Donald Trump keeps saying weirder and weirder things to justify his authoritarian takeover of US cities, pushing the lie that there’s a “crisis” of crime that requires armed troops in the streets, even though crime is down nationwide — and, except for a spike during his pandemic, it’s been trending down for decades. And now, to further that lie, Trump is even downplaying domestic violence, which he suggested Monday shouldn’t really count as a crime.
Well, no, that doesn’t make a goddamn bit of sense, but that’s hardly novel. Trump sent soldiers into Washington DC as an authoritarian show of force on August 11, and promised that more cities — all with Black, Democratic mayors, imagine that — would soon be occupied as well. Trump is now posting funny jokes about how neat it would be to napalm and strafe Chicago with helicopter gunships, because everyone knows the Robert Duvall character in Apocalypse Now was the actual hero that you’re supposed to identify with. He was of course praised for brilliantly trolling the libs, because it’s only a joke and you have no sense of humor.
But in Washington, Trump’s ready to say the fake crisis has now been defeated by Trump’s fake intervention after only a month, even though The Troops have done little more than spread mulch and crash the occasional armored vehicle into a civilian car. Trump has decided it’s time to declare victory over a crisis that didn’t exist in the first place.
On Monday, at the “Museum of the Bible” in Washington DC, Trump insisted that thanks to his brilliant strategy of making threats against Blue cities, Washington DC miraculously has no crime at all! Or at least it would, if only the crime statistics weren’t all lying as badly as the economic statistics.
They said, “Crime’s down 87 percent.” I said, no, no, no — it’s more than 87 percent, virtually nothing. And much lesser things, things that take place in the home they call crime. You know, they’ll do anything they can to find something. If a man has a little fight with the wife, they say this was a crime. See? So now I can’t claim 100 percent but we are. We are a safe city.
Zero crime at all, apart from those little fights with the wife that aren’t crimes at all. If it takes place in the home, obviously that’s the man’s business. And the wife? She’ll watch what she says if she knows what’s good for her. Ha. Ha.
The White House, as you’d expect, lied every which way about what Trump said, insisting that Trump wasn’t downplaying domestic abuse, heavens no, although there was a bit of early confusion about what he meant. In a statement to The 19th, spokesperson Abigail Jackson claimed that Trump super cares a lot about domestic violence, because his executive order for the DC occupation called on the Department of Housing and Urban Development to investigate landlords who don’t “restrict tenants who engage in criminal activity,” and that totally includes domestic violence. Also, the statement bragged that trans women are being barred from domestic violence shelters, so you ladies should appreciate how much Great Leader cares for women.
“While President Trump is making America safer, the Fake News is whipping up their latest hoax in real time to distract from the Administration’s tremendous results,” Jackson said.
But White House propaganda minister Karoline Leavitt took a far different tack in yesterday’s press briefing. After the routine assurance that of course Trump would never downplay domestic violence, Leavitt didn’t bother claiming Trump was doing a goddamned thing about it, but instead said that Trump meant the media were all persecuting him again, just to spoil the great news of how Trump had personally prevailed over the criminal city of Washington DC.
“He wasn’t referring to crime. That’s exactly the point he was making,” Leavitt told reporters. “The president is saying, in fact, is that these crimes will be made up and reported as a crime to undermine the great work that the federal task force is doing to reduce crime in Washington DC.”
The details really don’t matter, because both things are true: Great Leader has eliminated crime, including domestic violence, but he also doesn’t have to eliminate crimes that are entirely made up, like reports of domestic violence. And if you don’t like it he’ll hunt you down with an attack helicopter probably.
The 19th also pointed out that domestic violence has, under previous administrations, been treated as a national crisis, with CDC studies and the Violence Against Women Act, which formally recognizes that domestic violence is “a public health and safety issue, not a private domestic matter.”
Just not so much under Donald Trump:
The federal government is by far the biggest source of funding for anti-domestic violence efforts, and since taking office, the Trump administration has sought to restrict nonprofits’ access to federal domestic violence grants. They have also laid off a top official and several teams working on the issue, threatening to destabilize domestic violence services and prevention efforts nationwide.
The New York Times, which also doesn’t have a sense of humor, even questioned the premise that Trump’s tin soldiers, ICE crackdowns, and brilliant memes have even eliminated crime in DC, although the Times still implied he’d done anything at all:
While crime is, in fact, declining in the capital — and Washington’s mayor has credited the federal law enforcement surge with contributing to the decline — there are still robberies, assaults and thefts occurring on a daily basis.
On Sunday alone, there was a homicide, six motor vehicle thefts, two assaults with a deadly weapon, four robberies and more than 30 thefts, according to police statistics.
But an effort was made. Far too often, the press pushes Trump’s narrative, taking at face value his claim that he’s sending National Guard and active-duty troops to cities to “crack down on crime.” In reality, 1) the military is prohibited by law from doing the job of local police, and 2) Trump knows and Democratic state and local officials know damn well that the troops are a political show of force. Journalists should know that, too.
In any case, just remember that Donald Trump, who still has to pay E. Jean Carroll $83.3 million after being found liable for sexually assaulting and libeling her, would never dream of downplaying domestic abuse!
And please forget that when Ivana Trump divorced him, she said in a sworn deposition that he had violently attacked her, pulled hair out of her scalp, and then raped her. After all, she later said in a voluntary statement that was not under oath that the deposition wasn’t entirely right about that word “rape,” she never intended for her “words to be interpreted in a literal or criminal sense.”
When the Daily Beast recounted the incident in 2015, Trump fixer Michael Cohen, still on the bus and not yet under it, claimed that “very clear case law” held that “you cannot rape your spouse,” which is not actually the law anymore. And then he threatened the reporters, saying
“I will take you for every penny you still don’t have. And I will come after your Daily Beast and everybody else that you possibly know,” Cohen said. “So I’m warning you, tread very fucking lightly, because what I’m going to do to you is going to be fucking disgusting. You understand me?”
“You write a story that has Mr. Trump’s name in it, with the word ‘rape,’ and I’m going to mess your life up… for as long as you’re on this frickin’ planet… you’re going to have judgments against you, so much money, you’ll never know how to get out from underneath it,” he added.
We guess Mr. Cohen is a good guy now, although that incident just might have some bearing on Donald Trump’s views of violence generally and domestic violence in particular. Who can possibly guess what’s in his mind, really? He’s like that great poet warrior in the classic sense, Col. Kurtz, and just so tragically misunderstood. Don’t make him hurt you.
Sounds Like Trump Really Is Going To Invade Chicago ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Hey, Is It BAD When Trump Says He’s Going To Invade All Our Cities (And Has Already Started)?
Donald Trump Never Raped His Wife And Even If He Did It Was Classy
[The 19th / On the Media / Brennan Center / Independent / NYT]
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