Karen Tumulty in the Post yesterday:

It’s a good thing Donald Trump wasn’t president during the civil rights movement. Judging by his tweets, Trump would have been tempted to award the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Theophilus Eugene “Bull” Connor, the notorious Alabama public safety commissioner.

Tempted shmempted; he would have done it.

Nearly six decades later, the man who sits in the White House is channeling his inner Bull Connor, unable to contain his eagerness to see play out on his own front lawn the vile tactics that Connor employed against civil rights marchers. In a giddy tweetstorm on Saturday morning, Trump let loose about how excited he would have been to see protesters who showed up across the street in Lafayette Square “really badly hurt” by “the most vicious dogs, and most ominous weapons, I have ever seen.”

…

“Many Secret Service agents just waiting for action,” Trump wrote. He added a quotation, one the president presumably wants us to believe he heard from someone who manages the White House security force: “We put the young ones on the front line, sir, they love it, and . . . good practice.”

To suggest that the agents are “just waiting for action” against their fellow citizens impugns both the professionalism and the humanity of the Secret Service. But it very much fits in the worldview of a commander in chief who has excused war crimes by members of the U.S. military with the claim that they are trained to be “killing machines.”

And who wets himself every time he types “sir” in a tweet.

What a president should be doing at this moment is trying to calm the country and bring it together, not fantasizing about how glorious it would be to witness bloodshed just outside his doorstep. Trump was so thrilled that he thinks a celebration is in order: “Tonight, I understand, is MAGA NIGHT AT THE WHITE HOUSE???”

Half the people I know are hitting a wall of despair right now.