President Donald Trump keeps trying to use wannabe authoritarianism to mask his abject failure of a presidency. At a Monday roundtable discussion at the White House about law enforcement in the United States, Trump seemed to threaten to impose martial law if certain cities don’t get their crime rates down to a level that he finds acceptable. Many of these cities are Democrat-led and full of members of marginalized communities, meaning that not only is Trump threatening Americans at-large, he’s threatening his political opponents and marginalized communities with apparent brute force.
Specifically, he said:
‘Things are happening that nobody’s ever seen happening in cities that are liberally run, I call them Radical Lib, and yet, they’ll go and march on areas and rip everything down in front of them. If that’s what you want for a country, you probably have to vote for Sleepy Joe Biden, because he doesn’t know what’s happening, but you’re not gonna have it with me. So we’ve been very strong on law enforcement. We’ll be doing things that you’ll be, I think, very impressed with. Numbers are going to be coming down even if we have to go in and take over cities because we can’t let that happen.’
Watch below:
#BREAKING: President Trump says federal government may "take over cities" to combat rising crime: "Numbers are going to be coming down even if we have to go and take over cities." pic.twitter.com/IJNDfAwvAS
— The Hill (@thehill) July 13, 2020
Nowhere in any of that word salad is a single specific fact. Although yes, some isolated instances of looting and rioting have happened around the country recently — and at many other points in the nation’s history — he did not cite a single specific example of people who “rip everything down” that actually demands the immediate national outcry that he seems so desperate for.
Some of the demonstrators he’s complained about in the past have toppled statues of racists from history, and Trump has tried to make the statues falling over into some huge campaign flashpoint and pretend like their demise represents some kind of secret conspiracy against American greatness — or something. It doesn’t. His comments are all ludicrous.
He didn’t even bother with specifics of how the federal government would “take over cities.” Does he want to deploy the National Guard? Many arms of the National Guard are controlled by state authorities, not the feds. Does he want to send in active-duty military? He threatened to do so during the height of some of the most recent protests across the country, but no local leaders around the country emerged who were willing to go along with his plan.
At the White House on Monday, Trump also made some utterly ridiculous claims about the rapid spread of the Coronavirus in the United States. Asked if he would acknowledge that the virus is “actually spreading,” he did not. Instead, after lying about the U.S. mortality rate, which he falsely claimed was “one of the lowest anywhere,” he said:
‘We test more than anybody by far. And when you test, you create cases. So, we’ve created cases… it’s a double-edged sword.’
No! Testing does not “create cases”! The cases would still exist and be very relevant even if they weren’t confirmed by a test, because people are getting hospitalized and even dying at sharp rates across the country.
Watch his comments below:
