Out of the four "executive orders" Trump gave, only one was actually an order and not just a memorandum. That order purports to direct the Department of Health and Human Services (DHS) and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to "consider" whether a ban on residential evictions might be "reasonably necessary." So it doesn't put a moratorium on evictions at all, and it was also the one thing clearly within Trump’s power to do; he could have extended the moratorium that expired on July 31. He didn't do anything to prevent evictions of people in housing funded by federally backed mortgages or who use Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) housing vouchers from starting up again.
That's despite the fact that 30 to 40 million households are now at risk of being evicted. It’s also despite the fact that the order actually acknowledges this fact, saying “there is a significant risk that this [expiration] will set off an abnormally large wave of evictions.” The White House is very aware of the problem, but also aware that these mass evictions could be another opportunity to try to skew the election. Voter suppression is the main game at this point, and they'll go at it from every angle possible, from a repeat of the 2016 Russia troll assistance to crippling the U.S. Postal Service. Now it's having millions of people without a home address to vote from. Particularly people of color, who are disproportionately hit by this crisis in every aspect.
The Trump order on evictions notes this fact as well, referring to the CDC's statement that “growing and disproportionate unemployment rates for some racial and ethnic minority groups during the COVID-19 pandemic may lead to greater risk of eviction and homelessness or sharing of housing.” Evictions are hitting Black and Latino communities particularly hard, but they’re also hitting younger people who rent. (All the people who are always the targets of Republican voter suppression efforts.)
This wouldn't be the first time, as Rayne, a writer at emptywheel, reminds us. The 2008 crash, just ahead of that year's election, was viewed as an opportunity by Republican operatives, including the chairman of the Republican Party in Macomb County, Michigan, who freely admitted to a reporter that "[w]e will have a list of foreclosed homes and will make sure people aren’t voting from those addresses." The Obama campaign and the Democratic National Convention sued to stop that effort, and Republicans were forced to back off. Even George W. Bush's Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division agreed to monitor the use of foreclosure records. Trump's Attorney General Bill Barr is not going to be doing that.
Rep. Maxine Waters, House Financial Services Chair, called the order “nothing but a political ploy," saying that the “so-called executive order” is just a stunt that “means nothing.“ It's worse than that, though: It's another in a long line of voter suppression tactics, and just about the cruelest imaginable.
