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The braying inner-city hordes are stationed just across the interstate. They’re smashing Confederate statues, federal buildings and mom-and-pop shops. They’re bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime, they’re rapists. Some, we assume, are good people.
But why take a chance? They want in on that affordable housing development down the street. And the only thing standing between them and you is the President of the United States.
That’s the word from Washington this week as President Donald Trump, dog whistle long since gathering dust in a bottom shelf of the Resolute desk, has once again pulled out the Racist Hysteria Bullhorn.
Trump has sought to station himself as the protector of what he calls the “Suburban Lifestyle Dream.”
It’s no wonder why: Trump desperately needs to shore up the suburbs to win another term in office. As is, his election polling looks dire. So, once again, he’s gone after Black and Hispanic people in cities. (As pollsters and reporters have noted, Trump’s sense of suburban voters and their feelings toward racial justice are quite outdated.)
It’s a two-pronged maneuver, starting with the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing rule of the 1968 Fair Housing Act. Trump this week celebrated that his administration had terminated the 2015 rule, which required that communities take concrete steps to identify and end racial discrimination in housing.
Housing Secretary Ben Carson called the rule “unworkable and ultimately a waste of time for localities to comply with.” But Trump stripped the veneer, turning it into a racist election-year ploy: “Corrupt Joe Biden wants to make them MUCH WORSE,” he said in a tweet about the AFFH rule in late June, referring to “once thriving Suburban areas.” “Not fair to homeowners, I may END!”
What’s so scary about desegregated housing? The President has tried to remind you: In tweets and speeches — and official policy — these past few weeks, Trump has sought to portray America’s cities as crime-ridden hellholes that need to be dominated with federal police lest they be “lost.”
This is a fantasy, of course, but it may be working. According to a poll released this week from HuffPost and YouGov, most Americans incorrectly believe that crime has increased over the past decade.
And as we reported, Trump is using the Justice Department to underline that point.
It’s called “Operation Legend,” purportedly an anti-violent-crime initiative in which federal dollars and law enforcement agents will parachute into six cities around the country and rack up federal charges against ne’er-do-wells.
Except, according to officials in several cities, the administration barely told them about the operation before they announced it publicly to the world — leading to concerns from affected city and state officials that Trump is looking to goose the numbers as an election -year talking point.
Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul, for example, warned against the administration using Operation Legend “to build arrest statistics without a broader concern for improving public safety.”
And in at least two cities, officials explained the operation as a jump-started version of Operation Relentless Pursuit — a similar initiative with nearly the same roster of cities that was announced in December.
In Milwaukee, one of Operation Legend’s target cities, U.S. Attorney Matthew Krueger said Relentless Pursuit was “now under the banner of Operation Legend.” As the city’s police chief said last week, Relentless Pursuit has simply been “renamed.”
Here’s what else we were watching this week:
