Fear, loathing and winning in 2020
As New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio — remember him? — runs ineptly for president, inept President Donald Trump looks at New York City, where crime is at a record low and rents are at a record high, and sees, inevitably, American carnage.
Here was the son of Queens in his dark inaugural address in 2017, looking out at a Gloomy City in the Sewer full of “mothers and children trapped in poverty…and the crime and gangs and drugs that have stolen too many lives and robbed our country of so much unrealized potential.”
He vowed: That “stops right here and stops right now.”
In 2019, after two-and-a-half years on his watch, that not only hasn’t stopped but has accelerated, at least judging from Trump’s word-salad conversation last week with Fox News race warrior Tucker Carlson about the “major problem with filth” and the street homeless in the big coastal cities (New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco) that the president said is “a phenomena that started two years ago. It’s disgraceful”:
Cops are getting sick, he said, from
contact with people camped on city streets, and “I’m looking at it very seriously, we’re doing some other things that you probably noticed…
“Although some of them have mental problems where they don’t even know they’re living that way. In fact, perhaps they like living that way. They can’t do that. We cannot ruin our cities. And you have people that work in those cities. They work in office buildings and to get into the building, they have to walk through a scene that nobody would have believed possible three years ago.
“And this is the liberal establishment. This is what I’m fighting… I don’t know if they really believe that this should be taking place. But it’s a terrible thing that’s taking place…
“When we have leaders of the world coming in to see the president of the United States and they’re riding down a highway, they can’t be looking at that. I really believe that it hurts our country.”
This is an ugly argument, but one that Democrats ignore at their own peril. There’s a reason that two-and-ahalf years after vowing the carnage “stops right here and stops right now,” Trump is saying that things are getting worse on his watch (“a phenomena that started two years ago”).
He is aiming to call the tune, like he did in 2016, and offer voters a ridiculously boiled-down choice between two absolute positions: open borders or a wall; cities full of mentally disturbed homeless men smoking on your train and camped in front of your office building, or cities without them; him, or his resistance.
After coming to office in 2014, de Blasio, to his great credit, largely ended the policing practice under the previous two mayors and 20 years of rousting the street homeless to keep them out of sight and out of mind. He’s proven that you can do that and have the appearance — and odor — of disorder without having it lead right away to an increase in violent or other serious crimes.
But if the choice is between simply leaving the street homeless alone, or doing something about them (not for them), the second one remains the popular winner. And doing something for them is expensive, painstaking work at which de Blasio has largely failed, despite spending nearly a billion dollars on a misdirected mental health program.
While New Yorkers’ keep delivering righteous Bronx cheers to Rudy Giuliani for carrying Trump’s filthy water, a gentle reminder that “America’s mayor” was given that title after he’d been elected not so long ago as our mayor on a vow to lock up squeegee pests, then breezed to a second term. And that not only did Trump win, with however many asterisks, in 2016, but that he did so while being vastly outspent and without the advantages of incumbency.
A gentle reminder to Albany’s new and vastly more progressive Democratic majority — likely to swell next year with Trump back on the ballot — and the organizers who helped finally deliver it that framing a better choice means offering affirmative plans that can maintain popular support, not just resistance.
harrysiegel@gmail.com