NY Post

President Trump is ordering the federal government to begin the process of defunding New York City and three other cities where officials allowed “lawless” protests and cut police budgets amid rising violent crime, The Post can exclusively reveal.

Trump on Wednesday signed a five-page memo ordering all federal agencies to send reports to the White House Office of Management and Budget that detail funds that can be redirected.

New York City, Washington, DC, Seattle and Portland are initial targets as Trump makes “law and order” a centerpiece of his reelection campaign after months of unrest and violence following the May killing of George Floyd by Minnesota police.

“My Administration will not allow Federal tax dollars to fund cities that allow themselves to deteriorate into lawless zones,” Trump says in the memo.

“To ensure that Federal funds are neither unduly wasted nor spent in a manner that directly violates our Government’s promise to protect life, liberty, and property, it is imperative that the Federal Government review the use of Federal funds by jurisdictions that permit anarchy, violence, and destruction in America’s cities.”

Federal agencies must detail “all Federal funds provided to Seattle, Portland, New York City, Washington, D.C.” Also, within 14 days Attorney General Bill Barr must develop a list of “anarchist jurisdictions” that “permitted violence and the destruction of property to persist and have refused to undertake reasonable measures” to restore order. The memo does not require Barr to include the four cities, possibly for legal reasons.

The memo instructs White House budget director Russ Vought to issue guidance in 30 days from Wednesday “to the heads of agencies on restricting eligibility of or otherwise disfavoring, to the maximum extent permitted by law, anarchist jurisdictions in the receipt of Federal grants.”

The amounts of money impacted by Trump’s order could be massive. New York City, for example, gets about $7 billion a year in federal aid.

President Trump, in his biggest executive order since he declared the whole country of America to be a disaster zone during the early and deathly stage of the coronavirus pandemic (labeled here as “Disasterland”), has now decided to levy sanctions through the O.M.B. on the American cities of Seattle, Portland, the nation’s capital Washington D.C. and the city he made once called home and made and then lost billions of dollars at, New York.

It’s not really that farfetched or hyperbolic to describe Trump’s memo as sanctions because that’s what they basically are. Considering how the 3 past presidents weaponized sanctions against sovereign nations that didn’t agree or abide to Clinton’s, W Bush’s and even the over-revered over-rated Barry Obama’s demands of them on weapons and their own leaders. Trump is doing the same thing on NYC and the other cities primarily because a vast majority of people are protesting and marching on the streets every day in solidarity calling for the abolishing of systemic police abuse.

With the exception of Portland, Seattle, D.C. and New York City has mostly moved on and protests have been mostly sporadic. Although they have been attended by saboteurs engaging in wanton destruction, the majority of the protests have been peaceful. But with New York, Trump has tied the city’s meteoric rise in shootings and other serious crimes to the social justice movements and by exhuming McCarthy he has unreasonably and baselessly labeled all protests as lawless and condemned the Big Apple as an anarchist jurisdiction.

The interesting thing about Donnie’s sanctions on American cities is that they sabotage the police he likes so much. It’s certainly going to make the cops in the cities he defunded harder to dominate them. Especially for the NYPD who he loves so much and are protecting all his real estate portfolio in Manhattan 24/7/365.

Speaking of New York’s Finest, Didn’t the PBA just endorse this guy? I don’t know about y’all but if this is going to be extremely counterproductive to the NYPD’s efforts to make the city safe from shootings and the protesters sloganeering with signs and vulgar cadences. Plus the city will just get worse than it is right now in all aspects regarding essential services like schools and mass transit.

In fact, the President’s sanctions on the five boroughs are already taking effect on those two services. Even though they have nothing to do with anarchy and street crime, the federal cuts already are underway starting with the Federal Bureau of Emergency Managements decision to cut COVID-19 aid funding to keep the subways and schools thoroughly disinfected plus stingy cut backs on PPE supplies on the most hardest hit city in the world by the novel virus as the temperatures start to chill with the first flu season of autumn weeks away. In a way it falls in line with Trump’s own flippant attitude about the novel virus, not just his persistent refusal to wear a face mask but also his inherent belief that COVID-19 is not as harmful or is the same as the common flu, which is in sync with the theories his new advisor has that downplays the severity of the contagion.

