This week Trump make moves to have undocumented immigrants go uncounted in the Census.
Protestors in Portland have come on in larger numbers than recent weeks to stand against the militarized DHS, including a contingent of moms.
Trump said on Monday that more cities will be targeted: “New York and Chicago and Philadelphia, Detroit, and Baltimore and all of these—Oakland is a mess—we are not going to let this happen in the country, all run by liberal Democrats,” the president told reporters in the Oval Office. “We’re going to have more federal law enforcement, that I can tell you.”
David Grahm writes in the Atlantic that Trump Administration is trying to create a national police force akin to what some countries have in their Interior Ministry: “The agents out on the streets of Portland are detailed from Customs and Border Protection, the Transportation Security Administration, the Coast Guard, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Among the forces deployed in Washington last month, when Trump briefly barricaded himself within the White House, were officers from the Federal Bureau of Prisons…. The reason these agents are the ones being deployed is simply that they’re the ones who are available. In the absence of a federal police force, the administration is simply pulling in any federal law-enforcement officer that it has the power to reassign…. Whatever his motives, the precedents he’s creating are likely to endure: His successors will have a blueprint for the creation of a national police force that answers to the president.”
Wittes and Jurecic write: The tactical divisions of the Homeland Security Department from which the officers in Portland appear to hail—Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE)—are not typically deployed at protests, but charged with enforcing immigration law and guarding the U.S. border. And as an internal department memo obtained by The New York Times shows, the officers sent into Portland’s streets were not trained to handle crowds.
So why is the Trump administration sending into American cities officers who aren’t appropriately trained for the mission, are acting on legal authority that will require litigation to defend, and are being deployed to address a problem that the federal government could address by means far less provocative and in a fashion far less likely to escalate disorder?
Here is one more theory for Trump’s actions: In deploying federal forces, Trump appears to be trying to provoke clashes with protesters, which he can use to convince white suburban voters that he’s the last line of defense between them and the chaos allegedly incubating in cities, Rahm Emanuel, the former Chicago mayor, told me. Referring to the street battle between construction workers and anti-war protesters in Manhattan in 1970, Emanuel said, “Trump is trying to create his own hard-hat riot, and they are wearing [law-enforcement] helmets.”
Wednesday night the mayor of Portland joined the protests and was tear gassed by unidentified DHS officers.
The Washington Post reports that the Trump Administration was looking to escalate conflict with protestors in June but when the protests and statue vandalism died down, they chose to focus on Portland where the federal courthouse is being attacked nightly: One of the officials said the White House had long wanted to amplify strife in cities, encouraging DHS officials to talk about arrests of violent criminals in sanctuary cities and repeatedly urging ICE to disclose more details of raids than some in the agency were comfortable doing. “It was about getting viral online content,” one of the officials said.
Congressional talks between Republicans and the White House broke down this week over new stimulus money.
And there was more bad jobs news: New state unemployment claims increased last week for the first time in nearly four months, disturbing evidence that the struggling economy is backsliding at a time when coronavirus cases are on the rise.
The New York Times wrote a long piece about how Trump turned against stopping the virus in April and May: But their ultimate goal was to shift responsibility for leading the fight against the pandemic from the White House to the states. They referred to this as “state authority handoff,” and it was at the heart of what would become at once a catastrophic policy blunder and an attempt to escape blame for a crisis that had engulfed the country — perhaps one of the greatest failures of presidential leadership in generations.
Some key findings: “Mr. Trump’s rush to urge a return to normal would help undercut the social distancing and other measures that were holding down the numbers.
The president quickly came to feel trapped by his own reopening guidelines. States needed declining cases to reopen, or at least a declining rate of positive tests. But more testing meant overall cases were destined to go up, undercutting the president’s push to crank up the economy. The result was to intensify Mr. Trump’s remarkable public campaign against testing…”
After being re-arrested this week, a judge turned Michale Cohen free: “I make the finding that the purpose of transferring Mr. Cohen from furlough and home confinement to jail is retaliatory,” the judge, Alvin K. Hellerstein of Federal District Court in Manhattan, said in court. “And it’s retaliatory because of his desire to exercise his First Amendment rights to publish a book and to discuss anything about the book or anything else he wants on social media and with others.”
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Trump’s Job Approval: 40.20%
COVID-19 Cases/Deaths: 4,099,310 / 160,220