Today Donald J. Trump nationalized the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) of the District of Columbia and called out the National Guard to occupy the city. He did all of this based on a lie: the “rising” rate of crime in the city. Fact: the crime rate in our nation’s capital is at a thirty year low. Fact: Washington, DC has a strong Black woman mayor who happens to be a Democrat. Fact: the largest racial and ethnic group in Washington, DC is Black Americans. Fact: the most violent incident in recent Washington history was the attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021. Fact: a significant number of the injuries to police officers on January 6 were to members of the Washington MPD, the police force that Trump has now taken control of. Fact: Trump refused to deploy the National Guard on January 6, allowing the attack on the defenders of the Capitol, the MPD and the Capitol Police to continue. So ask yourself, “why is he doing this?”
Please consider that in his second term Trump has now deployed the National Guard twice to US cities, previously in Los Angeles and now in DC. Both cities are governed by mayors who are Black women who are Democrats, Muriel Bowser in Washington and Karen Bass in LA. Trump has repeatedly attacked strong Black women leaders calling them names including labeling them as “low IQ”. Ask yourself “why?”.
I offer two reasons. First, to deflect from the continued questions about the Jeffrey Epstein files. Trump’s name apparently appears in them. Frankly, this is not a surprise. The two were long-term friends. The real question is what the files say about Trump and his relationship with Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell. I’m wondering how many names appear of people that Trump still considers friends, of his confidants and advisors. It wasn’t the Watergate break-in that brought down Nixon, it was the cover-up. So what is Trump afraid of? What is he trying to cover-up? Why won’t he release the files?
Second, Trump needs to deflect from the mistake of deciding to meet with Vladimir Putin in Alaska later this week. There is a criminal arrest warrant issued against Putin for acts committed against Ukraine during the course of the war. Putin would be arrested were the meeting with Trump held in almost any other country than ours. Members of the International Criminal Court (ICC) have committed to arresting anyone who travels to their nation that has been indicted by the ICC. Yet Putin can travel here because the US has not signed the treaty that created the ICC. We have NOT committed to enforcement of the international laws and standards regarding crimes against humanity. So Putin can come to Alaska. Shouldn’t Trump be embarrassed for hosting a man accused of war crimes? Shouldn’t we be embarrassed that this is happening?
The claim of this meeting is to bring about peace in Ukraine. Yet how can that happen when the meeting excludes Zelensky and anyone else representing Ukraine? This smacks of the “agreements” to divide Europe to appease Hitler and the Nazis. I wrote about this in February. I think we all know how that turned out.
One final point on the occupation of DC: Trump said he plans to rid the city of those living on the streets, those without homes. The truth of this statement is that he plans to attack people who are poor, the powerless. His “Big Beautiful Bill” was an attack on our nation’s poor through cuts to Medicaid and SNAP. And now he’s taking that war to the streets, personalizing in against the homeless in our nation’s capital. Yes, we have a problem with poverty in this country. Yet the way to address the problem is NOT by criminalizing having insufficient income to afford a place to live.
So ask why? Why is this happening? What is the point of diverting our attention? Ask yourself how our nation’s media is going to respond. Will CNN just report the facts of the occupation? Will they work on uncovering the why? Will they ask Trump a question such as “are the reports true that this occupation is to divert attention from the Epstein files?”. Will MSNBC ask? Will CBS, NBC, and ABC? Will The New York Times? We know the Jeff Bezos owned Washington Post won’t. And we can predict how Fox News, NewsMax, and the brosphere podcast media will act.
Ask yourself: Is this who we are?
The Ugliness is the Hope.
Resist. Persist. Oppose. Propose. Be the opposition with a proposition.
Well thought out, David. Trump is a reprehensible creature who is doing this for diversion purposes and also to throw red meat to the meathead mass of ignorantae who put him in office. God bless America??