Analysis by Aaron Blake, CNN
President Donald Trump has spent a decade painting large swaths of the United States as a hellscape, dating back to his dark 2017 inaugural address and his demagogic 2016 campaign.
But increasingly, he’s upped the ante on trying to leverage that supposed hellscape. He’s used it to float a crackdown on his political opponents and to justify deploying the military on US soil. The message is increasingly that things are so bad that you must give Trump more power to deal with it.
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There is a major problem with this, though. And that’s that – as with so many of Trump’s claims – he rests his case on a series of falsehoods and exaggerations. That doesn’t mean there aren’t real problems in our country, but they are not as Trump says they are.
But Trump’s moves to act on the picture he has painted has at least provided a valuable reality check.
Repeatedly now, judges have said Trump’s proclaimed hellscape isn’t reality.
The media has covered these claims skeptically. But it’s increasingly judges being tasked with ferreting out the truth.
This happened twice in the last week alone, as judges have ruled against Trump’s deployments of the National Guard to Chicago and Oregon.
‘Untethered to the facts’
In Chicago, Trump has compared the city to a warzone and suggested a war-like response. He at one point posted a meme parodying the Vietnam War movie “Apocalypse Now,” with the president is superimposed in front of a burning Chicago skyline as helicopters fly overhead.
His administration has defended its deployment of troops by saying that local police can’t handle the situation and that there is either “a rebellion or danger of a rebellion against the authority of the government of the United States” – two circumstances in which federal law allows the president to federalize the National Guard.
But US District Court Judge April Perry said Thursday that there was no such rebellion or danger of one. (In fact, she said the deployment itself could actually fuel “civil unrest.”) She said the protests at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility did not exceed about 200 attendees, and that there were about 100 state and local law enforcement officers there to handle it.
She said the Department of Homeland Security’s version of events was “simply unreliable” and suffered from a “lack of credibility.” She said the government’s evidence was contradicted by local and state law enforcement.
“What if (the president) is relying on invalid evidence?” she added at another point, according to WTTW-TV.
Perhaps the bigger rebuke came in Oregon, where it came from a Trump-nominated judge, Karin Immergut. (Perry was nominated by Joe Biden.)
Immergut in a lengthy ruling over the weekend noted Trump has cited a need to save “War ravaged Portland” from “Antifa, and other domestic terrorists.” Trump added as recently as Friday that Portland is “almost an insurrection.”
The judge has made clear that’s extremely far from the truth. Immergut acknowledged some significant instances of violence near an ICE facility over the summer. But she said it was well-contained by local authorities and that it had all but disappeared by the time of Trump’s September 27 order, when the protests “typically involved twenty or fewer people.”
“… The protests have been such a minor issue, that the normal nightlife in downtown Portland has required more police resources than the ICE facility,” she said.
Immergut emphasized repeatedly that judges should generally defer to the president’s characterization of events. But she suggested Trump’s version was just that wrong.
“But ‘a great level of deference’ is not equivalent to ignoring the facts on the ground,” Immergut said, adding: “The President’s determination was simply untethered to the facts.”
These are the most recent examples of judges fact checking Trump’s supposed hellscape. But they’re not the only ones.
The verdict was similar when US District Judge Charles Breyer ruled last month against Trump’s use of the military in Los Angeles.
Trump often claimed the city was on the verge of going up in flames. “Los Angeles was under siege until we got there,” he said at one point.
Breyer said that simply wasn’t true.
“There were indeed protests in Los Angeles, and some individuals engaged in violence,” the judge said in his opinion. “Yet there was no rebellion, nor was civilian law enforcement unable to respond to the protests and enforce the law.”
Breyer likened the level of violence to Black Lives Matter protests and “sometimes riotous” parties after the Dodgers or the Lakers have won championships.
“The June 6 and 7 protests were far more similar to these events than they were to the 1894 Pullman Strike, which crippled interstate commerce across the western United States,” Breyer said, highlighting the 19th century instance in which the military was called in.
Judges refute ‘invasion’ claims
Judges have also rejected Trump and the administration’s frequent claims of an “invasion” of migrants.
Trump has used such claims both on the campaign trail and in court to justify his use of the Alien Enemies Act (which requires an “invasion” or “predatory incursion” if used outside wartime) to rapidly deport migrants. In the latter case, Trump claimed we were essentially being invaded by Venezuela, via the gang Tren de Aragua.
Even Republican-nominated judges have said this didn’t add up.
“A country’s encouraging its residents and citizens to enter this country illegally is not the modern-day equivalent of sending an armed, organized force to occupy, to disrupt, or to otherwise harm the United States,” US appellate Judge Leslie Southwick, a George W. Bush nominee, wrote in an opinion last month. “There is no finding that this mass immigration was an armed, organized force or forces.”
The finding was similar when Trump-nominated US District Judge Fernando Rodriguez Jr. ruled in May against Trump’s use of the AEA.
“As for the activities of the Venezuelan-directed TdA in the United States, and as described in the Proclamation,” Rodriguez wrote, “the Court concludes that they do not fall within the plain, ordinary meaning of ‘invasion’ or ‘predatory incursion’ for purposes of the AEA.”
No invasion. No rebellion. Nothing the local police can’t handle And most of these decisions mentioned above have come from Republican-appointed judges.
That’s not to say nothing bad has happened in this country in recent months. The assassination attempts against Trump, the violence against Democratic leaders over the past year, and the assassination of Charlie Kirk last month show we have real problems. Crime is a major issue in many large cities, even if it’s hardly at unusual levels (and in some cases is actually down, like in Chicago).
But Trump has painted a much more ominous picture of historic and even organized violence that requires extraordinary, wartime-like responses – responses that happen to involve granting him huge amounts of power to address them.
If nothing else, his efforts to actually use these claims to expand his power have forced judges to reckon with the veracity of what he’s saying.
The verdicts they’ve reached suggest Trump is declaring war on a bogeyman.
The-CNN-Wire
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