In his deep, pathological envy of President Barack Obama, narcissistic con man and demagogue Donald "#BunkerBoy" Trump has sought to unravel and destroy his predecessor's legacy. From the Affordable Care Act, to protecting DREAMers, to pulling out of the Paris Climate Accords, Trump has recklessly and heedlessly trashed the good works that preceded him. Most recently, it was revealed that a vindictive Trump and the malicious sycophants around him, tossed the Obama playbook for handling pandemics like the one that's devastated America, killed over 100,000 and thrown over 40 million Americans out of work. Now, with the nation in crisis over the police killing of another unarmed African American man, we're reading that actions taken by Trump and his hapless former Attorney General and white supremacist Jefferson Beauregard Sessions early in the Trump regime had consequences that have played out in a disastrous way.
Key to mitigating the long-standing problem of police misconduct especially toward communities of color were oversight agreements between the Justice Department and state and local law enforcement agencies, sometimes in the form of Court-ordered consent decrees. With the Federal government overseeing the reform of troubled state and local police departments, as in Ferguson, MO and Baltimore, there was some forward progress in curbing police abuses in their communities. That ended in November 2018 as Sessions was unceremoniously fired by his cult leader, but not before he signed a memorandum effectively ending Federal oversight of those types of police organizations. The memo was full of segregationist terms like "states' rights", and claimed that the oversight agreements "undermined" local law enforcement (e.g., like the kind Minneapolis is suffering from).
So when you hear the thuggish "law and order" Trump threaten to unleash the military on states struggling to control violent demonstrations, it should be a reminder that his action to remove the Federal government from oversight over the police has failed spectacularly, with costly, fatal results.
