What's the endgame for Trump's blue cities offensive?
By Ronald Brownstein / Bloomberg Opinion
The siege of Minneapolis represents a fitting, if foreboding, capstone to the first year of President Donald Trump’s second term.
Since returning to office one year ago, Trump has pursued no goal more passionately or persistently than breaking the ability of blue jurisdictions and their leaders to resist him. In the process, he is straining the nation’s fundamental cohesion in ways that may escalate beyond his control.
Trump’s pressure campaign against blue states and cities is advancing along three major tracks.
The most visible is his use of physical force against blue municipalities. In Democratic-run cities including Los Angeles, Chicago, Portland, Charlotte and Minneapolis, heavily armed and masked federal immigration agents have swarmed neighborhoods and mustered for symbolic shows of force at prominent landmarks (such as MacArthur Park in Los Angeles and Michigan Avenue in Chicago), in a manner reminiscent of an occupying army.
Although immigrant communities have absorbed the brunt of this offensive, thousands of U.S. citizens and protesters have been swept up, too. Not since the segregationist Southern states deployed dogs, fire hoses and nightsticks against civil rights activists in the early 1960s has any government entity in the U.S. wielded force against its own citizens to this extent. Looming over all of this is an even heavier club: the possibility that Trump might deploy the military into U.S. cities. After the Supreme Court stopped Trump from seizing control of state National Guard forces, he quickly pivoted to threatening Minneapolis with the deployment of active-duty troops under the Insurrection Act.
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