The Republican Convention will be held in Cleveland, Ohio, between July 18th and the 21st. The crowd inside Quicken Loans Arena will likely be composed of more Donald Trump supporters than opposition; it is a convention of party loyalists. Outside Trump’s detractors will greatly outnumber his supporters. If he does receive support from some, they will be aggressively denounced by the larger majority.
“I think there will be riots in Cleveland because there are paid political protesters that the Democrats have,” Jeff Roe, who served as campaign manager for Sen. Ted Cruz, told Stein. “Look, if you want a protest and you’re a Republican, you need about a month and a highly organized plan to get people to come out at 10:30 on a Tuesday.
“But if you’re a Democrat,” Roe added, “you call SEIU and you call AFSCME and you call the Teachers’ Union and you’ve got a protest in 15 minutes. I think the Democrats have a chance to overreach and really coalesce the party in a way Trump himself could not do.”
This is possibly what I believe to be closest to the truth about the event in Cleveland. A Trump candidacy invites protests based on his racist attitude, and his unquestionable lack of qualifications to hold any office in our government, and certainly not the presidency. But the protests will contain other groups who have complaints about the Republican Party and its failures to support the American people.
Black Lives Matter has complaints aimed at the entire Republican Party which fails to recognize the need for judicial reform. Ill-trained law enforcement officers continue to treat blacks differently than whites, but the GOP does not agree.
The Cleveland Police Department has one of the worst records in the nation related to law enforcement bias.
Flint, Michigan, is approximately 250 miles from Cleveland. After a Republican Governor rerouted Flint’s water supply, dangerous amounts of iron polluted the mostly black city’s water supply. It remains a problem with no definitive solution. Rick Snyder’s austerity programs were not instituted in mostly white neighborhoods.
Other groups, too numerous to mention, will likely be in Cleveland. The American people will no longer accept one of our nation’s two major political parties as a supporter of special interests only. The middle class continues to diminish, while the number of billionaires increases, and the number of families living in poverty rises at an alarming rate.
My advice? Don’t miss an event which can truly be labeled a “reality show.” There will be no directors, no dialogue, and no situational planning; this would be the first of its kind.
Op-Ed
By James Turnage
The Truth With No Restrictions 