Donald Trump stepped up to the White House podium on Wednesday afternoon to announce a “surge.” Unfortunately, Trump isn’t surging new supplies to states ravaged by the coronavirus. He’s also not surging financial support to areas suffering under the recession that began even before the pandemic. Instead Trump is surging a motley collection of federal forces into cities across the nation so that they can mimic the disaster in Portland. And if mayors and governors don’t like it … all the better for Trump, who is only doing this to show that he can own Democratic politicians.
Trump, speaking along with U.S. Attorney General William Barr and Acting Secretary of Department of Homeland (DHS) Security Chad Wolf, announced that federal “law enforcement agents” are on their way to Chicago and Albuquerque as part of “Operation Legend.” But that’s not the limit of the expanded not-secret and also not-police rollout. Trump indicated that officers were headed to other cities … he just didn’t say which ones.
Campaign Action
The entire presentation was an extension of what Trump has been doing since the first protests appeared following the police murder of George Floyd: putting himself clearly on the side of white supremacy. To that end, Trump declared: "We will not defund the police, we will hire more great police.” That included not just putting federal forces on the ground, but providing $61 million in grants for cities ready to get on the more police wagon.
When Barr got his turn to speak, he used language out a noir novel, saying that the officers being sent in were "classic crime fighters," making a distinction between the forces being shipped out today and the DHS forces on the ground in Portland, who are trained in neither crowd control nor standard law enforcement. Barr also drew a line between the deployments announced today and efforts to protect Confederate statues and monuments.
And then Barr played on the major theme of the day by blaming an increase in violent crime noted in some cities directly on the protests against racist police murders. Barr called the protests “an extreme reaction” to Floyd’s murder, and then said: “We have seen then is a significant increase in violent crime in many cities. And this rise is a direct result of the attack on the police forces and the weakening of police forces."
That’s exactly the message that Trump was delivering today. This isn’t about being anti-crime. It’s about being anti-Black Lives Matter. However, Trump didn’t miss multiple opportunities to also point at “criminal aliens,” because racism isn’t complete without hitting Black and Latino communities. And, of course, today’s show was about punishing Democratic politicians, who Trump described as “deadly politicians.”
In Chicago, Mayor Lori Lightfoot made clear on Tuesday that she expected this move from Trump, but that the federal invasion was definitely not welcome. “If we need to stop them and use the courts to do so,” said Lightfoot, “we are ready to do that.”
Earlier on Wednesday, mayors from 13 cities signed a letter making it clear they did not support what Trump was doing in Portland, and certainly didn’t want to see those forces on the loose in their cities. "We urge you to take immediate action to withdraw your forces and agree to no further unilateral deployments in U.S. cities," said the letter to addressed to Barr and Wolf. Obviously no one was listening.