Political Irony

Donald Trump has declared himself to be the “law and order” president.

This is such a joke. Trump has looted the environment, is guilty of obstruction of Congress, and has disbanded the police, who in this case are Inspectors General who are supposed to enforce the law in the executive branch of our federal government. He has also violated several clauses of the constitution, the ultimate law of the land, including the first amendment.

It seems possible Trump has violated more laws than all the protesters put together.

I say, lock him up.

UPDATE: Trump and the Republicans aren’t just looting the environment, they are looting the country. The GOP snuck in a tax change to the Cares coronavirus relief package they passed in late March that lets the wealthy avoid $82 billion in taxes. And why am I not surprised that the biggest recipients of this windfall is rich real estate investors (like Trump).

The tell-all book by former National Security Advisor John Bolton was supposed to have been released in March, but the White House has been working hard to delay it, claiming that it contains some (unspecified) classified information. So on Friday, the book’s publisher released some content from it.

As expected, the book is very negative about Donald Trump. The released content is about how everything that the president does is predicated primarily on how it helps him win reelection. We already know that Trump tried to force the Ukraine to release lies damaging to Joe Biden before it would give them desperately needed aid that had been allocated by Congress. But the book will detail many other examples of this kind of mafia-like extortion by Trump.

According to the publisher, “Trump’s Ukraine-like transgressions existed across the full range of his foreign policy — and Bolton documents exactly what those were, and attempts by him and others in the Administration to raise alarms about them.” This applies to everything, not just Trump’s foreign policy, including his response to the COVID-19 pandemic and to the racial protests that are currently rocking the US.

For the pandemic, we already know that Trump is strongly pressuring states to reopen, even as cases start to spike again around the country. On Friday, a Whirlpool plant in Tulsa OK that employs 1,600 workers announced that it was shutting down temporarily because of an outbreak of COVID-19. But Trump is still going ahead with his planned rally there in seven days, and has already announced that the attendees are not required to social distance or wear masks.

What attendees will be required to do is sign a waiver that they will not sue Trump or the venue if they catch the disease. Like in Shrek,

So far in June, twelve states have seen hospitalizations increase. This in turn caused the Dow Jones to drop 1,862 points (6.9%) on Thursday, the worst drop since March. So Trump is not just causing people to die, he is visiting economic chaos on the country purely in service to his reelection.

But wait, there’s more! Also on Friday, it leaked from the Trump White House that when Trump’s advisors tried to give advice on how to respond to the protests against racism that have erupted in all 50 states (and around the world), Trump responded on multiple occasions “those aren’t my voters“.

There is an enormous amount of proof that Trump will “sacrifice” everything — our lives, our economy, even the rest of the world — to get reelected. Ironically, the only thing we can do about it is to defeat him and his Republican enablers at the ballot box in November.

Can you guess what happened when the city of Camden NJ “defunded their police department” in 2013?

If you’ve been listening to right-wing media, you might be thinking something like the following:

You can’t just defund a police department! Who is going to protect you from criminals? Violent anarchists will take over! Dogs and cats living together!

But that’s just propaganda designed to stir up FUD. Virtually nobody is saying that they want to eliminate law enforcement entirely. Instead, they want to reform it (as in “to form anew”) into something better. What happened in Camden is instructive.

At the time, Camden had become synonymous with crime and was considered among the deadliest cities in the U.S. After a rise in homicides in 2012, the city had wanted more officers patrolling the streets, but couldn’t afford to hire them.

Camden’s murder rate was 18 times the national average, and things were going downhill. Their only hope was to try something new:

The following year, the city’s police department was disbanded and replaced with a new one covering Camden County that had more officers, but on lower pay, according to a City Lab report.

That’s right. After they “disbanded” the police, they actually had more police officers. Significantly, these new police were trained to not think of themselves as soldiers or warriors, using guns, tear gas, flash grenades, military equipment, and other heavy-handed (and expensive) tactics. These police were now guardians of the citizens they served.

In addition to increasing the number of officers, they worked on increasing the number of non-crisis interactions between police and residents, in order to build trust. Officers also underwent de-escalation training and got body cameras. They wrote a new use-of-force policy that requires police to use force only as a last resort.

The results were dramatic. The number of homicides dropped dramatically and crime rates went down. The solve rate for crimes went from 16% in 2012 to 61% in 2014 — just two years later. And most telling, they had a 95% reduction in excessive force complaints.

For a better picture of how this happened, listen to this short interview with Scott Thomson, who was the chief of police who oversaw the shift to community policing in Camden:

Looking forward to now, in the aftermath of the death of George Floyd, demonstrations in Camden remained calm. On May 30, the police chief marched alongside protesters with a sign that said “Standing in Solidarity”, and 21 other officers marched as well. The organizer of the protest said that the chief asked her for permission to join the march.

Meanwhile, just across the river in Philadelphia, protests erupted into violence, with police using tear gas and rubber bullets.

It is ironic that police in many cities are escalating violence in response to protests. This indicates that the police mistrust and fear the people they are supposed to protect. This fear leads them to think they should kill before they themselves get killed. And the vicious cycle continues.

When police instead work to build trust, it makes the community safer, which means that the police themselves are safer and have less to fear.

Finally, I think people on the left should stop saying “Defund the Police”. That just plays into right-wing media propaganda and leads to more fear. This is better described as reforming them by rethinking the role of police — “reforming and rethinking”. Democrats are on the right track with the “Justice in Policing Act“. The experience in Camden shows that this not only saves lives, it saves money. And it might just save our country.

When Marine general James Mattis resigned as Donald Trump’s secretary of defense at the end of 2018, he promised that he would avoid criticizing the sitting president. But he added, “There is a period in which I owe my silence. It’s not eternal. It’s not going to be forever.”

Yesterday was the day the dam broke. Mattis came to the conclusion that Trump is a direct threat to our nation and wrote a stinging rebuke against his former boss, published in The Atlantic. If you follow the link and scroll down a ways, you can see the original text.

Mattis accuses Trump of violating the constitution, and of deliberately dividing the nation. “Donald Trump is the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people—does not even pretend to try.”

Mattis also criticized Trump’s current secretary of defense, saying “We must reject any thinking of our cities as a ‘battlespace’ that our uniformed military is called upon to ‘dominate’.”

And Mattis defends the protesters:

I have watched this week’s unfolding events, angry and appalled. The words “Equal Justice Under Law” are carved in the pediment of the United States Supreme Court. This is precisely what protesters are rightly demanding. It is a wholesome and unifying demand—one that all of us should be able to get behind. We must not be distracted by a small number of lawbreakers. The protests are defined by tens of thousands of people of conscience who are insisting that we live up to our values—our values as people and our values as a nation. We must reject and hold accountable those in office who would make a mockery of our Constitution.

UPDATE: In seemingly independent moves, Trump seems to have lost all of his generals, including his current secretary of defense, Mike Esper and the current chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, Mark Millay. Esper disagreed with Trump on the use of military force to deal with protesters and explicitly opposed the president’s invocation of the Insurrection Act. Millay sent out a general memo to the leaders of all US military branches reminding them that they swore an oath to defend and protect the Constitution and its values, including the rights of equality under the law, free speech, and peaceful assembly.