if this doesn't worry you, you have definitely lost your way. Constitution, no bother. Democracy gone, no prob?
From NY Times, linked to Rueters:
http://messaging-custom-newsletters.nytimes.com/template/oakv2?campaign_id=9&emc=edit_nn_20200721&instance_id=20482&nl=the-morning&productCode=NN®i_id=134017528&segment_id=33942&te=1&uri=nyt%3A%2F%2Fnewsletter%2F7f6e3eac-cf1c-535c-a382-76a4585ce7ed&user_id=beb981111a9d1126d186b6bcc274d92b
Trump’s threat of force
Demonstrators in Portland, Ore., on Monday night.Caitlin Ochs/Reuters
President Trump has been preoccupied with big-city crime for more than 30 years.
In 1989, he took out ads in New York newspapers asking, “What has happened to our City over the past ten years?” (The ads implied he favored the death penalty for five Black and Latino teenagers who turned out to be wrongly accused of a rape.)
In his 2016 presidential campaign, he made false claims about how dangerous Oakland, Philadelphia and other cities were.
And now he seems to have decided that sending — or threatening to send — federal troops to Chicago and other cities is his best hope for turning around a struggling re-election campaign.
Meeting with reporters in the Oval Office yesterday, Trump said that he planned to deploy federal law enforcement agents to Chicago, after already having done so in Portland, Ore., last week. He suggested he might also do so in New York, Philadelphia, Detroit, Baltimore and Oakland. He was vague about the reasons, saying all of the cities were run by “radical left” Democrats.
But the politics of the move are fairly clear. Trump is trailing Joe Biden in the polls, and the move lets him try to shift the nation’s attention away from the coronavirus crisis. Instead, he can run against two of his favorite bogeymen: “the radical left” and big-city crime.
In recent weeks, he has frequently tried to portray Black Lives Matter protesters as out-of-control radicals, even though millions of Americans have participated and the protests have typically been peaceful. He has also made numerous racial appeals to white Americans, such as defending the Confederate battle flag.
Threatening to send troops into cities — most of which have large Black populations — unites the two themes and lets him cast himself as a defender of a fading America. “If Biden got in,” Trump said yesterday, “the whole country would go to hell. And we’re not going to let it go to hell.”
In response, Democrats vowed to pursue legislation or lawsuits to stop him. “We won’t let these authoritarian tactics stand,” Senator Jeff Merkley of Oregon said. “It’s an American crisis.”
More from Portland: As military-clad federal agents swept through the streets this past weekend, they encountered a Navy veteran who had come out to ask whether the officers felt their actions violated the Constitution. They beat him with a baton and doused him with pepper spray. |
