00:00Let's bring in David Schultz, who's Professor of Political Science at Hamlin University.
00:05David Schultz, thank you so much for being with us. It's a pleasure to have you in France 24.
00:09Would you agree with Tim Walsh, who said earlier that we're now at an inflection point for the Trump administration
00:15because of what has happened and what important people in that administration have been saying?
00:21I think he's absolutely correct at this point. And the inflection point is in lots of different ways.
00:26It's first in terms of, let's say, the political language that the Trump administration is using,
00:31both in terms of why it's doing enforcement and the actions it's using here and the actions or the rather the statements it's using to describe what happened
00:40and trying to get people not to believe their eyes and their ears regarding the Alex Petty shooting.
00:45That's one. But the inflection point is also an inflection point about really the very logic of the American constitutional system,
00:53where the federal government does have powers to be able to enforce its laws.
00:58But a constitution in the United States also says that the federal government can't force, can't compel, basically coerce states to do certain things.
01:08And so this is a controversy that's got partisan implications, legal implications, political ones.
01:14And it's really rearranging, I think, the political legal map of the United States right now.
01:20Was there a sense of hypocrisy? Is there a sense of hypocrisy?
01:23In the attempt to cast the late Mr. Petty as a terror threat because he had a licensed firearm.
01:31Yes. I mean, the Republican Party has embraced the Second Amendment, which is our amendment that guarantees a right for individual right to bear arms.
01:39And the party has become sort of a defender of this against the Democrats.
01:43And what we're now seeing is something very unusual here, where the Democrats are embracing the Second Amendment, saying he had a gun.
01:51Yes. Also, it's important to understand he had a gun lawfully permitted to do so under state law and under the U.S. Constitution.
01:57And there's no indication whatsoever that at any point he took the gun out, aimed it at or brandished it or something.
02:05And so contrary to some of the other people who have been commenting and saying, if you bring a gun to a protest, it's inherently violent or you're risking your life.
02:15The answer is no, that that we have a legal right in the United States for good or for bad to be able to profess firearms and people can show up again if they point at somebody.
02:26That's a different story. But there's no indication that at any point that Alex Petty took the gun out, threatened anybody under way separate form.
02:34And those agents did not even know, it appears, that he had a gun until such time as they tackled him to the ground.
02:41Very different from the I'm diverting a bit here, David, if you'll just bear with me.
02:45Very different from the case of, say, Kyle Rittenhouse back in 2020 in Wisconsin, when he had an automatic rifle that he brought to a protest, killed two people, tried to kill another person.
02:56He was, of course, acquitted at court, but a very different case.
02:59And again, exposing again that hypocrisy.
03:01I think you're absolutely correct again. I mean, I've been telling my students that if we put if we put politicians in jail for our people in jail for hypocrisy, our prisons would be filled full of people.
03:14And this is sort of another situation here where many people are saying that the Trump administration and Republicans, especially when it comes to gun issues, are are all over the map.
03:23They're all over the map in terms of defending it when it's appropriate for their cause and not.
03:29And also, some people would say there's an overlay here that traditionally used to be that if persons of color were carrying a gun, they would say, no, that's they shouldn't be able to do that versus white people can do so, such as the Rittenhouse.
03:43But here we've got a white Caucasian U.S. American citizen, again, who's an ICU nurse, about as sympathetic as a character as you can come up with.
03:53And looking at how now they're maligning him, it really does raise questions about principle versus hypocrisy.
04:00Christy Noem, key in this, I think, Secretary of State for Homeland Security.
04:05I mean, how can she keep her job, given what she has said about him, which has been absolute lies, a fabric of lies that she's created to somehow justify how he was killed by 10 shots to his body while surrounded by ICE agents?
04:20How can she keep her job?
04:22Well, that's a great question here, that if Trump were looking for some type of way of de-escalating the situation, he has an easy out.
04:29He could blame Christy Noem for all this fire hurt.
04:33Remember, he ran a show for 16 years in the U.S. called The Apprentice, where he was always saying, you're fired.
04:39So he's got an obvious way if he wants to de-escalate it.
04:42But you're absolutely correct here, because she's basically mischaracterizing what happened.
04:47Again, she's asking people to not believe what their eyes and their ears are telling them at this point.
04:53And she's really doing a lot to really inflame the situation, on top of which she's reaching judgments before any investigation has been completed.
05:03But nobody seems to be trusting her or, let's say, the Justice Department right now to do a fair and impartial investigation.
05:09And the fact that the federal government is excluding the state of Minnesota from participating in the investigation just reinforces that trust that there's a cover-up going on here, too.
05:21Speaking from the outside of the United States, David, to think that people don't have faith in an investigation that apparently is going to be led by the FBI and the border agents,
05:30it kind of makes you wonder what has happened to the status of something like the FBI,
05:34which we tend to hold as being something that is to aspire to in terms of law enforcement, in terms of justice.
05:42What has happened?
05:42But this is what happens when you get justice and law enforcement that becomes politicized.
05:50And what's also to add to this here, if we look at the history of the United States,
05:55generally we expect the federal government, our national government, to be on the side of justice and on the good guys,
06:00that they're going to do the right thing.
06:03And you usually think of from the civil rights era in the United States,
06:07when some states were fighting the U.S. government to prevent integration, to prevent civil rights.
06:13Here now we have this characterization that people are not trusting the national government.
06:19I was listening to some governors from Republican states in the United States now also starting to be worried and say that,
06:26you know, maybe we can't trust the federal government and maybe the federal government,
06:32the Trump administration needs to exit from here.
06:34So this is really changing our perceptions of the Justice Department, of the FBI.
06:39And again, it speaks to what happened when we get things politicized.
06:43This reminds me of the days when Richard Nixon was president a half a century ago,
06:48where he used the FBI to persecute political enemies and the Justice Department to do the same thing.
06:54David Schultz, fantastic analysis.
06:56Thank you very much for sharing your thoughts with us.
06:58Professor of Political Science at Hamline University.
07:00Before you go, sir, the weather is appalling where you are.
07:03How are you coping? Everything OK?
07:06We're doing OK, but it's very, very cold here.
07:08We're about 20 degrees below zero.
07:11And it's certainly adding to the tension around here.
07:14David, thank you.
07:15That's our next subject, the weather.
07:17David Schultz, Professor of Political Science at Hamline University.
07:20Stay warm, sir.
07:21Thank you very much indeed.
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