There’s a scene about midway through The Color Purple (the original version from 1985) where Sophia (played by Oprah) is out with her children doing some shopping in town. She’s a Black woman minding her own business. A white woman named Miss Millie — a stranger Sophia does not know — takes it upon herself to comment on how clean Sophia’s children are and to offer a job as a maid. Sophia says “hell no.” At this disrespect of a white woman, a white man decides to insert himself into the situation to smack Sophia in the face. So, Sophia hit him back. A mob of white people surrounds her, the local police knocks her out with the butt of a gun, and she spends the next several years in prison for the simple act of responding to white provocation.
This is what Donald Trump was trying to do in Los Angeles. This is what he is trying to do in Washington DC. And this is what he is planning to do in Chicago and Baltimore.
President Donald Trump said Tuesday that he’s ready to order federal authorities to mobilize and combat crime in Chicago and Baltimore, despite staunch opposition from elected leaders and many residents in both cities.
Asked by reporters in the Oval Office about sending National Guard troops to the nation’s third-largest city, Trump said, “We’re going in,” but added, “I didn’t say when.”
“I have an obligation,” the president said. ”This isn’t a political thing.”
(cont. AP)
This is absolutely a political thing, so let’s talk about it real quick. I pulled some murder statistics to give you a sense of how Trump is picking his targets. Below are the ten cities with the highest murder rates (murders annually per 100,000 people) along with the party affiliation of the Governor of that state. I also added some other Trump Targets so you can see where they fall on the list. You can find all of this on the Crime Data Explorer from the FBI.
The first thing you should note is that NYC — lawless, dangerous, crime-infested New York City — is not even in the top 100. Los Angeles doesn’t make the top 75 and Chicago doesn’t make the top 20. Of the top ten, only Baltimore and DC have been singled out, and what do they have in common versus the rest of the list? Democratic leadership. Most cities themselves have Democratic mayors, because cities attract diverse populations, but murderous cities in Red States have escaped Trump’s attention (I’d be interested to see how long it takes him to get around to Detroit).
The National Guard has set up shop in the nation’s capital as a test run for how to make populations acclimate to military presence at the behest of a dictator. Because DC is a bastard stepchild of a city with less rights than the rest of us, Trump has a broader scope of powers he can use to plant the military. With other cities, deployment is narrowly defined and those troops are not allowed to take part in local law enforcement activities. When Trump sent the National Guard to Los Angeles to act as ICE Bodyguards and attempt to instigate mass rebellion, it was actually against the law, and a federal judge just ruled as such yesterday.
Rebellion is the ultimate goal. Trump wants a Sophia vs Miss Millie confrontation so he will have an excuse to escalate against the (nonwhite) American people. In DC, the National Guard has largely been left to pick up trash and do gardening. DC residents don’t know why they’re there, and the troops themselves don’t either.
Even the men and women of the National Guard seemed flummoxed, at times, over what exactly they were supposed to be doing in the nation’s capital.
“We’re the president’s patrol, ma’am,” one trio from South Carolina told us when we spotted them along the waterfront and asked what they were up to.
“Just walkin’ around,” replied another gaggle—also strolling along the Potomac.
“Smiling and waving,” a third group, up from West Virginia and stationed along the National Mall, told us.
President Donald Trump’s decision this month to deploy the National Guard to the streets of Washington, D.C., unleashed a torrent of coverage, criticism, and fear, along with a smattering of muted praise from some residents. More than two weeks later, soldiers are still deployed throughout the city, a physical presence amid the capital’s greenery as summer fades into fall. Their mission is ostensibly to stop violent crime, but many here and beyond fear that Washington is being used as a test case—the blueprint for Trump to deploy the National Guard across the country as a paramilitary police force—and that Americans are being conditioned to accept authoritarianism.
(cont. The Atlantic)
Mind you, the murder rate in DC has been steadily decreasing for years, but the National Guard has been effective in halting regular life in the city. Parents are keeping their kids home from school. Nannies and housekeepers aren’t reporting to work. Churches are half empty. Everyone is afraid that the National Guard is just another arm of ICE, so formerly vibrant neighborhoods have gone quiet. If Trump’s intended result was to rob DC of it’s vitality, he has succeeded. If his intended result was to stop crime, he has not: a woman was stabbed on H street last weekend directly across the street from a restaurant where three National Guard troops were having lunch. (x) We already know police don’t prevent crimes; the military doesn’t prevent crimes either.
