Crime in Chicago is Donald Trump’s new border wall.
Facts and truth didn’t matter a whit to Trump four years ago when he stoked fears about hordes of rapists and murderers pouring over the border from Mexico to destroy America.
He thought “the wall” might help him win him an election — and it did. Fear sells.
Now Trump is at it again, this time stoking fears about out-of-control crime by thugs and radicals in Chicago and other big cities. He’s throwing it out there and hoping it sticks, if just long enough to get him reelected on Nov. 3.
Please, voters, don’t let him get away with this again.
Fascism-lite
Chicago’s got a serious violent crime problem, no doubt. But Trump’s not out to fix it anymore than he was out to fix our nation’s immigration system. He’s out to use it for pure political gain, hoping to scare you into voting for him and fascism-lite.
Trump is not the first American president to prey on our fears to divide us, pitting small towns and the suburbs against big cities, but he might be the first to overtly reveal his entirely cynical intentions.
President Richard Nixon loved to rail about “law and order,” going on about looters in the streets and “bums” on college campus.
But leave it to Trump to pin it all on “radical left” Democrats and claim Joe Biden — Joe Biden! — would “let terrorists roam free.”
“Look at what’s going on — all run by Democrats, all run by very liberal Democrats. All run, really, by radical left,” Trump said on Monday, describing Chicago and other big cities as out of control. “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.”
Federal agents coming to town?
This week, the Trump administration proposed sending about 150 federal agents to Chicago. Was their plan to throw people into unmarked vans, as they have done to protesters in Portland, Oregon, like the old East German secret police?
The joke is that nobody — certainly not Trump — has a clue as to how a bunch of Homeland Security agents, who might not know Englewood from Edison Park, are supposed to stop an 18-year-old gangbanger from shooting up a porch full of people.
The bigger joke is that Trump doesn’t care. So long as he succeeds in whipping up fears about urban crime. So long as he can shake up those suburban moms whose support he needs on Election Day.
So long as he can make this ugly plot line stick.
On Tuesday, Mayor Lori Lightfoot, Gov. J.B. Pritzker and state Attorney General Kwame Raoul were trying to keep their focus on fighting crime, not playing politics. Lightfoot had spoken with John Lausch, the top federal prosecutor in Chicago, about crafting a reasonable plan to use federal resources to help our city.
“What I understand at this point — and I caveat that — is that the Trump administration is not going to foolishly deploy unnamed agents to the streets of Chicago,” the mayor said. “As I understand it, what we will be getting are some additional resources in the FBI, the DEA and the ATF.”
Looking for a new “wall”
Trump is drowning in the polls, done in by his pathetic handling of the COVID-19 pandemic and three years of overwhelming meanness, deceit and incompetence. He’s looking for a fresh new “wall,” something on which he can hitch a last-minute ride to election victory, and he thinks this “law and order” thing might be it.
He tried to politicize the pandemic, but reopening the economy led to a lot more people inconveniently dying. He tried to politicize religion by holding up a Bible outside a shuttered church, but Trump with a Bible just looked weird. He has tried to politicize race relations again and again, most recently by going to bat for the Confederate flag, tone deaf to the fact that even a majority of Southerners now think the flag is racist.
And, of course, Trump keeps bashing immigrants, though that game’s running on fumes.
On Tuesday, Trump ordered that undocumented immigrants not be counted in the U.S. Census, though the express purpose of the Census is to count every human being in the country.
We doubt Trump can win on law and order, either. It’s not going to stick. On the most basic level, we dare to believe, enough Americans are finally just sick of this guy.
In recent weeks, Trump has tweeted the words “LAW AND ORDER!” more than 20 times, but all he’s managed to do is drive down his poll numbers even more.
A poll released Sunday by The Washington Post and ABC News shows Biden leading Trump by 15 percentage points. On the question of who can be trusted more when it comes to “crime and safety,” registered voters picked Biden by a nine-point margin, 50% to 41%.
Children think professional wrestling is for real, but in time they grow up.
The thrill of the cartoon strongman is gone.
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