She ticked off a list: putting conservatives on the Supreme Court, withdrawing from the Paris climate accord, renegotiating the North American Free Trade Agreement and presiding over the lowest unemployment in 50 years before the pandemic. Moreover, she said, he did so amid a special counsel investigation and an impeachment.
“It’s a very chaotic atmosphere to accomplish those things, so I give him credit for that,” she said.
Robin Sinsabaugh, who lives outside Charlotte, N.C., supervises seven McDonald’s franchises. Many of her employees are African-Americans, and initially she was sympathetic to the outrage over Mr. Floyd’s killing.
“Obviously Black men, especially younger men, are targeted,” she said. “I say that because I’m able to talk to a lot of my employees. I talked to a young man who said, ‘I’ve been pulled over a dozen times when I’ve done nothing wrong.’”
But she believes that grievances that were peacefully expressed at first got out of hand in early June, when the police in Charlotte said that protesters had aimed rocks and fireworks at officers, and the authorities responded with pepper spray and tear gas.
“I’m not going to remember them for anything they said,” Ms. Sinsabaugh said of the marchers. “I’m going to remember them for what they did to their own city.”
Ms. Sinsabaugh, 47, is married to a retired police officer.
She said the nationwide fracture between the president’s support of aggressive policing and the protesters’ fury at law enforcement had split her own household. Her 17-year-old son, who will vote for the first time in November, is vehemently anti-Trump. When he watched the video of Mr. Floyd’s killing, he erupted, saying “all cops should be shot.”
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