There are constant protests in New York City.
For several days, the protests in May and June over Floyd’s death spiraled into something else. As happened in other places in the same period, groups of looters and vandals used the protests as a jumping-off point for theft and property damage. That quickly faded. When the protests shifted to focus attention on tributes to leaders of the former Confederacy and those who had participated in the slave trade, New York — not exactly a hotbed of Confederate nostalgia — was not an epicenter. City leaders did agree to remove a statue of Theodore Roosevelt from outside a museum, but that was more because of the presentation of the statue itself than anger at Roosevelt specifically.
The White House has nonetheless argued that New York City is in the grip of a ferocious crime wave.
“Misguided movements, such as ‘Defund the Police,’ seek to leave our communities more vulnerable than ever,” White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany said during a briefing earlier this month. “Case in point: This weekend alone, in New York, there were 44 shootings with 11 killed.”
“We can’t let this happen to the cities,” President Trump said on Monday. “New York was up 348 percent — the crime rate.” He claimed that the police “are afraid to do anything.”
“If the governor is not going to do something about it,” Trump said, “we’ll do something about it.”
Asked what he would do, Trump pointed to the recent deployment of federal law enforcement to Portland, Ore.
“In Portland, they’ve done a fantastic job,” Trump said. “They’ve been there three days, and they really have done a fantastic job in [a] very short period of time. No problem. They grab them; a lot of people in jail. They’re leaders. These are anarchists. These are not protesters.”
That statement alone is hard to defend, given documented instances in which people say they have been snatched off the street by unidentified people in military gear.
Those armed enforcers apparently worked for the Department of Homeland Security — thought it’s hard to say with certainty. DHS is leading the effort in Portland and has argued that its deployment is in response to a “siege” of federal buildings in the city. It produced a list of a number of actions taken by “violent anarchists,” most of which identified incidents of graffiti.
DHS derives its authority to deploy in Portland — and presumably New York — from an executive order Trump signed last month. That order, offered in response to incidents in which protests led to vandalism of government buildings or the toppling of public monuments, claimed that “Anarchists and left-wing extremists have sought to advance a fringe ideology that paints the United States of America as fundamentally unjust and have sought to impose that ideology on Americans through violence and mob intimidation.”
“They have led riots in the streets, burned police vehicles, killed and assaulted government officers as well as business owners defending their property, and even seized an area within one city where law and order gave way to anarchy,” the order read.
In response, DHS and other federal officials were ordered to leverage a patchwork of laws aimed at protecting government buildings, churches and memorials to establish a parallel police presence in targeted cities.
While incidents of violence and vandalism occur nightly in replayed footage that airs on Fox News, it is not the case that there is an ongoing series of violent protests in most American cities. The White House’s claims about the need for intervention in New York don’t even pretend to be about the protests that are the focus of Trump’s executive order, except by association: The protests are calling for changes in how police do their jobs, leading to changes at the NYPD, which the NYPD argues is enabling violent criminal activity.
There has been an increase in shooting incidents in the city, with shootings more than doubling over the past month. But those incidents have primarily taken place across an expansive area, from Brooklyn to northern Manhattan and into the Bronx. Deploying federal officers near federal buildings — clustered in southern Manhattan — wouldn’t do much. Deploying them in the city broadly wouldn’t either, unless the intent is to send thousands of DHS enforcers into the streets.
Again, there are constant protests in New York City. It’s thoroughly dishonest to argue that those protests are connected directly to the violent incidents Trump is targeting.
But that’s not what Trump is doing. What he’s doing instead is leveraging a manufactured excuse to use military and quasi-military forces for his political benefit — just as the White House ordered a group of peaceful protesters to be cleared from a plaza in Washington so Trump could visit a church for a photo opp.
We saw this same instinct well before the recent protests. In the weeks leading up to the 2018 midterm elections, Trump ordered the deployment of troops to the border with Mexico, arguing that a caravan of migrants traveling up from Central America demanded a federal armed response. The soldiers mostly stayed at the border putting up concertina wire until the election was over.
A few months later, Trump engineered a government shutdown to strong-arm Congress into funding a wall on that same border. When Congress declined to do so, Trump declared a national emergency predicated on a surge in families arriving and seeking asylum. That emergency allowed him to divert funding from across the Defense Department to the construction effort. While House Democrats tried to force an end to the emergency declaration, the Republican Senate has allowed it to continue.
National emergencies must be renewed annually. The White House did so in February despite a sharp drop in the number of migrants arriving at the border, the ostensible predicate for the emergency in the first place.
Trump has recently been taking victory laps on the issue.
“You don’t hear about the wall. They don’t want to talk about the wall anymore. Do you notice?” Trump said at an event last month. “Never has the Democrat Party fought so hard against something. And do you notice? They never talk about the wall. Because, in the end, they gave it up. They gave up. We won.”
A victory on the wall was, of course, critical to Trump’s argument that he has delivered for his base since his 2016 election. It’s just as important as his warnings about frightening migrants were to his pitch in late 2018 and just as central as “law and order” has been to his reelection bid this year.
To fight for “law and order,” you need lawlessness and a mechanism to hold that lawlessness in check. Trump has managed to establish the mechanism — the law — and is now in the process of identifying the disorder.
Polling suggests his reelection message isn’t resonating. But that hasn’t stopped him before.
