MINNEAPOLIS SHOOTING REVIVES OLD GUN DEBATE IN NEW CONTEXT OF TRUMP CRIME PUSH. A lot of big-city Democrats, plus their allies in activist groups, plus their allies in the media, plus the officials at the Democratic National Committee’s summer meeting in Minneapolis, are denouncing President Donald Trump’s effort to curb crime in Washington, D.C. When Trump said he hoped to expand the effort to other cities, like violence-plagued Chicago, they told him what they had told him in Washington: Hands off our crime!
Yes, it is a strange dynamic. Why would Democrats take such a strong stand against Trump’s program, especially when to many outsiders it appears they are defending crime and criminals, or at least their city’s right to go soft on crime and criminals? It’s a little baffling.
It’s especially confusing in light of a new poll from the Associated Press and the University of Chicago’s National Opinion Research Center. The survey shows that 53% of those polled approve of how Trump handles the issue of crime, while 45% disapprove. In addition, 66% of those surveyed said crime is a “major problem” in the United States, and 81% said it is a “major problem” in large cities.
Another poll, the Harvard CAPS/Harris poll, found that 54% strongly or somewhat support Trump’s declaring a crime emergency in Washington. An equal number, 54%, strongly or somewhat support Trump’s ordering National Guard troops to expand their presence in the city. A smaller but still significant number, 50%, support the federal government taking command of the Washington D.C. police department.
Officials of the Democratic National Committee meeting in Minneapolis this week spent a lot of time denouncing Trump’s crime initiative. DNC chairman Ken Martin was full of fire, urging Democrats to fight Trump. “I’m sick and tired of this Democratic Party bringing a pencil to a knife fight,” Martin said.
Other DNC speakers were similarly belligerent, including one activist who urged Democrats not to respond to the president on the crime issue. “Don’t take the bait and talk about migrant crime or carjackings or the things that actually don’t matter to that many Americans,” she said. She did not explain why migrant crime or carjackings actually don’t matter.
The Democrats’ Trump bashing came to a terrible end when a shooter opened fire at a Catholic school not far from the DNC meeting, killing two young children and wounding more than a dozen others. The DNC quickly adjourned its session. “I’m extremely, extremely sorry that our meeting ended on such a tragic note,” Martin said. “But as we leave here with heavy hearts, let’s steel ourselves gain in this work and why it’s so important. Everything we do is to make sure that things like this never happen again, especially to little, little children.”
As the Democrats left town, the political outlines of the situation — a strange intersection of the old Democrat-Republican argument on guns mixed in with the Trump crime initiative and an element of woke, all in the context of heartbreaking loss of life — were already clear. Democrats, as always, are blaming the killings on the availability of guns, while at the same time warning the public from making anything of the fact that the 23-year-old killer was a man who claimed to be transgender. “Anybody who is using this as an opportunity to villainize our trans community has lost their sense of common humanity,” said Minneapolis’s Democratic Mayor Jacob Frey.
Others are likely to point out the number of violent attacks carried out by transgender shooters across the country in recent years, a point that will be used to bolster the Republican argument that keeping the mentally ill away from guns, rather than broader gun control measures, is the way to prevent future mass shootings.
Behind it all will be the ongoing debate over the Trump crime initiative. Not long after the shooting, former Biden White House spokesperson Jen Psaki, now a cable news host, used the violence to take a swipe at Trump. “When kids are getting shot in their pews at Catholic school mass and your crime plan is to have National Guard put mulch down around D.C., maybe rethink your strategy,” Psaki tweeted. Look for more of that sort of thing in the coming days.