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police.
The Hill notes that Trump’s Bible-holding moment wouldn’t have been so cringey if the police hadn’t used tear gas and flash-bang grenades to remove peaceful protesters gathered around the White House.
The president claimed that he’s an ally of peaceful protesters, then didn’t stop Attorney General William Barr, aka Evil John Goodman, from having them forcefully removed from the White House without seeing the irony in it at all.
On Monday night, “Pelosi, joined by Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.), issued a scathing statement Monday night condemning the attacks as ‘cowardly, weak and dangerous.’”
By Tuesday morning, it seemed as if Pelosi had lost a bit of her anger; maybe it was the Bible, maybe it was her morning cup of Sanka, but whatever it was, Pelosi was now calling the peaceful protesters’ removal “a most unfortunate situation” and then referenced passages from Ecclesiastes.
“Peaceful demonstrators ... in front of the White House were beaten — some people came out and beat them so they could clear the area so the president could come out and go forward. What is that?” she asked. “That has no place, and it’s time for us to do away with that; a time to heal.”
Pelosi then pointed to past presidents who’d dealt with difficult situations during their time in office including, “former President George H.W. Bush, who urged unity following the Rodney King beating in 1991, and former President Obama, who called for healing following the death of Eric Garner during a violent arrest in New York in 2014,” the Hill notes.
“It is incumbent upon all of us as Americans—regardless of race, religion, region, faith—that we recognize that this is an American problem, and not just a black problem or a brown problem or a Native American problem,” Pelosi said. “This is an American problem.”
But Nancy has to know when her voice is needed and when it’s not. America was still having fun at Trump’s expense. We were still laughing at him looking at a Bible like he’s wondering where the batteries go. We didn’t need the Democrats’ voice on this one and we surely didn’t need the Bible as a prop.
In short Nancy Pelosi:
And we don’t fuck with the “photo-ops”—see what I did there?