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Trump's Russia Scandal Expands: Jeff Sessions Spoke Twice With Russian Ambassador During Trump's Campaign

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Captain Magic3/01/2017 8:09:58 pm PST

Radley Balko, Washington Post: Trump’s speech was a broadside attack on the values of a free society

Blind support for law enforcement is no better than blanket criticism or distrust. It’s baffling to me how people with Trump’s or Sessions’s politics can understand the corruption of power and petty tyranny that infect bureaucracies, but advocate wholesale deference and reverence to the men and women to whom we give badges, guns and the power to terminate lives. Cops who risk their lives to save others deserve respect. Cops in general demand oversight. This is because (1) human beings are flawed, and (2) nothing exacerbates those flaws like giving one human being a gun plus power and authority over other human beings.

Back to Trump:

And we must support the victims of crime. I have ordered the Department of Homeland Security to create an office to serve American Victims. The office is called VOICE — Victims Of Immigration Crime Engagement. We are providing a voice to those who have been ignored by our media, and silenced by special interests.

This is the most appalling part of the speech. Singling out perpetrators of crimes by their immigration status is no less abhorrent than singling them out by their race — which, of course, is what Trump senior adviser Steve Bannon used to do with the “black crime” tag at Breitbart. This sort of isolation and dehumanization is what authoritarians do to disfavored groups. It has a long and sordid history. It would be appalling even if undocumented immigrants were more prone to violent crime. But of course they aren’t, so in addition to being unabashedly bigoted, it’s also just ignorant. It’s about as useful as opening an office for victims of crimes committed by left-handed people. Or billionaires.

Trump next singled out the father of a man killed by an undocumented immigrant. This too is an ugly appeal to emotion that isn’t backed by any data. Yes, there are awful stories like this one. There are also awful stories of people who are murdered by members of just about any group or class you can conjure up.

Trump’s tribute to Carryn Owens, the widow of U.S. Navy SEAL Ryan Owens, has also been much discussed. Some pundits have called it the best moment of his presidency. I thought it was cheap and exploitative. There’s been much speculation about whether Trump prematurely ordered the raid that ended Owens’s life. I don’t know enough about military operations to have an opinion on that. But most military experts say that the raid was badly botched. The Trump administration responded to those criticisms by saying that anyone who questioned the raid’s success was doing a disservice to Owens. That approach became problematic when Owens’s own father began publicly questioning the raid.

In the past week, Trump has put the blame for it on both the military and on the Obama administration. So it seems odd for him to have touted its success Tuesday night. Trump’s claim that the raid produced valuable intelligence has also been hotly disputed. In short, Trump deflected the growing criticism of his handling of the raid by inviting the widow of the soldier who died in it to his speech, where he got to indirectly revel in the ovation Congress gave for her husband. He did this even as Owens’s father was demanding answers. It wasn’t presidential; it was crass score-settling.

It’s worth noting that Trump also called for substantial new spending on infrastructure. That isn’t exactly typical of a Republican these days. I suspect this is what’s driving at least some of the praise for his speech. But this has always been part of Trump’s agenda. It wasn’t an overture to the other side, it was merely confirmation that Trump’s raw nationalism doesn’t fall neatly along partisan lines. The fact that some of his agenda happens to overlap with some priorities of Democrats doesn’t make Trump statesmanlike or presidential. Nor does it dilute the deceit, egotism and shameless fear-mongering that infected the rest of his speech.

This speech was a nightmare. That Trump managed to dress up the same populist resentment in language more familiar and palatable to Beltway types makes him more dangerous, not less.