With an impending election and polls looking bad, Donald Trump needed a quick political boost.
Taking advantage of television footage of a refugee procession outside 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 criticized the “coverage” of the emergency.
That was in October 2018, and as a political strategy before the midterm elections, the gambit failed completely.
Democrats overturned 40 seats in the House of Representatives next month and racked up the largest popular vote margin in the history of the midterm elections, with the highest turnout in 100 years. The emergency of the “caravan” was no longer known.
Now, two years later, Trump faces even bigger elections, with an even greater need for a political coup d’etat to win a second term in November.
Rather than deploy troops across the border to confront an invented threat, Trump has announced “increased federal law enforcement in American communities” to combat an alleged cataclysm of violence stemming from a Democratic plot to undermine local police.
“To see it from any point of view, the effort to shut down the police in their own communities has led to a shocking explosion of shooting, murder, murder and heinous crimes of violence,” Trump said Wednesday at the White House. “This bloodshed must end. This bloodshed will end.
The deployment against anti-racism protesters is a ploy to polish his strong man credentials, critics say: Trump is pursuing fascism made for television, with the imposition of federal forces in US cities against the will of local authorities. As in 2018, the unmistakable bag man is people of color, whom Trump represents, with the help of conservative media, as a new threat to the country that only he can defend against.
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