Dear Editor:

The three cities with the highest murder rates in the United States are Birmingham, St. Louis, and Memphis — all of them in red states. Of the next 11 cities, 8 are in red states. The District of Columbia is 10th, Chicago is 21st, and Los Angeles is 87th.

Quick to declare crime emergencies and to federalize National Guard units and deploy U.S. Marines in Los Angeles, Washington, D.C. and Chicago — without the permission of their mayors or their state governors — our ‘law and order’ president is loth to intervene in any state that elected him in 2024.

I wouldn’t pretend to know what is going on inside the head of Donald Trump, but it’s hard to rule out blatant partisanship and seething resentment against progressive communities with Black Democratic mayors. Divide and conquer is the fundamental strategy of military campaigns; could it be that our Commander-in-Chief has turned his target lists from Russia to us?

Without Russian support and interference, Trump wouldn’t be president; because of Democratic opposition, he lost the popular vote in 2016 and won by only a narrow plurality in 2024.

His own social media post, “Chicago is about to find out why it’s called the Department of WAR,” is followed by three helicopter emojis, the symbol of General Augusto Pinochet’s policy of “disappearing” his enemies during the Argentine “Dirty War” (1976 - 1983). Many of his 30,000 incarcerated citizens were killed by being thrown out of helicopters.

Of course we all want to help what a recent letter writer called “The city that bleeds. The city that cries out.” But now that it’s a Trump “emergency,” shouldn’t we triage the deadliest cities and send blue-state militias into those “hellholes” of the former Confederacy?

Just asking.

Bill Hammond

Boothbay