Trump to cities: Drop dead

[Zorro]

Opinion by Max Boot

I had a nice, quiet Labor Day weekend. My family spent a day with friends at the Jersey Shore, but the rest of the time we were in New York City, where I live. We played tennis in Central Park; ate delicious Laotian food at a trendy restaurant in Tribeca and equally delicious Israeli food at a restaurant on the Upper West Side; bought bagels and lox from Zabar’s, the venerable Jewish grocery; and drank iced lattes from Irving Farm, a hip coffee shop. As I walked around, I noted the normal bustle of the city — the only discordant element being the masks that everyone wears to stay safe.

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!”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/09/08/trump-cities-drop-dead/

[Me.]

1. And Yet Those Hell Holes Manage To Pay Enough Taxes To Support Large Swathes Of The Country

where his deplorables live.