Trump to cities: Drop dead
I mention this only because if you listen to President Trump, what I did would scarcely have been possible. According to the president, city dwellers must be cowering in fear from black-clad antifa thugs who are turning our neighborhoods into “anarchist jurisdictions.” The way Trump talks, I should probably be awarded a Presidential Medal of Freedom just for daring to step foot out of my front door.
Last week, this White House issued one of the more absurd pronouncements ever to come from any White House — sinister and ludicrous in equal measure. It began: “Unfortunately, anarchy has recently beset some of our States and cities. For the past few months, several State and local governments have contributed to the violence and destruction in their jurisdictions by failing to enforce the law, disempowering and significantly defunding their police departments, and refusing to accept offers of Federal law enforcement assistance. As a result of these State and local government policies, persistent and outrageous acts of violence and destruction have continued unabated in many of America’s cities, such as Portland, Seattle, and New York.” It ended with a threat to cut federal funding for these “anarchist jurisdictions.”
This executive order has a convoluted bureaucratic title. It really should be headlined: “Trump to cities: Drop dead.”
The president is campaigning for reelection by declaring war on America’s metropolitan areas — although 80 percent of the U.S. population lives in urban areas, and 85 percent of gross domestic product is generated by large cities. This would seem to be, on its face, a suicidal strategy, but Trump is trying to divide cities from their suburbs, warning with characteristic dishonesty that “Joe Biden and the Radical Left want to Abolish Police, Abolish ICE, Abolish Bail, Abolish Suburbs, Abolish the 2nd Amendment — and Abolish the American Way of Life. No one will be SAFE in Joe Biden’s America!”
Trump acts as if Biden is currently the president of urban America and Trump is the president of everything else. Yes, big cities generally have Democratic mayors, but that doesn’t absolve Trump of responsibility for them, just as the Republican leadership of rural America didn’t absolve President Barack Obama of responsibility for those areas. Democrats don’t write off rural America. How dare Trump write off urban America?
It’s true that cities such as New York are hurting, just as the rest of the country is. Aside from the appalling number of confirmed and probable coronavirus deaths (23,736), we have seen a spike in shootings and murders, homelessness and unemployment. Many families are relocating, at least temporarily: Home sales have plunged in Manhattan while booming in the suburbs. But it’s absurd to depict cities such as New York as urban hellscapes. While New York’s murder rate at the end of August was 33.6 percent higher than a year ago, it remains 19.2 percent lower than 10 years ago and 77.7 percent lower than 27 years ago.
What we need from the federal government is help, not abuse. You would think that would be the least Trump could do, given that the primary responsibility for the scale of the pandemic and its economic fallout is his. The United States has eight times Canada’s population — and about 20 times its covid-19 fatalities. The difference is leadership: Canada has a rational, responsible leader, and the United States does not. Instead of leading, Trump prefers to play cruel political games.
The United States has seen an average of 38,915 new covid-19 cases a day and 800 new deaths a day over the past seven days, yet last week Trump’s Federal Emergency Management Agency declared that it would no longer reimburse local costs of fighting the coronavirus in schools and other public facilities, because these actions are no longer “necessary to protect public health and safety.” That move could strip New York and other cities of millions of dollars in badly needed funds to sanitize schools and subways. Meanwhile, prospects for a badly needed bailout for beleaguered state and local governments are evaporating amid obstructionism from the White House.
New York has survived terrible crises in the past — near-bankruptcy in 1975, a massive blackout in 1977, a crime wave in the 1970s and 1980s, the terrorist attack of 2001 — and we will survive this one, too. Like most New Yorkers, I’m not going anywhere: Rather than buy a place in the suburbs, we are remodeling our apartment in the city. But it would be nice if we had a president who was working to help, rather than hinder, urban America. The president is supposed to lead the whole country, not just the portion of it that supports him politically.
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