As part of Donald Trump’s crime and immigration crackdown, he had deployed or planned to deploy the National Guard in multiple cities, a move that did not sit well with the Democrats running those jurisdictions.
Polling on this issue has not been in Trump’s favor, and he has also faced setbacks in the courts.
Rather than continue to fight this battle, Trump has decided to pull the deployments, but not without issuing a warning first.
I think it is really important that people realize what these deployments were all about because they have been misconstrued in the media and by Democrats. There were really three aspects to the operations.
The first was to respond directly to protests against immigration enforcement actions, demonstrations that were turning violent, hoping to tamp them down before they truly got out of control.
The second was to serve as a deterrent in high-crime areas.
The third, and most important in my eyes, was to protect federal agents on the ground. The National Guard troops were intended as backup, and they were never meant to serve as law enforcement, which is how Democrats and the media were portraying them.
Regardless of what Trump says about polling, he pays close attention to the numbers and has always done so.
He may sometimes disagree or make up his own numbers, as he is doing now with an approval rating he says is at “64%,” but the reported numbers definitely impact Trump’s policies and always have.
In this case, the majority of voters disapproved of the deployments by a margin of 56-41. Even the numbers among Republican voters were relatively weak, with only 86% supporting the deployments.
You always want same-party approval to be up over 90%, at least, so those numbers were concerning.
Trump is starting the new year off with a fresh outlook for the cities that were targeted with deployments, saying all such operations will now end in those areas, but there is a key caveat.
The president stated, “Portland, Los Angeles, and Chicago were GONE if it weren’t for the Federal Government stepping in. We will come back, perhaps in a much different and stronger form, when crime begins to soar again – Only a question of time!”
This, by the way, was not just Trump deciding to pull out troops, but a reflection of the fact that the administration lost its appeal to the Supreme Court, which ruled 6-3 that the president did not have the power to deploy National Guard troops in these cities.
The decision stood in stark contrast to how the high court previously ruled regarding the Guard deployment in D.C., but as I stated in a previous report, that is because the capital city falls under federal purview, unlike individual states, which have independent rights in relation to the federal government.
