The Wild Reed: “He Is Enacting an Authoritarian Agenda”: Khalil Gibran Muhammad on Donald Trump’s Militarization of Law Enforcement

Khalil Gibran Muhammad is a professor of African American studies and Public Affairs at Princeton University. He is also the author of The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America.

Earlier today, Muhammad was a guest on Democracy Now! where he offered the following perspective on President Trump’s recent federal takeover of law enforcement in Washington, D.C. This takeover is being justified by Trump’s contention that the capital is awash in violent crime, including crimes being perpetrated by “roving mobs of wild youth.”

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We are seeing a consistent pattern from Donald Trump. We can start with the calls for the return of the death penalty in 1989 in reference to the rape of a white woman in Central Park, which ultimately led to the conviction of five innocent young Black boys. Donald Trump has never apologized for that moment. . . . [T]his is a man who has consistently scapegoated Black and Brown people to either gain celebrity or political capital. And now as president the second time, he is enacting an authoritarian agenda, in which case the militarization of law enforcement and the deployment of law enforcement assets to either coerce or control scapegoated populations, as we saw in Los Angeles recently, is consistent.

And this is, in particular, an escalation, because while he tested the waters in deploying the Marines and 4,000 National Guard troops in Los Angeles, now we see the takeover of a local police department. And while he has the right to do so, at least for a limited period, it’s not clear that he’s going to stop. He’s calling for the same in New York. He’s calling for the same in Chicago.

And I just want to remind everyone that the Trump administration elected in 2016 came in riding on a lie about "American carnage" in American cities. This was also a period of dramatically declined crime rates and violent crime rates, in particular, across U.S. cities. So, there is nothing here that is factual in terms of the pretext for the calls [for the federal takeover of local law enforcement]. What is consistent is Donald Trump’s use of racist rhetoric, racist ideas, and the use of policing to enact a domestic policy agenda.

. . . Donald Trump doesn’t care about any rule of law. What he cares about is flexing the power of the executive branch of government against so-called enemies. And as long as he can get away with it, without congressional oversight, and with a claim of a popular mandate, which, of course, is not entirely true from the election, [he will] get away with it. And it is a slide towards a fascism. All of this is [a] textbook [case of fascism from] around the world. And we ought to be deeply concerned about the future of all of us with respect to the capacity of this particular president to use and threaten a coercive state violence against his so-called enemies.

. . . [A] global perspective is very helpful here. We’ve seen this same president threaten to turn Gaza into the Riviera of the Middle East. That is a massive population experiencing ethnic cleansing and genocide. . . . [Here] in the United States, [Trump is] criminaliz[ing] people who are victims of an unequal society, [people] who have not found the resources to support the healthcare and housing needs; the criminalization of poverty by local officials. [Trump is] essentially threatening to turn those populations into criminal populations — that is, to treat them as if their poverty is a crime. Again, this is consistent with the policies of this administration when it comes to people, both in the U.S. and in Gaza and other parts of the world.