On Friday’s “McLaughlin Group,” The Daily Beast’s Eleanor Clift argued that Black Lives Matter doesn’t favor violence, President Donald Trump’s theme of law and order “is basically cover for authoritarian action” and a distraction from the coronavirus pandemic, and that the president is “fanning the flames of unrest from the Oval Office” in order to help his bid to win re-election.

Clift said, “AOC and BLM do not favor violence. Nobody favors violence. The law and order theme is basically cover for authoritarian action, and it’s Donald Trump’s effort to distract from the fact that a thousand Americans die every day. We’re, in a couple of weeks, going to hit 200,000 lives lost. All those people that Pat thinks are sitting around worrying about attorney Crump and what’s going on in these other cities, they’re worrying about their kids going to school, and they’re not going to be so foolish as to believe that the violence is coming to the city near them. This is Charlottesville all over again. There are good people on both sides, a president fanning the flames of unrest from the Oval Office. Because he thinks it’s his ticket to re-election.”

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