Amid the bloviated threats Donald Trump has inflicted on the nation, especially since becoming president again in January, his latest cosplay meant to distract the nation from his failed policies and leadership are among the most dangerous and offensive to Americans.
Trump’s deployment of National Guard troops into Washington, D.C. was created for optics to please his TV audience on Fox News and other pro-Trump media and anger proponents of American democracy.
Savvy Americans aren’t fooled. This latest stunt is political theater, not a serious strategy to address crime. And in staging this spectacle, Trump is once again undermining the Constitution, the law, and the very concept of democracy.
Trump stood before armed troops and federal officers last week and declared: “We’re not playing games. We’re going to make it safe.”
Reality tells a different story. Violent crime in Washington has dropped significantly since its pandemic-era peak, reflecting the broader nationwide decline. FBI statistics show murders fell nearly 15% last year.
Many Democratic-led cities Trump has threatened to “clean up,” including Denver, are also seeing reductions in violent crime.
So, too, are the Republican led cities that actually lead the list of most violent crime cities in the country, such as Memphis, Tenn. and Dayton, Ohio.
The supposed “crime wave” is a convenient fiction, a prop for Trump’s authoritarian play meant to distract the nation from his driving up the cost of living with tariff chaos and his obsession with trying to upend the Jeffrey Epstein scandal.
It does not mean that crime, and especially violent crime, isn’t a serious problem in Aurora, Denver and most other large cities. But solving the problem takes money, strategy, determination and perseverance, not political pony shows.
What is not fiction is the unprecedented military presence in the nation’s capital. Thousands of National Guard troops are patrolling streets, setting up checkpoints, and, in some cases, carrying firearms.
Daycare centers have closed. Families fear sending their children to school. This is not the restoration of public order. It is an intimidation campaign that injects fear into daily life.
This is not America.
The Posse Comitatus Act, a post-Reconstruction safeguard, bars the use of the U.S. military to enforce domestic laws. The reason is clear. It’s to prevent people like Trump from riding over the rights of citizens as well as state and local government, just as he’s doing right now.
Trump is exploiting a loophole because of Washington’s partial federal status, but the spirit of the law is clear: America does not station soldiers on city streets. That principle has protected this country from military rule for nearly 150 years.
Trump is now eroding it as a lark.
The irony of his folly would be comical if it weren’t so dangerous.
A convicted felon, found guilty of falsifying records to cover up his criminal conduct, now postures as the nation’s sheriff. The same man who incited the deadly Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, an insurrection that left police officers beaten and bloodied, now sends in military police and lectures others on law and order.
Trump’s contempt for the law is not hypothetical. It is a matter of public record and a ploy. His current show of force is less about protecting citizens than about fictionizing his own presidency.
The racial overtones of this deployment cannot be ignored. Trump has fixated on majority-minority cities led by Black mayors and Democratic governors, describing them as “filthy” and dangerous. Baltimore, Chicago, and New York are his next targets, he boasts.
Notably absent from his threats are Republican-led cities or majority-white communities, such as Dayton. Civil rights leaders like the Rev. Al Sharpton are correct: this is about profiling and race, cloaked in the language of public safety.
Elected officials across the country, including Maryland Gov. Wes Moore and Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, have called this what it is: a manufactured crisis and a political stunt. Trump is abusing the men and women of the National Guard as pawns. He is inflating the perception of crime to distract from his own failures on inflation, health care, and governance. And he is testing how far he can stretch presidential power to impose his will on American cities.
If he were truly impassioned to solve a long list of urban crises, he could coordinate with states to call out the national guard to care for poor, elderly residents, recently shafted by deep cuts to Medicaid, imposed by Trump’s so-called “Big Beautiful Bill.” Guardsmen could be stationed in schools to help tutor children, especially in poor areas, who fell behind during the pandemic and have yet to catch up. If Trump were seriously concerned about crime in large cities, he could champion ways to send cash so cities like Aurora, Chicago and others could fund youth-violence prevention programs and hire more local police officers to successfully, and legally, train to effectively combat crime.
The American people should not be fooled. Militarizing cities will not stop the sale of illegal drugs, linked to murders. It will not make families safer. What it will do is normalize the presence of armed troops in civilian life, erode public trust in democratic institutions, and move the United States one step closer to authoritarian rule.
Trump seems to relish the criticism.
“Because I sent in people to stop crime, they said, ‘He’s a dictator,’” he told one radio host. He mused that people he allegedly talks to might want a dictator.
Presidents are not dictators. They are not warlords. They do not use the military as props in campaign ads. They are sworn to uphold the law.
Trump’s use of soldiers as stagehands in his law-and-order farce is a betrayal of that oath. It insults the service members asked to play along. It insults the citizens forced to live under military patrols. And it insults the memory of every American who has fought to keep the military out of civilian life.
Crime is a serious issue, one that deserves serious solutions: investment in communities, reform of policing, stronger education and economic opportunity, and collaboration across parties and jurisdictions. What Trump offers instead is a spectacle that jeopardizes the safety and freedoms of the very people he claims to defend.
This editorial is so full of “alternative facts” and outright deceptions that any self-respecting paper would be embarrassed to print it.
The notion that crime has dropped is a falsehood created during the Biden administration and was largely concocted after redefining felonies as misdemeanors and other creative accounting methods. Ask any police officer in these big cities and you will get a very different report.
Most legal citizens welcome the Federal assistance in D.C. It is only illegals who are fearful.
If placing the National Guard in D.C. was illegal or unconstitutional, some left-wing judge would have already ruled so.
The reason that the focus is on cities with majority-minority individuals with Black mayors is that crime has skyrocketed in these cities due to policies of cashless bail and the reduction of felonies to misdemeanors by their left-wing district attorneys. To suggest otherwise is simply more racist nonsense from the left. Shame on the Sentinel editorial staff.
