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Sometimes, all I want to do is watch baseball. It’s the only sport I watch, and I admit I am somewhat of a fair weather fan. But I love baseball, and it’s been fun to watch lately since the Yankees are doing pretty well. It’s calming and a way to escape for a hour or two. Below is a New Yorker cartoon of mine.
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We are seeing more forceful responses to Trump on the state and city level, and I find that hopeful. It’s not clear how Trump will respond to these voices, but it makes me feel we are seriously pushing back now and have incredible leaders in this space.
The other day, Illinois Governor Pritzker gave a measured, furious response to Trump’s idea that he would next send National Guard to Chicago. Here is some of what he said, it’s powerful:
“I want to speak plainly about the moment that we are in and the actual crisis, not the manufactured one, that we are facing in the city and as a state and as a country. If it sounds to you like I am alarmist, that is because I am ringing an alarm, one that I hope every person listening will heed, both here in Illinois and across the country.”
“[o]ver the weekend, we learned from the media that Donald Trump has been planning for quite a while now to deploy armed military personnel to the streets of Chicago. This is exactly the type of overreach that our country's founders warned against. And it’s the reason that they established a federal system with a separation of powers built on checks and balances. What President Trump is doing is unprecedented and unwarranted. It is illegal, it is unconstitutional. It is un-American.”
“We found out what Donald Trump was planning the same way that all of you did. We read a story in the Washington Post. If this was really about fighting crime and making the streets safe, what possible justification could the White House have for planning such an exceptional action without any conversations or consultations with the governor, the mayor or the police?”
“Let me answer that question,” he said. “This is not about fighting crime. This is about Donald Trump searching for any justification to deploy the military in a blue city in a blue state to try and intimidate his political rivals. This is about the president of the United States and his complicit lackey Stephen Miller searching for ways to lay the groundwork to circumvent our democracy, militarize our cities, and end elections. There is no emergency in Chicago that calls for armed military intervention. There is no insurrection.”
“….thirteen of the top twenty cities in homicide rates have Republican governors. None of these cities is Chicago. Eight of the top ten states with the highest homicide rates are led by Republicans. None of those states is Illinois.”
“To the members of the press who are assembled here today and listening across the country,” he said, “I am asking for your courage to tell it like it is. This is not a time to pretend here that there are two sides to this story. This is not a time to fall back into the reflexive crouch that I so often see where the authoritarian creep by this administration is ignored in favor of some horse race piece on who will be helped politically by the president's actions. Donald Trump wants to use the military to occupy a U.S. city, punish his dissidents, and score political points. If this were happening in any other country, we would have no trouble calling it what it is: a dangerous power grab.”
“Earlier today in the Oval Office, Donald Trump looked at the assembled cameras and asked for me personally to say, ‘Mr. President, can you do us the honor of protecting our city?’ Instead, I say, ‘Mr. President, do not come to Chicago. You are neither wanted here nor needed here. Your remarks about this effort over the last several weeks have betrayed a continuing slip in your mental faculties and are not fit for the auspicious office that you occupy.’”
“Finally,” he said, “to the Trump administration officials who are complicit in this scheme, to the public servants who have forsaken their oath to the Constitution to serve the petty whims of an arrogant little man, to any federal official who would come to Chicago and try to incite my people into violence as a pretext for something darker and more dangerous, we are watching, and we are taking names. This country has survived darker periods than the one that we are going through right now. And eventually, the pendulum will swing back, maybe even next year. Donald Trump has already shown himself to have little regard for the many acolytes that he has encouraged to commit crimes on his behalf. You can delay justice for a time, but history shows you cannot prevent it from finding you eventually.
“If you hurt my people, nothing will stop me, not time or political circumstance, from making sure that you face justice under our constitutional rule of law. As Dr. King once said, the arc of the moral Universe is long, but it bends toward justice. Humbly, I would add, it doesn't bend on its own. History tells us we often have to apply force needed to make sure that the arc gets where it needs to go. This is one of those times.”
Yesterday in an outrageous, televised 3 hour long cabinet meeting full of rambling incoherent statements and lies, Trump responded to Pritzker:
“…I have the right to do anything I want to do. I’m the president of the United States. If I think our country is in danger — and it is in danger in these cities — I can do it.”
Pritzker, responding on social media, said: “No, Donald. You can’t do whatever you want.”
The Mayor Brandon of Chicago is also speaking out:
The 3 hour long cabinet meeting was intended for the media, and was an horrific display of Trump’s lack of mental acuity, his arrogance and narcissism. In it, each member of his cabinet tried to out-do the other in praise for Trump. He even brought in a woman who works for MTV to describe her mugging in DC two years ago, in an obvious attempt ti justify the troops in DC.
“There’s something really nice about just, you know, the openness of what we’re doing,” Mr. Trump mused as he closed the gathering out. “It’s government.”
It was not “government,” it was Trump repeatedly making self-aggrandizing statements, wasting everyone’s time.
Last week, there was video of man yelling loud obscenities to miltary personel in Washington, DC, and then got so angry that he threw a subway sandwich at them. At the time, I found it very funny; we all feel this angry. We all want to throw a sandwich sometimes. But they arrested him after the sandwich hit a guardsman. Today, however, the Trump administration failed to convince a grand jury to bring charges against the man. From the NY Times:
“The grand jury’s rejection of the felony charge was a remarkable failure by the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington and the second time in recent days that a majority of grand jurors refused to vote to indict a person accused of felony assault on a federal agent. It also amounted to a sharp rebuke by a panel of ordinary citizens against the prosecutors assigned to bring charges against people arrested after President Trump’s deployment of National Guard troops and federal agents to fight crime and patrol the city’s streets.”
Another man was arrested recently when he deliberately lit an American flag on fire in front of the White House. Trump had said that anyone who sets fire to a flag would be arrested, and put in jail automatically for a year. He can’t do that, the Supreme Court ruled on two separate occasions that flag burning fell under free speech. I don’t particularly like the idea of burning a flag—although I find flags to be a problematic symbol of nationalism—but what if we all burned flags together in one mass protest?
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