One Week from Primary Election, WA GOP Resorts to Trumpian Doubletalk on Police Safety 

WA GOP Mimics Trump’s Racist “Law & Order” Rhetoric While Abandoning Officers to Domestic Terrorism

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE | July 28, 2020

SEATTLE — Against the wishes of local and state elected officials, the Trump administration continues deploying federal law enforcement agents to cities across the country. Let’s be clear: these actions are not motivated by any attempt to de-escalate or solve the underlying systemic inequities spurring Americans to protest. Instead, Trump administration officials admitted that the express purpose of the deployment was about “getting viral online content.”

This drastic and unconstitutional overreach by the administration has inflamed tensions and is a desperate attempt to inflict chaos to distract from the drastic, deadly failures to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The WA GOP has not mustered any response to the ongoing conversation about reforming police use of force policies, instead they continue parroting Trump’s divisive rhetoric.

Any police officer listening to their “defend the police” rhetoric would find it hollow given the WA GOP’s total and complete abdication of responsibility when a domestic terrorist in their ranks exposed the personal identifying information for dozens of officers from several agencies, some of whom were undercover. Additionally, Washington Republicans entirely disregarded calls from the Spokane Police Guild to oust that domestic terrorist from the legislature in 2019.

“Make no mistake: Democrats have consistently urged protesters to remain peaceful and avoid playing into the desperate dog-whistle politics of Trump’s failing campaign,” said Tina Podlodowski, Chair of the Washington State Democratic Party. “It’s laughable to see the WA GOP pretend to care about property crime when they ignored threats against police officers originating from a sitting elected official within their own ranks. This irresponsible cheerleading of Trump’s chaos spells doom for Washington Republicans this November.”

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