This will also effect government buildings like courts and prisons, the latter of which was so risky to inmates that the city and state had to release them back on the streets and into hotels to stop infections and flatten the COVID19 curve, which has also had a deleterious effects on the street crime rise. What’s interesting about the FEMA cuts to NYC is that they have absolutely nothing to do with the protests or the meteoric rise in shootings, but in a dastardly way sacrifice the health and safety of city workers and students as a form of payback for the protests decrying Trump’s law and order exhortations and policy decision deploying homeland security to oppress demonstrations and exhortations to defund police departments across the country. Even at the expense of the cops Trump claims to love and respect so much.

As for the NYPD, there has been virtual silence from their influential representatives and high brass about Trump’s executive vindictive memo against the city they patrol. The expansively vocal PBA leader Patrick Lynch, Police Commissioner Dermot Shea and even their version of Gen. MacArthur who battled and kettled the Black Lives Matter protests in early June, Deputy Commissioner Patrick Monahan have been silent about Trump’s defunding of the city they serve to protect, of which they have barely been able to do just that this summer amid accusations of a department slowdown and after daily voicing their frustrations following the city and state decisions to ban chokeholds, Trump’s decision has to be a betrayal to them and will make any effort to get guns off the streets as well as monitoring protests happening daily and spot the saboteurs milling in the marches looking to cause and instigate property destruction and vandalism more difficult.

If there is anything positive about Trump’s flipping off to his hometown and it’s not the irony of Trump defunding the NYPD, it’s that its exposed even more the weakness and fecklessness of the men elected to lead New York State and New York City, Governor Mario’s Son Cuomo and the worst Mayor in the history of humankind Bill de Blasio. Emperor Cuomo reacted to Trump’s memo with pathetic shit-talking bravado, his voice clearly shaking saying that he better not walk on the streets of New York without a bodyguard, even though he surely knows the President has secret service. The Blaz responded the only way he knows how, by saying he will sue, for one thing he truly knows in his role as mayor is to spend tax dollars which he has done mightily against his own constituency when he sent his city lawyers to protect crooked cops from divulging their records and against judges to have his developer favored zoning decisions repealed. Besides those things, Cuomo and the Blaz ain’t going to do shit to stop this defunding because they actually owe Trump for their current existence.  With the way Cuomo has been able to evade scrutiny from the feds over his lethal decision to put COVID-19 patients in nursing homes and then transfer them along with the residents to hospitals to protect their owners and investors who donated to the Luv Guv and with Trump firing former SDNY DA Preet Bharara who was investigating de Blasio’s pay to play fundraising graft in City Hall.

Even though it’s a big factor, Trump’s defunding memo isn’t just based on malice, revenge and his latent desire for a police state and his bogus justification about anarchy jurisdictions, but also on the weak and non-existent leadership of NYC and the other cities he targeted (that Ted Wheeler guy in Portland? now that’s a fucking big pussy). So a lot of blame should be dispensed all around. Which is how Donnie continues to thrive despite his criminal complacency and unpreparedness to protect his country from a pandemic that wound up killing 180,000 citizens and led to 20% of working people unemployed.

Trump is still a fucking dick for doing this though, NYC is getting broker and broker and that 7 billion (which is surprisingly little considering all the valuable real estate here) is essential for it’s solvency and overall security and he knows how vulnerable the city is. Trump’s sanctions against NYC will make the current environment under this “new normal” even worse and cause more businesses to go under than any rioting and street crime will do. If anything, these sanctions are just an extension of his slumlord tactics denying services to undesirable affordable renting tenants that he gleefully executed as a young real estate scion in the 80’s

Right now, Trump is running full speed to keep his current job and his base enjoys his condemnations against and endorsements of violence against the Black Lives Matter movement and their supporters. And since he no longer lives in the city where he made his billions and built his brand off his daddy’s second surname, it’s not a surprise he would rather let it rot in the New Bad Days just like in the old bad days when Ford wouldn’t bail NYC out.

You think he would have learned something from that history but as I said before, Trump doesn’t give a fuck.