DC's real crime wave

 Ralph Nader -  Trump, always looking to distract attention from his many crimes, has deployed National Guard troops and federal law enforcement officials in Washington, D.C. After his usual wild exaggerations about “…violent gangs and bloodthirsty criminals, roving mobs of wild youths, drugged-out maniacs and homeless people,” he moves to impose what is becoming his police state over an overwhelmingly Democratic city.

As Trump’s troops fan out across more of the city, they are told to be aggressive, take credit for arrests made by the local D.C. police force, and arbitrarily interrogate D.C. residents, for example, people waiting at bus stops, minding their own business.

Trump, during his first and current terms, rarely stepped out of his limousine to see what D.C. is like. He finally visited with a cluster of his police and troops yesterday, passing out “cheeseburgers prepared by the White House chef’s staff and around 100 pizzas from Wiseguy Pizza,” and quickly declared Washington a safer city after less than two weeks of his forces patrolling largely tourist and downtown business areas.

The reaction from D.C. residents is mostly negative. Business is already slowing for D.C. restaurants and will only get worse as Trump brings in more National Guard troops from Republican states, paid for by the taxpayers.

Homicides in D.C. are at a 30-year low. They are far lower than in many cities in the Red States headed by white mayors. Trump seems to go after cities that happen to have black mayors, further illustrating his racist bigotry, along with downplaying slavery and reinstalling Confederate statues and returning Confederate names to military bases.

To be sure, there are two grave and deadly ongoing crime waves in D.C. One is clearly the violence surging from Trump’s White House, with big weapons and big tax dollars to fund and shield mega-terrorist Netanyahu’s slaughtering genocide of civilians in Gaza, and increasingly the West Bank.

Trump has continued the “co-belligerency” that Biden established with the Israeli regime. Every day, far more babies, children, mothers, and fathers have been killed from this brutal Trump/Netanyahu axis than are killed in a year in D.C.

The deliberate cutoff of life-saving medical, food, and water assistance to millions of the impoverished in less developed countries occurred when Trump illegally closed the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). Humanitarian relief groups already count the preventable deaths in the many thousands. Cutting off food and vaccines will have devastating long-term consequences.

Domestically, convicted felon Trump openly violates many criminal statutes and constitutional provisions  For example, he daily violates the Anti-Deficiency Act by spending large sums of money NOT appropriated by Congress. He violates the Hatch Act, which prohibits the use of federal property for electoral campaign purposes. (See the June 28, 2023, letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland by me and Bruce Fein.) He glories in obstruction of justice – a felony. His former first-term national security adviser, John Bolton, wrote in his memoir that “obstruction of justice was a way of life at the White House.”  

Trump is continuing this offense in his second term with vengeance. He engages in flat-out open extortion in dealing with universities and several large corporate law firms. The list goes on. Recall that Trump said in 2019 that “With Article II, I can do whatever I want as President” and has repeatedly declared that he has never done anything wrong in elective office. It is understandable that scores of psychologists have described him as a dangerous and delusional personality. The worst is yet to come from the egomaniacal Trump.

As for the K Street offices of hundreds of corporate lobbyists, where does one start? They are, along with heaping piles of campaign cash, making sure that neither Congress nor government agencies of the Executive Branch stop the corporate crime wave. The Big Business paymasters spend whatever it takes to ensure that crime in the suites is never aggressively prosecuted....

Why then is the press mesmerized by the declining street crime in D.C., luridly inflated by the serial prevaricator, Trump, without so much as a mention of serial White House and K Street crimes? Why is the word “crime” never associated with the far greater “crime in the suites” but only with crime in the streets? To ask is to answer. Power, money, and greed camouflage the corporate criminal deeds from journalists who do not or are not allowed to see them in plain sight...

Who will be the first reporter to ask Trump in his many informal gatherings with the press, about these two booming crime scenes representing the Oligarchy and the Plutocracy?

When will the reporters and their editors stop wallowing in a cultural rut where common candor requires uncommon courage?