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While Trump virtually wiped out ISIS and took a more aggressive stance toward threats abroad, he imposed a range of measures to enhance public safety in the United States.
President Obama rarely missed an opportunity to denounce the police’s actions, usually erroneously, when a white police officer arrested or killed a black suspect. For instance, Obama said Trayvon Martin, the black teenager shot to death in Florida, “could have been me thirty-five years ago” and said Cambridge police acted “stupidly” when a white police officer arrested a black Harvard professor who was being obstreperous during an investigation of a report of a possible break-in. Obama later admitted he knew nothing about the case.
Weeks after police officer Darren Wilson shot and killed Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, Obama said the shooting death of a black teen by a white police officer exposed the racial divide in the American justice system that “stains the heart of black children.” Speaking at the annual Congressional Black Caucus Foundation dinner in Washington, Obama said the death of Brown “awakened our nation” to a reality that black citizens already understood.
In fact, through exhaustive interviews with witnesses, cross-checking their statements with previous statements to authorities and the media, ballistics examinations, DNA tests, and the findings of three autopsies, the Justice Department concluded that Wilson believed Brown matched a description of a suspect in the theft of cigarillos from a convenience store. When Wilson tried to question Brown, the teenager attacked him in his patrol car and tried to take his gun, then charged him outside the police vehicle, according to multiple witnesses. And the claim that Brown put his hands in the air and pleaded “don’t shoot” was simply a lie.
As Obama repeatedly denounced police shootings as racist, executions of police officers by black men suddenly became common. For a criminal inclined to murder a police officer, what more excuse is needed than the president of the United States denouncing police shootings as racially motivated? As a result, police hesitated to act proactively to attack crime in the inner cities, fearful that if they had to use their weapon, they would be targeted by Black Lives Matter. Rioting after police shootings of black men became commonplace. And while gun sales saw a sharp increase under Obama, they dropped precipitously after Trump’s election, according to FBI statistics, gun shop owners, and corporate reports of gun manufacturers.
Instead of inflaming race relations by making pronouncements about killings of blacks, Trump let local authorities sort out whether police officers who shot suspects had acted improperly and should be prosecuted. While bad cops walk the street and should be severely punished, if you have participated in “shoot, don’t shoot” deadly force video scenarios, as I did at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia, you know how nearly impossible it is to accurately decide in a split-second whether your life or another person’s life is in danger. Given the minuscule number of bad police, Obama’s crusade against the police was akin to denouncing all Muslims as terrorists.
It’s difficult to imagine how searing racism in America once was. When I was editor of the Clark University paper in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1963, I called twenty-three landlords who had placed classified ads for rental apartments in the Clark area and asked if the unit was still available. When told it was, I said, “By the way, my roommate is a Negro. Is that a problem?” Ten of the twenty-six—or 38 percent—said it would be. When I was a Washington Post reporter in 1984, I revealed that Lena Ferguson had been denied membership in the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) because she is black. DAR president general Sarah M. King acknowledged to me that being black can be a reason for an applicant’s rejection by a local chapter, along with “divorce, spite, neighbors’ dislike.” The story resulted in Ferguson’s acceptance as a member and selection as an officer by the local chapter. The DAR agreed to bar discrimination and take affirmative steps to recruit blacks with the necessary lineage.
But while racism still exists—as does anti-Semitism—the truth is that besides colleges that give preference to blacks in admitting students, many companies and organizations today seek to hire blacks and promote them over similarly qualified whites because they think it’s the right thing to do or will enhance their public image.
While a Democrat and a liberal on most issues, in his book Enough: The Phony Leaders, Dead-End Movements, and Culture of Failure That Are Undermining Black America—and What We Can Do About It, Fox News host Juan Williams attacks the victim mentality that Democrats and black leaders like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson perpetrate on the black community today.
“This is a time when, unfortunately, there are too many black leaders who focus on grievance,” Williams says. “The only time you see these guys on TV is when they say somebody has been racist or the police department has done something wrong. All they are doing is complain, and it leads young people to a victim mentality, where they don’t think they can succeed in America. They don’t think they have a chance. They hear from their leaders that if you’re black or Hispanic, you don’t have a chance.”
