When President Donald Trump first weighed in on Wednesday on the caught-on-camera killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police, he was uncharacteristically subdued. Floyd’s death was “sad and tragic,” he tweeted. “Justice will be served!” By the early morning hours on Friday, this moment of compassion was at an end. Rioters in the city were “THUGS,” he wrote, and he proposed sending in the National Guard to “get the job done right.” In a tweet so depraved that Twitter appended a disclaimer, he quoted an infamous 1960s Miami cop: “when the looting starts, the shooting starts.”

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