Trump Sends In More Federal Agents

New York’s mayor, Bill de Blasio, has pledged to take Trump to court if he sends federal officers into the Big Apple. In Philadelphia, the attorney general, Larry Krasner, has also vowed to push back. “My dad volunteered and served in World War II to fight fascism, like most of my uncles, so we would not have an American president brutalizing and kidnapping Americans for exercising their constitutional rights and trying to make America a better place, which is what patriots do,” Krasner said in a statement this week. “Anyone, including federal law enforcement, who unlawfully assaults and kidnaps people will face criminal charges from my office.”

“The deployment of unnamed special secret agents onto our streets to detain people without cause and to effectively take away their civil rights and civil liberties without due process — that is not going to happen in Chicago,” Lightfoot said.

Lori Lightfoot, Chicago’s Democratic mayor, had vowed to fight efforts to install federal agents in the city. But she walked that back on Tuesday after a conversation with John Lausch Jr., a U.S. attorney and a former colleague of hers, who assured her that the agents would cooperate with the city police.

This seems to stretch the administration’s previously stated justifications for deploying federal officers into cities. Those rested on the executive order that Trump signed last month to protect monuments and statues, and on the D.H.S.’s original charter, which says that troops can be used to protect public property.

Trump and William Barr, the U.S. attorney general, told reporters that the administration would be sending officers to Chicago not to combat protesters but to help fight a recent rise in violent crime there. “We’re going to continue to confront mob violence,” Barr said. “But, the operations we are discussing today are very different — they are classic crime fighting.” The administration has also ordered agents into Kansas City, Mo., with a similar mission.

Federal officers under the auspices of the Department of Homeland Security have been clashing with protesters in Portland, Ore., since last week, and yesterday the state’s attorney general argued in court for a restraining order to expel the federal agents from the city.

“We will never defund the police,” Trump said, hammering at a message that has become central to his re-election campaign. “We will hire more great police. We want to make law enforcement stronger, not weaker. What cities are doing is absolute insanity.”

President Trump announced yesterday that he would send hundreds more federal agents to Chicago and other American cities, significantly expanding the scope of a program that has been criticized by Democrats as borderline authoritarian.

The House of Representatives, which is led by Democrats, voted yesterday to remove statues of Confederate leaders and other white supremacists from the Capitol building. The bill calls for the replacement of a bust of Roger B. Taney — who as chief justice of the Supreme Court delivered the majority opinion in the Dred Scott case in 1857, declaring that Black people could not be considered U.S. citizens — with a likeness of Thurgood Marshall, the court’s first Black justice. It would also remove statues of four white supremacists who served in high government positions in the 19th and early 20th centuries, and would bar from the Capitol “all statues of individuals who voluntarily served” the Confederacy.

The bipartisan vote, 305 to 113, could end up being moot: Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, has criticized efforts to “airbrush the Capitol” as “clearly a bridge too far,” and seems unlikely to call it up for a vote. And even if the Senate passed it, Trump — who has made defending Confederate symbols part of his re-election campaign — would probably veto it.

Two polls published this week found the nation divided on whether Confederate monuments and statues should be banished from public places (neither asked specifically about the Capitol building). In an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll released on Tuesday, 51 percent of American voters said Confederate monuments on public property should be removed. In fall 2018, just 35 percent said they should be removed.

But when the question was asked slightly differently, in an ABC News/Washington Post poll also published Tuesday, 52 percent of Americans opposed removing Confederate statues from public places, while 43 percent supported the idea. The ABC/Post poll also found little support — just 25 percent — for removing statues of former presidents who had owned slaves.

How does Trump fit into the legacy of bigotry in the White House? According to some historically dubious remarks by Joe Biden yesterday, it’s simple: Trump, he said, is the first and only racist to hold the presidency. In a virtual town hall organized by the Service Employees International Union, Biden called Trump a “racist” in response to a question from a health care worker who said she was concerned about Trump’s referring to the coronavirus as the “China virus.”

“The way he deals with people based on the color of their skin, their national origin, where they’re from, is absolutely sickening,” Biden said. “We’ve had racists, and they existed and they tried to get elected president. He’s the first one that has.”

Biden might do well to look into the story of Andrew Johnson, who once wrote that “everyone would, and must admit, that the white race was superior to the Black,” or Woodrow Wilson, who put in place strict segregationist policies in federal offices, or Ronald Reagan, who was captured on a recording privately calling Black people “monkeys.” (The man he was speaking to, Richard Nixon, was president at the time. He laughed in response.) Then, of course, there were those who actually owned slaves.

The administration yesterday announced that it was putting a down payment on a coronavirus vaccine. It signed a nearly $2 billion contract with Pfizer, the pharmaceutical giant, and a German biotechnology company, which are working together to develop a vaccine.

The contract guarantees that the government will have access to 600 million doses of the vaccine, with at least 100 million available by December. The $1.95 billion contract covers the cost of the first batch; the other 500 million doses would need to be paid for in the future. The government does not pay anything until the drug is approved by the Food and Drug Administration and the first 100 million doses are delivered.