Supreme Court v. Trump, 1-0. Withdrawal from Chicago, Los Angeles and Portland after stops by the judges. The president claims the drop in crime, but mayors and governors speak of political defeat. The legal issue remains
Just before the start of the new year, Trump has decided to backtrack on one of his biggest battles in recent months: the deployment of the National Guardat least as far as it goes Chicago, Los Angeles and Portland. We are removing it “despite the fact that CRIME has been greatly reduced thanks to the presence of these great patriots in those cities, and for this reason ONLY”, he wrote on his social network Truth: the cities “would have disappeared if the federal government had not intervened. We will return, perhaps in a much different and stronger form, when crime begins to skyrocket again. It’s only a matter of time!”.
Yet according to Democratic leaders who have opposed this “useless” deployment from the beginning, the president’s decision has nothing to do with reducing crime, on the contrary: in Chicago and Portland the troops never took to the streets precisely because of the legal disputes, the mayor of Portland, Keith Wilson, said that the credit goes entirely to the local police and public safety programs, while the governor of Oregon Tina Kotek called the decision a victory for the “rule of law”.
Only last week the Supreme Court had blocked the sending of the National Guard to Chicago which according to mayor Brandon Johnson was “useless and unconstitutional”, while at the beginning of the month a federal judge had made the same decision in Los Angeles, ordering to return control of the Guard to Democratic governor Gavin Newsom.
The announcement is not absolute, the troops will still remain deployed – despite the ongoing legal battles – in Washington, where in November two soldiers were hit by an Afghan attacker, in New Orleans and Memphis, but it is a sign of renunciation by the Administration: it means that Trump will no longer try to send troops to the states where the governors have opposed it. “I’m glad he finally admitted defeat,” Newsom said Wednesday.
