I think with the president only calling out cities in states that didn’t vote for him, coincidence can, in fact, be ruled out. NYC is one of the safest big cities in the US, but it’s his favorite target.
Eh, how many cities can Trump even name? New York, Los Angeles, and Washington are the three most famous cities in the US, and hence the ones most likely to be specifically called out by anyone referring to particular cities.
It could also be the size of the punching bag cities, which enables a vague cultural memory of the cities being dangerous because, being large, there are bound to be a lot of horror stories from them. This could either be just his knee-jerk go-to examples of “bad hambres” in big cities, or knowing that others already have this perception making the bogeyman story sound more plausible.
But it could also be trying to hurt blue states in various ways. It could also be a combination of all 3.
The “Epstein Files” are just as much of a distraction as well. Regardless of what may or may not be in them, the Republican-dominated Congress isn’t going to vote to impeach him, much less remove him from power, the MAGA faithful will deny it even if there were video evidence of Trump having sex with underaged girls, the GOP will not repudiate or abandon him, and Russ Vought and his band of Heritage Foundation fuckwits aren’t going to stop dismantling the administrative state and trying to turn the nation into a theocratic White Christian hellhole. Releasing the “Epstein Files” won’t fix our deep-seated political problems or reveal anything any sensible person didn’t already know from Trump’s own statements about how he likes young girls and wants to fuck his daughter.
Stranger
I think this action, and so many others, is a perfect demonstration of the “boiling frog” analogy. If the mere probability of this happening had been brought up during his campaign it would have been labeled hate speech fantasy and the person bringing it would have been told that Trump would be deposed long before things got that bad, and yet…here we are today. Bees have a memory duration of about 2.5 seconds, but they aren’t looking so bad right now compared to us.
What a great reason to release them to get them out of the way! Wait-that wasn’t what you were going for?
Whoopsy!
I long ago came to the conclusion that even if Trump tried to escape a sniper by holding a baby as a human shield, he still wouldn’t lose the support of the MAGA faithful.
Why not look at the party affiliation of the safest cities? Or the gubernatorial affiliation of the safest cities?
I look at homicide rates because, unlike with other crimes, almost all are reported.
If we can go back to 2019, due to convenience of what is in Wikipedia, the three safest American cities with a population over 200,000 are all in California (Irvine, Chula Vista, and Fremont). For population over a million, the safest are San Diego, San Jose, and New York City.
There are some safe close-to-big cities in Texas (El Paso and Austin). Although they do have a GOP governor, the mayors are Democrats. And another safe city in that population range is highly Democratic Boston.
Of course, the real story is that urban Americans tend to vote Democratic. And Republicans do not necessarily ruin safety. Safe Omaha, although it has a Democratic mayor today, had a GOP mayor until earlier this year, and Nebraska has a GOP governor, So I make no claim for cause and effect.
It’s not about releasing the Epstein files (which I agree won’t happen) - it’s about continuing a line of attack that’s working (in terms of doing damage to the president’s and his party’s popularity and approval).
There is no “it. “ America has accepted fascism, there is no event that will change their mind short of collapse.
This is true. The GOP has control of all 3 branches of government and a plurality of state legislatures and governors so there’s not much Dems can do in the interim.
This is all about the Midterms though and reminding everyobe making the GOP is the party of pedophiles and their enablers.. hopefully that will discourage others from voting for it in the mid terms.
I am impressed that so many still feel like this is business as usual and that the midterm election results will be honored.
Is it really doing any damage, though? It certainly isn’t putting the brakes on the real damage being done within the government and to what still remains of democratic norms. And as panicked as Republicans are about mid-term elections, they’re making preparations to stay in power ‘by hook or by crook’. Really, the focus on these ‘files’ and all of the shady business around Epstein’s life and death, and Ghislaine Maxwell’s glad handling by Trump officials is tantalizingly appealing to the public while taking focus off of the really dangerous stuff the people behind getting Trump re-elected are actually doing.
Don’t get me wrong; I’d love to see all grand jury testimony and evidence around Epstein’s affairs brought to public light and journalistic scrutiny, and it is telling that political leaders on both sides of the aisle are hemming and looking for excuses to not pursue releasing this information. It’s one of the rare instances of a conspiracy theory likely having real basis in fact (at least, as much as we know) and I’d like to see all the people involved being held to account as unlikely as that is. But it won’t cause this regime to fall even if Trump featured prominently in evidence.
Stranger
Even if you think the results will not be honored you need to win them in order to legitimize the resistance to the subsequent regime.
as I observed in another thread, it appears to be that since this business about the non-release of the files, all that pro-Trump merchandise disappeared from the stores. It’s unscientific, and I haven’t been able to find any way to corroborate it, but the non-release of the files does appear to have eroded some of his support. If so, it would be worthwhile to keep reminding people about it, lest they forget.
When countries become dictatorships, fair elections are among the last aspects of free government to go. It is hard to stuff ballot boxes when the press is still willing to run stories the supremo will not like.
If you predict that there will be a free and fair legislative election after which results are dishonored, I’m interested to know plausible examples. Maybe there are. What I do not believe is that the perils of presidentialism, in the U.S., are so far different from elsewhere.
Republicans are already taking over election boards in red states, setting up to challenge critical elections that they lose, and to deny, deny, deny the validity of elections won by opponents even if there is no basis, just as their ostensible leader continues to deny having lost in 2020. Will 2026 elections be “free and fair”? They will in some states, not so many in others. Will Republicans allow Democratic opponents in critical positions to be sworn in and seated? I guess we’ll see but the erosion of democratic norms, like conceding an election, has gone further and much faster than I expected with little in the way of alarm by much of the mainstream punditry which desperately wants to pretend that all is normal about a president sending the National Guard and Marines to quell a two square block protest and conduct immigration enforcement with the Congress not batting an eye, or building a concentration camp in remote Central Florida, sending people there with no due process, and denying Congresspeople their right to inspect and investigate it.
We have gone further down a dark path with stark parallels to the Weimar Republic and the rise of fascism in 1930s Germany with literal fascists being platformed by this regime. Election interference and denial is not a far stretch as the next step.
Stranger
The pattern of “It can’t happen here”, followed by it happening, followed by ignoring what just happened in front of their faces, followed by the next “It can’t happen here”…it gets damn tiring at times.
You can’t blame the mayor’s party for urban issues. Large urban areas tend to have disproportionate numbers of people in poverty. Poorer areas of cities tend to have higher crime rates. Lower income voters are more likely to vote Democratic. It’s living with poverty and crime that results in Democratic mayors, not the other way around.
“Ferreira and Gyourko studied the impact of mayoral elections on crime rates in over 400 U.S. cities (with a population of at least 25,000) between 1950 and 2000. Whether the mayor was a Democrat or a Republican, they found that differences in violent crimes (specifically murder and robbery) were not statistically different from zero. When the authors divided their sample by population size into “bigger” versus “smaller” cities, they again found no evidence that cities with a Democrat as mayor had higher crime rates. Gates observed that some of the fastest increases in murder rates between 2019 and 2020 were in Republican-run cities, notably Jacksonville, FL, Miami, FL, Fort Worth, TX, Tulsa, OK, and Oklahoma City, OK.”
“Mayoral Party Affiliation and Violent Crime Rates in America’s Most Populated Cities”
– Arjan S. Kochar, Fahmid Rashid, Samuel P. Sullivan, Sarrkos K. Thunyiswa and Paul M. Sommers
Middlebury College, Middlebury, VT, USA