PR stunt designed to givr DJT talking points during his "Make America White er Great" rally on Friday. Nothing of substance which was the intent.
Trump's African American weighs in.... https://www.cnn.com/2019/09/12/politics/trump-my-african-american-leaving-gop/index.html
Why yes! The sheer GALL of those people to treat him the same way he and his MAGA groupies treated Obama. Don't those ungrateful cretins realize that unlike Obama Trump is a WHITE president? Why the next thing you'll know they'll be demanding that Trump produce his birth certificate. We all know that his tax returns are off limits...
The narrative that Obama should have/could have effected this change 8 years ago is bizarre. Imagine: it's 2012 and Obama signs an executive order just like the one proposed now; how does Fox react? How does the republican congress react? "Overreach! Emperor Obama! He's trying to de-fang the police to cater to his criminal voter base!" Or Obama & Biden get house dems to work on police reform when they don't even have a majority- where does it go? It goes nowhere, of course. It dies immediately in a republican-controlled congress that's all about "law & order".
As someone else noted police departments are under local control. Only so much he can do. Trump ran on being the law and order guy so regardless of if it's a pr stunt he is trying to show some empathy. I'm not saying he should be credited for it but it is outside his lane.
His speech and the signing ceremony were a lot of the same old dreck that we've come to expect from Trump. I think it was telling that he only had LE there and not families of victims of LE. The substance of the EO isn't bad. It certainly doesn't go far enough but as Trump does benefit from having a low bar.
My understanding is that this EO doesn't actually enact anything - it's merely calling for the creation of a database and recommending things.
As others have noted the President can't actually do much regarding local LE. Besides that I'm willing to admit I'm giving Trump the benefit of the low bar considering his other rhetoric about owning the streets and telling LE to rough up suspects.
That's how he moves the goal posts so that people say he is doing a good job when in reality he isn't doing anything. Other Presidents get involved in the legislative process by working with Congress to get bills passed. This president just issues EO's and Tweet-O's and calls it a day.
It's basically gotten to the point that if he hasn't outright broken something, people are relieved. That's how you should feel towards a pet that's being house trained, not the freaking president.