Trump's War on Urban America

Disclaimer: This article and every single article on my Substack only represent my own personal opinion, and not the opinion of my employer, or any public body I serve on or volunteer with.

I initially wrote most of this in the midst of the state-sponsored terrorism in Minnesota, but I withheld on publishing due to the deep depression caused by the decline of our nation.

Unfortunately, the conversation is still timely.

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When Trump takes glee in committing atrocities in our name by bombing and executing civilians in foreign countries, it’s no surprise that he gives his own citizens the same treatment at home. Trump has explicitly described the deployment of federal troops to cities as a political project against Democratic governance, against American multiculturalism, against liberal democracy, and against American cities. Trump’s goons are going around cities executing Americans, and Trump’s buddy CEO at Palantir is bragging about how they’ll take away urban American’s rights and freedoms and livelihoods.

America is in accelerated decline. This nation is dying, and it will not survive the fanatical fascism that has engulfed the Republican Party. We have federal agents gleefully executing American citizens on orders of the President with no charges and no consequences. We have a national executive invading American cities with troops because they don’t vote for him or like him.

More disturbing is that a sizable amount of the country either doesn’t care or is endorsing this domestic warfare. We have the most fanatical Supreme Court since the Dred Scott decision. John Roberts’ Court is openly permitting Republicans to disenfranchise voters, while blocking Democrats from responding. It has destroyed the 14th Amendment, granted Donald Trump total criminal immunity protections, and blatantly issued rulings driven by social media politics than by any basis in law.

It’s important to understand how we got to large sections of the nation cheering the execution of American citizens. Generations of dehumanization towards urban America and led to these unfathomable occupations and crackdowns and the eventual breakdown of the United States.

The key tenets of fascism are clearly and proudly embraced by Trump and Vance:

• Civil law enforced by the military

• Partisan dictation of the media by the state: not only FCC attacks against liberal programs but explicitly right-wing takeover of neutral social media websites and news organizations

• Censorship of non-conforming culture

• Glorification of violence and anti-liberal behavior.

Anti-urban politics began with Richard Nixon. Nixon popularized the idea of the “Silent Majority,” a white, conservative population that was quietly against the national cultural shift towards women’s advancement, anti-war and Black civil rights in the 1960s. Nixon began the reduction of funding to urban areas along the cultural war lines of today, which was sold to suburbia and rural America as a rejection of Lyndon B. Johnson’s welfare programs. His successor, Gerald Ford, was happy to let New York City collapse into bankruptcy until he felt shamed into acting.

It needs to be emphasized how absolutely insane it was and still is for a national government to take pride in defunding its most prominent city. Most governments work overtime to prop up their international cities; the United States is really the only prominent developed nation that takes pride in tearing it down.

Ronald Reagan, and the growing power of conservative AM Radio that propelled him to the White House, began pushing the notion that Americans were fundamentally divided between urban and rural. That urban dwellers were not true Americans like the rural Americans. Even though it was Reagan who oversaw the decline of the Rust Belt with global trade, the movie actor sold himself as a leader for the Heartland, who would put the welfare mothers (code for Black people) and bra-burning college girls (code for White liberals) in their place.

From the 1980s to the 2000s, AM Radio normalized anti-urban politics. Conservatism fundamentally viewed American cities as disgusting places implicitly because of their diversity, that colleges were not worth attending, and that the city dweller was bad for not caring about the real, country American. It worked at creating the urban-rural divides in voting patterns we have today, where living in a city or outside of one has replaced the north-south-coast divide in voting patterns.

Roger Ailes, founder of Fox News in 1996, felt he needed to control the narrative so that another criminal president like Richard Nixon couldn’t be taken out by the Washington Post. The recent conquering of the Post by Jeff Bezos, CBS by Bari Weiss, and Elon Musk of Twitter is also part of this long-term plan; better to conquer credible media than try to make competitors.

With the advent of cable and 24-hour news, Fox News runs anti-urban programming daily. Fox finds another American city to slander, always pretending their issue is merely Democratic governance, but focusing on what makes American cities great: their diversity, their openness, and their shared cultures.

With the rise of social media, anti-urban propaganda has risen to the level of national psychosis. Propaganda about how terrible beautiful San Francisco is was so effective that when conservatives visited the city for the Super Bowl this year, they were openly astounded at how misled they were.

This propaganda implants a deep darkness into the hearts of millions of Americans: the normalization of hate towards urban Americans and our liberal democracy. We have to contend with a grim reality presented by YouGov and Quinnipiac, that 60 - 70% of Republicans endorse extrajudicial killings of defenseless citizens—even White Americans—whose politics they don’t share.

After Trump’s re-election in 2024, Trump declared a national, ideological, anti-urban policy and staffed every department with anti-urban figureheads cutting funding for and harming American cities wherever possible. Trump’s first urban target was D.C. and specifically homeless people.

Throughout history, homeless people have always been the first to bear the brunt of authoritarian governments testing out policies that will be enacted on the broader population later. Instead of using the federal government’s $7 trillion budget to issue a mere $10 billion to house most homeless people in America, or building low cost homes in D.C. like he’s doing for his gaudy ballroom, Trump sent troops to smash tents and evict homeless people from the Metro.

Aside from cruelty, which is an important goal of the Trump Administration, the main objective was the normalization of armed troops conducting police patrols in U.S. cities. And when Trump suffered zero consequences for his actions by Congress or the U.S. media—the latter even applauded the National Guard for sweeping homeless people—Trump expanded his occupation to the people of urban California.

