The blacks in the United States of America are crying out for justice. Thursday’s tragedy in Minneapolis has blighted the pedestrian record of Donald Trump yet again.

His threat to use violence to suppress the raging unrest is at best a feeble response to an ugly truth, one that was manifest no less during Barack Obama’s presidency. Sad to reflect, he hasn’t spoken the language of a responsible Head of State.

Still more distressing must be the fact that a black journalist was arrested ~ the white reporter was not ~ while covering the protest, with Mr Trump calling the protesters “thugs” and pledging to use what he called “lethal force” in the fountain-head of libertarian democracy, at any rate theoretically.

The nub of the crisis must be that racist violence in the United States was seldom more lethal. The predominantly white law enforcement authorities have distinctly acted with calculated malevolence.

The heartrending visual of a white police officer pressing his knee on the neck of a black, George Floyd ~ “I can’t breathe,” he cried before dying ~ will be recorded by historians as quite the most damning document on the treatment of blacks in a country that claims to be a premier democracy.

Small wonder that the USA today bears witness to a people’s upsurge against white police brutality. And till Saturday afternoon, the upsurge had escalated beyond the frontiers of the Midwestern city, notably to New York, Denver, Chicago and Oakland.

The canker is spreading with awesome effect as Trump’s America stumbles in the conflict against coronavirus and racism. As anger over the killings of black people by police continued to escalate, at least seven people were also shot in Louisville, Kentucky, as protesters turned out to demand justice for Breonna Taylor, a black woman fatally shot by police in her home in March.

In Denver, dramatic video footage also emerged of a car plowing through a crowd of protesters, who had gathered amid outrage over the death of Floyd in a scene reminiscent of the killing of Heather Heyer at a far-right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017.

Shots were also reported to have been fired towards Denver’s state capitol building. Horrific memories of St Bernadino and Ferguson still rankle.

The centre of the anger, however, remains Minnesota’s Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St Paul, which have seen several other high profile controversial police killings of black people ~ including the shooting of Philandro Castille in 2016 ~ where state governor, Tim Walz, called in the National Guard as the city faced escalating unrest.

The National Guard tweeted minutes after the precinct burned that it had activated more than 500 soldiers across the metro area, although it said its principal task would be to protect the city’s fire department. Donald Trump can scarcely afford to be almost so catastrophically impetuous… be it in tackling race riots or Covid-19.