On Thursday, President Trump signed three vaguely worded executive orders which which, he said, were “designed to restore safety in America.”
That these orders, or almost anything Trump has done, will make most of us more “safe” is a lie. Just like his promise to make America “great” again only applied to some, Trump’s orders for “safety” are intended to make our already grotesquely violent police even more violent towards people of color and other poor people, in order to make Trump and his plutocrat cronies feel more safe.
The new Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions – who has prosecuted civil rights activists and was denied a federal judgeship amid an outcry over his record on race – has been tasked making sure laws adequately protect police officers from the public, even though police have been killing upwards of a thousand citizens a year lately.
The good news is that Trump, acting like a bully, is more talk than action. Issuing executive orders is the weakest manner of governing after tweeting. As the wildly unpopular immigration ban has shown, they are legally vulnerable and, quite possibly, totally uneforceable.
An executive order about policing is especially weak because, unlike immigration, law enforcement is largely a local issue with which the federal government has a limited role.
And yet, even Trump’s call for a “taskforce on crime reduction and public safety” is dangerous for one major reason. Just like when Trump vowed a “major investigation” into voting fraud, his plan for a police task force gives the impression, as he said on Thursday, that “We face the menace of rising crime and the threat of deadly terror.”
This is a lie. Crime is not rising, even though Trump keeps lying about crime statistics in Philadelphia, Chicago and nationally.
What the president is doing is whipping up hysteria and rage to create excuses for police to clamp down on the civil rights of people of color. Likewise, while scholars know that immigrants are less likely to commit crimes, and while the Ninth Circuit made us all a bit safer by slapping down Trump’s travel ban, the president’s ranting that a “Big increase in traffic into our country from certain areas, while our people are far more vulnerable” already put a mark of shame, suspicion and surveillance on the backs of immigrants.
Perhaps the focus on our concern should not be wider population, but the actions happening in the White House which are making most Americans – indeed, most humans – less safe.
Do the millions of people who depend on clean drinking water downstream from Standing Rock feel more “safe” after the Trump administration’s decision to move forward with the North Dakota pipeline?
Do people feel safer after Trump’s attacks on the EPA and its antagonism towards climate science?
Do servicemembers and their families feel safer knowing Trump is apt to order a raid in another country – like the disastrous one in Yemen which killed a Navy seal, civilians, and children – over dinner and because “Obama wouldn’t have done it”?
Does any American with a mortgage or a bank account feel safer seeing with even the tepid protections of the Dodd-Frank act under attack?
Do the millions who might lose health care if Medicaid, Medicare or Obamacare are scaled back or axed feel safer?
Do school children and their parents feel safer with an Education Secretary who thinks guns have a place schools?
Finally, do even Trump’s own supporters feel safer knowing that he may have been thinking and tweeting about Nordstrom ... during his intelligence briefing?
Remember: nothing this president says or does will make most of us safer. Even as other branches of government try to intercede, Trump’s actions are intended to make him, his children and his cronies feel “safe” as they steal time, energy, and money from our lives – making most of us more precarious and vulnerable along the way.
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