Hey Kirk, let me give your thoughts a very big, “AMEN”.
And thanks, Mr. Perry for giving me, my word of the week, the third word in your weekly rant, BLOVIATED.
It sounds fairly positive while being very negative, such as, …the Editor has a history of bloviated rants…..
“Trump seems to relish the criticism.”
Why wouldn’t he, considering how easily your side ended up taking the bait.
There is much to this argument that is not common knowledge and is kept that way by our politicians. Generally, the politicians capitalize on their own lack of knowledge and that of the public. Scythian proverb says “Wise men argue causes…fools decide them”. As always, the fools know little about what they decide and the people who do know are not heard.
As much as I dislike Trump, he is right about quite a few things. He is, however, a bully and a bull in a china shop when it comes to implementation. While he is right about crime, putting troops in cities puts a bad taste in the mouths of people who understand the traditional and constitutional job of the military. I can see the use of the military in some cases. It has been necessary in the past in times of civil insurrection and the necessity to insure that civil rights are assured. Use of the military in this situation will only provide a brief pause in the crime situation. Having been involved in numerous incidents where we saturated an area with officers, I can speak with some expertise on the matter. Any time you saturate an area with officers you will bring crime to a halt. Then the officers are left standing around getting overtime pay with little to do. It works great while you are there. Simple common sense. But you cannot afford to pay to saturate an area permanently. Police administrators generally are poor at deploying their officers in an efficient manner. This is due primarily to the fact that police administrators are usually simply political types who advanced themselves and paid little attention to better ways to police. They look like they are progressive by doing technological things like greater computerization and using crime analysts. In reality, these things have some value but often simply make law enforcement more efficient but less effective. I just read where Boulder is going to online reporting for misdemeanor crimes. Sounds good but ultimately it leads to poorer policing. Reported crime will go down as soon as people realize that there is little reason to make a crime report that will see little investigation and is simply for insurance purposes. Additionally, the patrol officer no longer has a grasp of crime because he doesn’t really see it. He doesn’t take a report and he doesn’t see the scene and have a chance to relate to the pain of the victims. I won’t go into this further here. Beyond the fact that legislatures reduce felonies to misdemeanors is the corruption that exists within police departments when it comes to reporting crime. The politician chief needs to look good and so do your city leaders. So, often there is a move within the department to downgrade crimes. One of our former chiefs required us, the supervisors to creatively reduce the categorization of crimes so he could look better, For instance, a forcible entry burglary of your house where you didn’t know what was stolen became a damaged property report. Just one example. It was a famous back east trick utilized by big name chiefs.
We should be looking close to home when it comes to crime. Our Colorado legislature has done incredible harm to law enforcement. SB 217 ran thousands of officer out of law enforcement and keeps many from doing active police work. Our legislature’s efforts to thwart cooperation between local and federal law enforcement have damaged the effectiveness of law enforcement tremendously. Regardless of the statements of support for law enforcement, the intent is clear to officers. the officers do not have the support of the legislature and the DAs that enforce their policies. I am not talking about blindly supporting police misconduct. I am talking about realistic approaches to crime.
We won’t have those realistic approaches because we will never truly evaluate approaches and use the “wise men” who have learned from the job. We will continue to play politics and listen to fools (the uninformed and politically motivated). Trump is playing one side. He is right in what he is saying. His approach is most likely for his own political purpose since it will have little lasting effect. The left. meanwhile, is doubling down on policies that will hurt us while still claiming to care for our safety. So, the left has little moral high ground here.
Mr. Black – We can always count on you for a reasoned and insightful analysis when it comes to matters of law enforcement. It is always helpful to get a view from someone who has had actual experience as an insider. I do think that many of Trump’s actions have a self-serving political component. But you must admit that placing National Guard troops in cities results in more arrests and is an effective “end around” in “blue cities” who refuse to help enforce U.S. immigration law. Many illegals have been apprehended this way.
Yes, it will be productive in the short term. There is no doubt that there will be many good arrests. However, it is not sustainable in the long run. Cities should study how to accomplish long range strategies that are consistent and effective. That should be done publicly with input from all who have an interest. The public then could quickly see who has a reasonable plan that addresses their problems. As it exists now, we get political types chosen in the same political ways who have little in the way of real ideas for addressing crime. They then advance silly ideas that change little and only those within the police department know how ineffective they are. What is worse, these same political types fail to address legislative efforts that endanger the public safety. Honest public assessments by experience people are kept to a minimum by the people in authority. A friend, who is a news videographer, was lamenting about the encoding of all the police and fire channels. He said that there is no longer a way to know what is really happening. We are simply spoon fed what the people in power want us to know. There is little hope for improvement in law enforcement when we have no long term plan that passes a public test and we rely upon constantly changing approaches from those who paid little attention to the job during their advancement. Further, until we have public officials with the courage to address foolish legislative actions, we will have little hope for effective law enforcement. Trump is right about crime. He is right about the radical left approaches in our legislatures. He simply can’t effectively address the failures at the state and local levels. He also doesn’t have any idea about what will work past surging resources into an area. His ideas are good. His approaches are often too heavy handed and cause more backlash. Given that he will always be advised by high ranking political types, it is understandable why he won’t have a good grasp on solutions.
See you in the camps, boys!
Of course, you won’t recognize them as such until you see the barbed wire and the gate slams shut behind you.
But we recognize you. Believe that.
“Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Che, and Pol Pot could not be reached for comment.”
Tell us some more about how there aren’t any TdA gang members in Aurora because you didn’t see their spirit shirts, Jeffy-poo.