The American people have taken a not-so-chill view of the president deploying the military to police the nation’s cities.
“If Donald Trump thinks that potentially sending in the National Guard into cities like Portland is a winning political issue, the polling says you’re wrong, Mr. President!” CNN data guru Harry Enten told viewers Monday.
Trump has railed against what he describes, without providing evidence, as threats from “domestic terrorists” in Oregon’s largest city.
On Saturday, he directed the Department of Defense, which he now calls the “Department of War,” to deploy 200 National Guard troops to protect Immigration and Customs Enforcement facilities in Portland from “ANTIFA,” using “Full Force, if necessary.”
Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek and state Attorney General Dan Rayfield have since filed a lawsuit alleging that the move is based on exaggerated claims, describing Trump’s “war ravaged” characterization of the city as “pure fiction.”
The has president already deployed federal agents and military personnel to Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., and Chicago, with more promised on the streets of Memphis as part of a wider MAGA crusade against a supposed crime wave in Democrat-controlled urban areas, for which the Trump White House has again produced no evidence.
Trump’s defiance of statistical reality, which shows violent crime has broadly declined across the country since the pandemic, may have proven to be among his strongest campaign issues last year, but the latest numbers from Enten show just how sharply the tables have now turned.
Roughly 58 percent of voters say they’re opposed to the Trump administration’s use of federal troops, rising as high as 64 percent among independent voters, Enten said, further noting that Trump’s wider ratings took a pounding after the first deployment to Los Angeles earlier in June.
“We’ve heard this song before,” the network numbers wizard said. “Look at the change in Trump’s net approval. Overall, it dropped four points! How about immigration? It dropped by seven points! We have a history of Trump sending the National Guard into a western city and what happened was there were clear political ramifications for the president of the United States, and they were not good ramifications.”
The Daily Beast has reached out to the White House for comment on this story.
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