https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/202 ... y-electionWith an election looming and the polls looking bad, Donald Trump was in need of a quick political boost.
Seizing on television images of a procession of refugees out of Honduras, the president announced an imminent “invasion” of the United States by a “migrant caravan” and said he would deploy 15,000 military personnel to stop it. For weeks, Fox News blared “coverage” of the emergency.
That was in October 2018, and as a political strategy ahead of the midterm elections, the gambit utterly failed.
The Democrats flipped 40 seats in the House of Representatives the next month and racked up the largest popular vote margin in midterm elections history, on the highest turnout in 100 years. The “caravan” emergency was heard of no more.
Now two years later, Trump is facing an even bigger election, with an even bigger need for a political masterstroke if he is to win a second term in November.Instead of deploying troops to the border to confront a made-up threat, Trump has announced “a surge of federal law enforcement into American communities” to fight a supposed cataclysm of violence born of a Democratic plot to undermine local police.
“To look at it from any standpoint, the effort to shut down policing in their own communities has led to a shocking explosion of shootings, killings, murders and heinous crimes of violence,” Trump said at the White House on Wednesday. “This bloodshed must end. This bloodshed will end.”
The deployment against anti-racism protesters is a ploy to burnish his strongman credentials, critics say – Trump is pursuing made-for-TV fascism, with the imposition of federal forces into US cities against the will of local authorities. As with 2018, the unmistakeable bogeyman is people of color, whom Trump portrays, with the help of conservative media, as again posing an existential threat to the country that only he can defend against.
Unlike the deployment of troops to a US border, the deployment of federal troops inside American cities threatens to fulfill its own fantasy, turning a dark and opportunistic fable spun by the White House into a daunting new reality in which violent clashes really do play out in the streets and unaccountable federal law enforcement officers really do round up and detain US citizens.
“What one has to ask is, how much is spectacle and how much is reality?” said Jason Stanley, a Yale philosophy professor and author of How Fascism Works. “Now, the spectacle should already worry us, because he did the spectacle in Lafayette Square,” Stanley said, referring to Trump’s violent clearance of peaceful protesters from a park near the White House in June.
“Then he did the spectacle in Portland. And when you allow too much spectacle, as it gets worse over time, people start to say, ‘This has been happening for awhile, what’s the big deal?’
“The spectacle normalizes, and then you can’t tell – say it’s November – you can’t tell if it’s still spectacle any more. It’s spectacle until someone gets hurt.”
Just how big of a spectacle the White House has planned for the run-up to the November elections is unknown.
Will trumps Crime In The Streets Election Ploy Work?
1trump says he's protecting the suburbs. I guess he never figured it out that this is 2020 not 1968. The suburbs changed since then. And since the 1990's crime is down. Yes, gun violence is up but petty street crime is down everywhere.