Donald Trump threatened Monday, July 20, to send federal law enforcement to several large cities ruled by Democrats, including Chicago or New York, after controversial first deployments in Portland in the northwest of the country. “ We're going to have more federal law enforcement agencies. In Portland, they did a fantastic job , the US president told reporters on the sidelines of a White House meeting with congressional officials. In three days, they put a lot of anarchists in prison ”.
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Federal agents were deployed to the Oregon city last week to end protests against police violence and racism marred by violence. Local elected officials - Democrats - however demanded the departure of these federal forces, believing that their presence added fuel to the fire instead of solving the problems.
Donald Trump, who relies on his firm posture to win a second term in the presidential election on November 3, accuses these elected officials of laxity and now promises to extend the recipe to other cities. " We are not going to let down New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Detroit and Baltimore ", he declared, accusing the elected officials of these big cities of being of " radical left ".
Referring to an upsurge in shootings since the beginning of the month in Chicago, the Republican billionaire estimated that the situation in the third largest city in the United States was " worse than in Afghanistan ", a country ravaged by decades of war. And if his Democratic rival Joe Biden was elected to the White House, " it would become true for the whole country ," he said. The country would go to hell! "
The governor of Michigan, where Detroit is located, immediately denounced " hate rhetoric ". " There is no reason for the president to send federal troops to a city where people are calling for reform peacefully and respectfully, " Gretchen Whitmer said in a statement.
Since the death of George Floyd, an African American suffocated by a white policeman on May 25 in Minneapolis, the United States has experienced a wave of protests on a scale not seen since the civil rights movement of the 1960s. .
Even if the mobilization is subdued, sporadic demonstrations continue in several cities and sometimes give rise to overflows. For several weeks, Donald Trump has been focusing on this violence and abandoning the questions raised about racism and police violence.