Williams told me that the Democratic Party “has not delivered in terms of protecting the poor minorities in the country, on basic items, like education for your children, safety in our streets, making sure that you have the opportunity to have an economic foothold on the ladder of upward mobility.”
In contrast to the victim mentality, Condoleezza Rice grew up in segregated Birmingham, Alabama, where blacks had to eat separately from whites and use different bathrooms and water fountains. Rice vividly remembered going into a store when she was seven with her mother Angelina. Rice spotted a dress she liked, and her mother asked the saleswoman if her daughter could try it on. The woman took the dress from Rice and motioned to a storage room.
“She’ll have to try it on there,” the woman said.
“My daughter will try on this dress in a dressing room or I’m not spending my money here,” Condoleezza’s mother told her.
Hoping to make a commission, the sales clerk furtively showed them the way to a dressing room.
“My parents,” Rice told the Washington Post, “were very strategic. I was going to be so well prepared, and I was going to do all of these things that were revered in white society so well, so that I would be armored somehow from racism. I would be able to confront white society on its own terms.” Rice, who became George W. Bush’s national security adviser and secretary of state, lived in a place where restaurants wouldn’t serve her a hamburger, she said, “But my parents were telling me I could be president.”
Instead of handouts, Trump’s remedy for impoverished blacks is growing the economy with tax cuts and deregulation to produce more jobs. The Republican alternative is simply, “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach him how to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.”
Often, Trump achieved results simply by virtue of his public exhortations. By making illegal immigration an issue, Trump discouraged illegal border crossings from Mexico, cutting the rate by 76 percent and diminishing the drug trade. By threatening to withhold federal funds from sanctuary cities that refuse to cooperate with the government to deport illegal immigrants who have committed crimes, Trump discouraged sanctuaries and made it less likely that illegal immigrants with a record of felonies would commit more crimes in the United States.
Since San Francisco is a sanctuary city, authorities there ignored a request from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) that its agents receive notification before releasing from jail Jose Ines Garcia Zarate, an illegal alien with seven felony convictions who had been deported back to Mexico five times. If the authorities had complied with ICE’s request, ICE would have picked him up and would have deported him as an illegal immigrant. Instead, he was free to stand along a San Francisco pier and fire a weapon, killing Kate Steinle, thirty-two. The bullet ricocheted off the ground about a hundred feet away before hitting her in the back. She screamed for her father, Jim, as she collapsed to the ground. He tried to save her by performing CPR until help arrived, but it was too late. Kate Steinle died in the hospital hours later.
Garcia Zarate claimed the shooting was an accident, and he was acquitted of murder and involuntary manslaughter. While those who favor sanctuary cities maintain that they aid law enforcement because illegal immigrants are more apt to report crimes if they do not fear being deported, the fact is that illegal immigrants also want to be safe. Kate Steinle and many like her would be alive today if sanctuary cities did not shield felons from immigration laws.
For years, the violent street gang MS-13 has been gaining strength. Mainly Salvadoran immigrants or people of Salvadoran descent, MS-13 members primarily target Hispanic communities. The gangs make money through extortion, prostitution, human trafficking, and drug trafficking. They use machetes to hack to death rivals. To instill fear and enhance their power, they engage in gang rape and cut their victims to pieces.
Instead of relying on local authorities to build cases to wipe them out, Trump used ICE to arrest and deport them as illegal aliens. Calling MS-13 members “animals,” Trump said in a speech to law enforcement officers on Long Island, “We’re going to destroy MS-13.” Under Trump, arrests by ICE of MS-13 members increased on an annual basis by 83 percent.
Behind the initiatives was Priebus, who was in the White House typically from 6 a.m. to midnight seven days a week overseeing the process for drafting executive orders, bringing in CEOs and members of Congress, and arranging Trump’s public appearances.
“Reince was engaged in policy more than anything,” Steve Bannon says. “He does not have an ideological bent. There was not one big policy that he wasn’t in the middle of. I thought Reince was fantastic.”
It wasn’t his way to attack colleagues through anonymous leaks to the press or to tout his own accomplishments. So Priebus’s role in the success of the Trump White House never came out.