Doing nothing keeps working for the Democratic Party. It worked in early 2017, when women’s marches led by activists and local grassroots groups rather than elected officials prefigured a 2018 wave election highlighted by first-time female candidates. It worked for Joe Biden during the most intense weeks of the coronavirus crisis, when he made limited, online-only public appearances but gained in polls against Donald Trump anyway as the president demonstrated daily that he couldn’t understand or manage the threat of COVID-19 and speculated about the merits of injecting oneself with disinfectant. Now it is working again during the mass protests that have flowered from the pavement where police killed George Floyd in Minneapolis.


The House hasn’t held hearings on his killing or on the subject of police brutality more generally, while many Democratic mayors and governors have actively put themselves at odds with protesters by issuing curfews and allowing police crackdowns. Biden has made appearances here and there to signal his solidarity with protesters but has not attempted to portray himself as a leader of the movement. Protesters, unburdened by professional political concerns about being perceived as too radical or too permissive of the looting that has taken place concurrently with some marches, have seized the news cycle day after day and kept its focus directly on police misconduct.

Donald Trump and police officers themselves have reflexively cooperated with this goal by encouraging and perpetrating more misconduct. Unprovoked beatings, tear-gassings, and rubber-bullet attacks have been documented in viral footage, some of it taken directly outside the White House, and this spectacle of the indefensible has drawn increasing numbers of marchers out of their homes. Trump, Attorney General Bill Barr, and police chiefs across the country have meanwhile pursued the factually meritless theory, born more or less from right-wing email chains, that the protests have been infiltrated and manipulated by a coordinated, professional, national network of “antifa” anarchists. (“Black bloc” anti-fascist activists who believe in situational violence do exist, but are not nationally organized and have been less visible at the protests since Floyd’s death than they were at those that have taken place at other times during Trump’s presidency.)