Political Sniping Won't End 'Carnage' in Chicago
I don't want to judge too hastily. Something good may come of President Donald Trump's offer to "send in the Feds" if Chicago authorities can't curb the city's homicide crisis.
Something good may result from a Trumpian White House intervention, either because of it or in spite of it.
But I might be more inclined to think that sending in "the Feds" was a promising idea if I knew which "Feds" he's talking about.
His offer came via Twitter, like so many of our new president's other policy views. On Tuesday, the fifth night of his presidency, he tweeted, "If Chicago doesn't fix the horrible 'carnage' going on, 228 shootings in 2017 with 42 killings (up 24 percent from 2016), I will send in the Feds!"
Three things were striking about this tweet. One, Chicago has a lot of feds in town already, whether the president knows it or not.
Chicago police have been working for years with the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Agency and other top federal crime-fighters. Together, they've gone after gunrunners, drug dealers, gangbangers and others who have driven shootings and homicide numbers up. The city also receives millions in federal grants to assist police and support anti-violence social programs.
Two, Trump's tweet was notable in that, unlike most of his little missives, it actually contained data, hard numbers that suggest our tweeter-in-chief actually might have done some research. Trump, normally a man of few words that he repeats a lot, usually prefers to wing it, typing whatever springs out of his head.
A clue to that little mystery popped up later that evening as eagle-eyed reporters noticed how closely his data matched the numbers in a commentary earlier that evening by host Bill O'Reilly on his Fox News program, "The O'Reilly Factor."
"(Can) President Trump override Chicago and Illinois authorities," O'Reilly asked, "and stop the murder?"
Trump apparently thinks so. Or, at least, he has good reason to expect his conservative base of supporters to think so.
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