Anyone who has been paying attention to literally every action the Trump administration has taken since day one of President Donald Trump’s second term knows that political posturing and an attempt to intimidate the opposition are the motivators for the public arrests of activists and journalists who were present during a nonviolent protest at St. Paul’s Cities Church last month.
The MAGA-fied federal government wanted to send a message that it pretends is about religious freedom when it’s actually just about a partisan show of force meant to appease right-wing constituents, who are still unwilling to admit this whole immigration crackdown has been a little more than a series of human rights violations and a big show of government-sanctioned xenophobia and racism.
Of course, if the administration were attempting to intimidate or strike fear into the hearts of those protesters, it just doesn’t seem to be working. In fact, Nekima Levy Armstrong, one of the protest’s organizers — whose arrest photo was digitally altered by the White House to look like she was in distress when she clearly wasn’t — is speaking out about her arrest and how it failed to “break” her.
From the New York Times:
Ms. Levy Armstrong, a 49-year-old mother of four, said she learned about the photo while she was in jail, during a phone call with her husband. When she saw it for herself after she was released the next day, she said, she was “disgusted.”
The exaggerated features and the darkened skin, she said, reminded her of when the bodies of enslaved people were left disfigured to deter uprisings on plantations, or during Jim Crow when racist propaganda would depict Black people as caricatures. She said she remained “cool, calm and collected” during both her arrest and the transport to jail.
“They couldn’t break me by arresting me,” Ms. Levy Armstrong said, “so they doctored an image to show the world a false iteration of that time to make me look weak.”
“Reducing my image to some scared crying woman was just so degrading, and it just shows how far the office of the president has fallen,” Ms. Levy Armstrong said. “The presidency, the White House is supposed to symbolize the world’s greatest superpower, but instead they acted like a $2 tabloid.”
Armstrong is absolutely spot on, of course. Trump and his administration — including whoever is running the federal government’s websites and social media accounts — have ghettoized the highest office in the nation, leaving it run by infantile bullies, bigots, and buffoons, who routinely pass along the same kind of disinformation found commonly in Reddit threads dominated by incels who have zero media literacy.
And Armstrong isn’t far off with her references to slavery imagery either. After her arrest, she was “transported from the federal courthouse in St. Paul, Minn., to the Sherburne County Jail with three layers of shackles on her body — around her wrists, waist and feet,” the Times reported. One might not consider that level of bondage to be overkill if we were talking about someone accused of a horrendous murder, or even an armed robbery or violent offense of a lesser nature. But this is a woman who engaged in a protest at a church that resulted in no injuries or even the threat of such.
If the administration didn’t expect that putting a Black woman in chains from head to toe over a nonviolent “crime” was going to remind Black people of slave patrols and auction blocks, maybe it doesn’t actually know or care about Black people the way Trump claims it does.
Bigotry and idiocy — that’s all this administration has to offer to the nation it claims it’s making great again.
Sad.
SEE ALSO:
DOJ Arrests Black Woman Organizer Of Anti-ICE Church Protest
White House Posts Digitally Altered Photo Of Protester
Nekima Levy Armstrong Speaks Out About Doctored Arrest Image, Saying Trump Admin ‘Couldn’t Break Me’
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