Situation Report: Mostly peaceful protests continued into their 10^th day as charges were filed against four former Minneapolis police officers in the death of 46-year-old George Floyd.

  Former President Barack Obama, in a rare weigh-in on national issues, called for police reform throughout the country, including a ban on shooting at moving vehicles and on certain kinds of physical restraint.

  Former Defense Secretary and Marine General James Mattis, who quit the Trump administration in a policy disagreement, finally spoke up about the President, issuing a statement saying, “Donald Trump is the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people — does not even pretend to try.”

 Mattis said, “Instead he tries to divide us. We are witnessing the consequences of three years of this deliberate effort. We are witnessing the consequences of three years without mature leadership.”

Most Foul: Charges against former Minneapolis cop Derek Chauvin have been elevated to second-degree murder and three other officers involved with the death of 46-year-old George Floyd have been accused of aiding and abetting murder.

  All four had already been fired. “This is a bittersweet moment,” Ben Crump, a lawyer for Floyd’s family, said in a statement. “This is a significant step forward on the road toward justice, and we are gratified that this important action was brought before George Floyd’s body was laid to rest. That is a source of peace for George’s family in this painful time.”

  Gov. Tim Walz noted the charges were progress, but  “We must also recognize that the anguish driving protests around the world is about more than one tragic incident.”

  In the course of subduing Floyd, Chauvin kept his knee on the man’s neck for nearly nine minutes, 2 minutes and 53 seconds of that after Floyd was unresponsive.

  The charge of second-degree murder requires proof that Chauvin intended to kill Floyd, or that he killed Floyd while committing another felony. Charging documents indicate that prosecutors intend to take the second route. The maximum prison term would be 40 years.

Internal Dissent: In a move that could cost him his job, Defense Secretary Mark Esper yesterday publicly disagreed with President Trump’s threatened use of the 1807 Insurrection Act to put down rioting and unrest over the death of George Floyd.

   “The option to use active-duty forces in a law enforcement role should only be used as a matter of last resort, and only in the most urgent and dire of situations,” Esper told reporters at a Pentagon briefing. “I do not support invoking the Insurrection Act.”

The Fish Rots: President Trump has yet to address the nation about the open conflict that erupted after the death of George Floyd and the central issue of how black people are treated by the police in America.

  This morning, as parts of American cities are smoking rubble and more than 40 million are unemployed, he tweeted,  “MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!” And “LAW & ORDER!”

  Retired Marine Gen. John Allen writes in Foreign Policy magazine that, “The slide of the United States into illiberalism may well have begun on June 1, 2020,” the day President Trump called for deployment of the military against protesters in the streets, “Remember the date,” Allen says, “It may well signal the beginning of the end of the American experiment.”

  Allen says,  “The vast majority of the people protesting in the streets are justifiably furious at the murder of George Floyd, but they’re even angrier over pervasive injustice, mass incarceration, frequent false arrests, and an institutionalized devaluation of black lives and property.”

  But, he says, Trump “sees the crisis as a black problem—not as something to be addressed by creating the basis and impetus for a move toward social justice, but as an opportunity to use force to portray himself as a ‘law and order’ president.” 

  New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu writes in The NY Times that, “Race is America’s most traumatic issue, one that we have not faced nor nearly worked through. Centuries-old wounds are still raw because they never healed correctly in the first place.

  He says, “Far too many black Americans remain trapped in a vicious cycle of anger, fear and hopelessness. And they will remain so until more white Americans come to grips with the country’s past and seek to repair what has been broken.”

  President Trump, who used to bar black people from renting his apartments, tweeted, “I’ve done more for Black Americans, in fact, than any President in U.S. history, with the possible exception of another Republican President, the late, great, Abraham Lincoln…and it’s not even close.”

Pandemic: This morning, 107, 175 Americans are dead of the coronavirus, 1004 in the past 24 hours.

   The drug hydroxychloroquine, which President Trump has taken and promoted as an antidote for the coronavirus, did not prevent healthy people exposed to covid-19 from getting the disease, according to a study being published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

  It is the first randomized clinical trial of the antimalarial drug for use against the coronavirus. William Schaffner, a professor of preventive medicine and infectious diseases at Vanderbilt University Medical Center said, “As we say in Tennessee, ‘that dog won’t hunt’ — it didn’t work.” 

Social Notes: Fox News host Sean Hannity and his wife, Jill Rhodes, announced that they quietly divorced last year after 26 years of marriage. If only the whole country could divorce him.

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