If Democrat mayors won't stop violence why should Trump let them off the hook?
Bill McGurn, Wall Street Journal, explains the 'Pottery Barn rule' and argues why it might hurt to Trump to intervene in cities facing violence
The self-proclaimed wartime president is now fighting a different kind of war.
Donald Trump is openly campaigning against crime in the streets, at least the streets run by Democratic mayors, and using federal forces to intervene.
This is a battle the president very much wants--and which the Democrats seem very happy to provide. It obviously shifts attention from that other war, on the coronavirus. And the media reaction, by and large, has been one of shock and horror at Trump’s tactics.
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It’s been a signature of Trump’s tenure that he vows to override local authorities and impose law and order--a popular theme with Republican voters going back to Richard Nixon, but also one with potential appeal to liberals worried about violence in their communities.
The president’s crackdown on illegal immigration, his complaints about sancutary cities, and his warnings about Central American caravans during the midterms were an early indicator of this approach.
When some of the protests after George Floyd’s killing turned violent, the president, after expressing concern about police brutality, focused heavily on the riots. He slammed the Democratic mayors in Minneapolis and Seattle for losing control of their cities, and especially Seattle leaders for allowing protesters to exclude police from an autonomous zone.
Now the front-burner issue is not violent protesters but a surge in shootings and murders in some of the nation’s largest cities.
The latest flashpoint is Portland, where Trump has dispatched federal agents who have grabbed protesters off the streets and thrown them in unmarked cars without explaining why they’re being detained or arrested. This has triggered both a rhetorical and a legal war.
As the New York Times notes, Oregon’s Democratic governor Kate Brown has called the tactics “a blatant abuse of power,” and Portland’s Democratic mayor Ted Wheeler has branded it “an attack on our democracy.” The state’s attorney general has asked the courts for a restraining order against the federal agents.
As is usually the case with Trump, we don’t have to rely on unnamed sources to divine his political intent. Here’s what he says:
“Look at what’s going on — all run by Democrats, all run by very liberal Democrats. All run, really, by radical left...If Biden got in, that would be true for the country. The whole country would go to hell. And we’re not going to let it go to hell.”
When hundreds of protesters converged on a Portland courthouse through the early morning hours yesterday, federal agents unleashed gas and shot projectiles against them.
Nancy Pelosi, for her part, tweeted about Trump’s “storm troopers” and said in a statement that agents are “kidnapping protesters” and this is not a “banana republic.”
Now Trump plans to send federal law enforcement agents to Chicago--drawing a blast from Democratic mayor Lori Lightfoot--and has suggested he may do the same with other big cities, including New York, Detroit and Philadelphia.
The Times says Trump is looking for “an issue that would gain traction with voters at a time when many of his own supporters have soured on his leadership amid a deadly pandemic and economic collapse.”
But while the violence in these cities isn’t as devastating as in past decades, it is increasingly troublesome. For instance, 63 people were shot in Chicago last weekend, and a dozen of them died. Young children have died, caught in the deadly crossfire. It’s a summertime surge that would force a response from any president.
But much of the media coverage, at least at the national level, is far more heavily focused on Trump’s tactics than the deadly scourge they are designed to combat. Of course, the president contributes to that focus--and may well prefer it--when he explicitly frames the argument around Democratic officials and says Biden would cause a descent into “hell.”
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The headline on Michelle Goldberg’s Times column conveys the tenor of the commentary: “Trump’s Occupation of Cities Has Begun.”
After recounting how a federal agent shot a protester in the head with an “impact munition” and he needed reconstructive surgery, Goldberg says: “There’s something particularly terrifying in the use of Border Patrol agents against American dissidents. After the attack on protesters near the White House last month, the military pushed back on Trump’s attempts to turn it against the citizenry. Police officers in many cities are willing to brutalize demonstrators, but they’re under local control. U.S. Customs and Border Protection, however, is under federal authority, has leadership that’s fanatically devoted to Trump and is saturated with far-right politics.”
The Washington Post’s Ruth Marcus writes that “law enforcement agents aren’t targeting protesters who engaged in violence; they appear to be sweeping up random people who have exercised their rights under the First Amendment...This is not America.”
On MSNBC, commentator John Heilemann denounced what he called “paramilitary units” that “we have seen in authoritarian regimes in Third World countries” He accused Trump of “a genuine attempt” through “intimidation and potentially through force to “try to steal this election.”
Now it’s a long stretch between sending in federal forces to combat urban violence and the actual theft of the election. But many pundits are so distrustful of Trump--who, in that Chris Wallace interview, wouldn’t promise not to challenge the election results--that they view this as a potential plot to remain in power.
To be sure, the administration has some questions to answer about how these law-enforcement agents are conducting themselves and why they’re not identifying themselves. The feds may have the power to do this, but it’s extremely rare for a president to send in the likes of border patrol agents over the objections of mayors and governors. In fact, Dwight Eisenhower sending the National Guard to force desegregation of a Little Rock school in 1957 is the first example that comes to mind.
But what plenty of the national coverage plays down is the violence itself, whether spawned by protests, gangs or garden-variety criminals. Millions of Americans are understandably concerned about that, even if they support such underlying causes as fighting racial injustice.
The irony is that Trump is trying to paint Biden as soft on crime, when the former VP got hammered in the primaries for a too-tough approach for his authorship of the 1994 crime bill.
For the moment, though, this is the president’s chosen battlefield. He may have resumed the virus briefings yesterday, but he’s in a defensive stance on Covid-19. With the crime issue he’s on offense--but the political price may turn out to be high.
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