Stephen Miller was put in charge of how this occupation of the rest of American cities will go. Since childhood, Miller, an antisocial hate monger, repeatedly professed his hatred for Latinos and the working class in his hometown of Santa Monica on film and in print media. Miller’s hatred of LA is why Los Angeles was chosen as the first non-D.C. city to experiment in military occupation and anti-immigrant terrorism.

The courts eventually struck down Trump’s use of the National Guard. Moreover, the Guard was generally staffed with state locals who were less inclined to be violent towards their neighbors than the federally-controlled and ideologically loyal Border Patrol and Department of Homeland Security.

The next target was San Francisco, but San Francisco is home to the CEOs and tech billionaires whose predominantly foreign-worker and liberal American workforce would both be harmed and irate by an occupation. Trump owes his success to Silicon Valley, whose ascendant Tech Right propagates his cult of personality to the masses through their sway over people’s media feeds. San Francisco is also powering an A.I. boom, which appears to be the primary industry keeping the U.S. economy out of a recession. The occupation of the Bay Area was canceled.

Ilhan Omar’s resilience against Trump’s depraved racism online and the fact that Tim Walz was the state’s governor ensured Minneapolis would be chosen next. Trump was already engaged in a series of unprecedented digital pogroms against random minorities, including the Somali people of Minneapolis. A combination of being both black and of foreign ancestry made Somalians—like Haitians in Ohio that Trump’s 2024 campaign randomly terrorized—attractive targets for the administration, which is staffed by Nazi accounts chronically posting on Twitter.

Notably, the major corporations of Minneapolis did not come to the defense of its workers. It did not put out public statements highlighting the economic and moral damage of Trump’s actions, or the valiant and inspirational labor of its immigrant workforce. It remained tight-lipped or both-sided the issue as its own workers were killed or prevented from going to work by federal troops.

The administration began with a false flag attack in the most 21st-century way imaginable: a racist YouTube video by an unwell Twitter influencer, made to be clippable by other morons on social media. Then the White House, coordinating with Elon Musk and overriding everyone’s Twitter feeds, promoted this video to the top—thereby making it a news story among traditional media. (It’s become a pattern that this unwell YouTuber coincidentally does videos on places the Trump Administration is about to terrorize or attack. He is doing a video of Cuba right now).

Then the federal government began its invasion of Minneapolis. Gregory Bovino explicitly declared war on Minneapolis with a bunch of uneducated and ignorant Border Patrol and ICE officers hired because they’re ignorant. They tear-gassed schools, brutalized White Minnesotans who filmed them, and terrorized Somali-American neighborhoods. And as we all know, executed American citizens.

The glee with which ICE agents, conservative intellectuals, and their sympathizers on Twitter ridiculed their fellow Americans being brutalized and executed on film shows how far gone the country has gone.

The problem for the mainstream media that enabled this anti-urban hatred is that the empirical science on the motivations of Trump’s most fanatical supporters doesn’t support the coddling and sympathy that reporters want to give them. The research consistently shows that support for Trump typically (not always) is associated with lower empathy, fear of foreigners and prejudice. This doesn’t play into the “downtrodden country folk” narrative, which always excludes country residents like Hispanic agricultural workers, the Black belt of the South, or White southern urbanites who usually vote Democratic—and just lost their rights thanks to the Supreme Court gutting the Voting Rights Act.

The New York Times (before the executions) ran to a “rural diner”, as is custom for these silly stories, in Minnesota and interviewed people’s opinions of Minneapolis and its people. Unsurprisingly, patrons described the diverse and vibrant people of Minneapolis in these evil, awful terms which are not reciprocated by Minneapolis people about rural people. (It’s also worth remembering that a lot of people say they’re rural but are actually not—they’re suburbanites).

The media avoids critical examination to figure out why they have the opinions they do about the people of Minneapolis. NYT just repeats propaganda they’ve been fed for the umpteenth time, and in a way, legitimizes this libel against our cities as rooted in some truth.

The reason why White people in Minneapolis and urban areas in general tend to vote Democratic and hate Trump is that their exposure to people of different races, cultures, and religions contradicts the propaganda. That’s a very beautiful thing about American cities. It was White Minnesotans out there, obstructing ICE and defending their neighbors, because they correctly understand that they share more American values with their immigrant neighbors than they do the J.D. Vance and Trump.

J.D. Vance and the fascists want to reinforce the tribal notion that what defines an American community is race. It plays well with people who are typically isolated and don’t see other races of people in large numbers with regularity. This is what all this “heritage American” and “suicidal empathy” nonsense is about.

But what urban living in an area of millions dispels is that it’s values, not race, that determine your community and friendships. It can sometimes correlate with ethnicity or religion, but increasingly for many it does not. White people who purposely live in diverse urban areas make white nationalists like Vance particularly upset.

Why are millions of Americans in urban centers paying federal taxes to subsidize a government and political constituency in open, one-sided warfare? Democratic-voting counties contribute more than 70% of our national income and have no malice towards rural and semi-rural people. Why do we endure this hatred and seek to rationalize it?

What the people of Minneapolis did was extraordinarily brave and the General Strike was inspirational. We need to scale this all up because Trump got away with it, and as history dictates, anything he gets away with he’ll do again.

At some point, Americans in urbanized areas need to be both aware of what they are—the economic pillars of the world’s largest economy—and stop accepting being demeaned by the media and their bosses who shame them because went to college or have diverse neighbors.

It’s not about urban vs. rural—that’s what Trump and the far-right media apparatus and its appeasers push. ICE is terrorizing rural workers as we speak who put food on our tables. It’s about people who embrace all of America vs. people who clearly hate it and have declared war on it.

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