Trump’s threat to block “anarchist jurisdictions” from receiving federal funds is a fascist move.
This week the Trump administration once again ratcheted up its war against the majority of Americans who didn’t vote for Donald J. Trump in 2016 and who don’t plan to vote for him in 2020: In a truly extraordinary move, Trump ordered the Justice Department and the Office of Management and Budget to work with federal agencies to identify “anarchist jurisdictions” with the intention of blocking them from receiving federal funds. A preliminary list of these jurisdictions was reported to include Seattle and Portland on the West Coast, and Washington, D. C. and New York on the East Coast. But that list was, apparently, slated to grow considerably. Barr’s mandate is to come up with the names of all offending jurisdictions over the coming two weeks, and then to give federal agencies a month to work out what projects they can hold as financial hostages — meaning that the inevitable court battles around this ludicrous and vindictive power grab will kick into gear in the days before the election. Trump seems to believe that the more pain he can inflict on the U. S.’s urban centers, and the more liberal outrage he can generate in the run-up to the election, the more he will drive his white suburban and rural base to the polls. Trump has tried to pull this trick before. On and off for the past four years, he has threatened to “defund” sanctuary cities. A couple years ago, he came close to pulling the trigger on this decision before backing off after California spearheaded a multistate legal response, and after his own legal experts concluded he didn’t have the power to take away highway funding, education dollars, health care investments, and other non-law-enforcement dollars as a policy response to a specific law enforcement dispute with local jurisdictions. More recently, another federal appeals court said Trump could tailor a response by specifically withholding federal law enforcement grants to cities and states; and soon afterward, the administration did, indeed, begin withholding law enforcement-specific funds. However, in the months following, Number 45 has, on the campaign trail, resurrected the more general defunding threat, holding it as a sort of sword of Damocles over his rivals. Trump has also sought to exploit natural disasters for similar political ends. When large wildfire conflagrations destroy thousands of square miles of land, and thousands of homes in California, Trump repeatedly issues threats to withhold FEMA dollars from the state.