How do you prevent crime though? Well, maybe we should ask a city that has seen its homicide rate fall 40% in the past five years: Baltimore, the city Trump has declared is out of control and needs his help.
Brandon Scott took office in 2020 as a 36-year-old native resident with big dreams for his city. He took full advantage of Biden’s post-COVID recovery policies and was able to get every level of city management on board with his plans to reduce crime in Baltimore. It’s a personalized approach that involves knocking on doors, checking on the most vulnerable in the city, and using hundreds of millions of dollars from the federal government to fund safety net programs and youth services. Crime is not the result of a violent population that needs a dark shadow of authority to frighten them into submission. Crime is what happens when people have no resources and no hope to improve their lives. Brandon Scott understands that. Republicans do not. And this administration is trying to undo all of it.
Brandon Scott’s approach offers benefits to get people out of the street and off a violent path: housing, victim assistance, drug treatment, mental health services, job training.
…
For the first time in forever, Charm City’s leaders are all pulling in the same direction, and crime is falling through the floor. They’ve placated violence in inventive and predictable ways. They are, of course, justifiably concerned that Donald Trump will undo their successes on Republican “screw cities” general principles.
Trump closed the White House office of gun violence prevention on the first day he took office. Three months later, the Department of Justice cut the $300m allocated to community violence-intervention grants in half, including many in Baltimore. The cuts were part of a larger $811m culling across the office of justice programs, Reuters reported. Funding for gun-violence victims’ services, conflict mediation, social workers, hospital-based programs: gone.
Scott blasted the cuts to the program’s partners as dangerous and reckless.
“You’re talking about an administration who has said for years that they want to drive down crime in these cities,” he said. “The truth is no one cares if the mayor is a Republican or Democrat in any city when it comes to gun violence.”
(cont. The Guardian)
There’s your playbook. Cut the funding that makes the city safe. Watch crime spike. Deploy the military to bring order. Instigate confrontations with residents. Escalate the situation. Then you have cause to take control of the city’s coffers to ensure that Blue States don’t in fact cut off their payments to the federal government that are in turn used to prop up Red States who need the resources. And you have reason to arrest mass amounts of people to fill the beds in the prisons owned by friends of the Trump Administration who use the slave labor of the incarcerated to produce goods that make their shareholders rich.
Sidenote, in case you weren’t aware: Anytime you see a statistic that says “Well Obama actually deported way more people…” that’s because Obama was actually deporting them. Trump is arresting them, to put them in detention centers, so that his friends get rich from the government contracts that pay them per detainee. Earlier this year, NPR reported that, “Nearly 90% of people in ICE custody are held in facilities run by for-profit, private companies.” (x)
But anyway, Trump is not getting the reaction he had hoped for. The National Guard in DC is roaming around like tourists, hopping on busses to look at the sites, and the people are largely ignoring them. Aside from that white queen hitting a guard with a Subway sandwich, violent protest has been zero. I don’t actually know what the line is between complacency and peaceful protest. If you see the National Guard walking around your city with automatic rifles and you ignore them, are you becoming accustomed to military presence in advance of a total takeover by a fascist dictator? On the other hand, if you make it hard for the Guard to operate in your city, are you giving this administration the excuse they need to escalate the situation?
Regardless of how you feel you should behave, this highlights the need for all of us to pay attention to local elections. If Trump’s goal is to take over prosperous cities in Blue States, would you rather Mamdani or Cuomo be your line of defense? Do you want a Democrat in office like JB Pritzker or a Democrat in office like Kathy Hochul? Who is going to stand up to a dictator and who is going to welcome him with open arms? Keep those things in mind when you’re voting for your councilmembers and congresspeople, your mayors and governors. Your vote isn’t just about public transit or rent increases — it’s about protecting your city from Donald Trump.
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