#Trump’s response to city violence and other commentary

Federal law enforcement officials aim at protesters outside a fence during a demonstration in Portland.
REUTERS

As violence plagues US cities, President Trump has to decide “what is possible, what is imperative” and what is prudent, Andrew C. McCarthy reasons at The Hill. The feds, after all, can only respond to offenses that violate a “federal criminal law,” such as attacks on federal courthouses, or that “implicate important federal duties.” Yet if big-city Democratic mayors put “defeating the president in November over working cooperatively with the federal government to suppress rising crime,” the “modest number of federal agents” won’t be able to wage “a long-term, intensive campaign against violent street crime.” So Trump should “deploy federal agencies” to “protect federal property and officers” first, and after that, the decision to address the crime surge lies with the mayors.

From the right: The Smart Path Ahead for ’Burbs

Team Trump is rolling back an Obama-era Housing and Urban Development rule “that pressured suburbs to permit” low-income housing, observes Howard Husock at City Journal, though a Joe Biden victory would likely see the rule restored. Yet HUD had “wandered into fraught local terrain.” Liberals “aren’t wrong that large-lot suburban zoning is ‘exclusionary,’ and conservatives aren’t wrong that subsidized housing has failed.” What’s needed is for local zoning boards to permit new development and the adaptation of existing housing, “both for young adults who grew up in expensive towns and for local teachers, firefighters and police officers.” Doing so would create “racial and socioeconomic diversity.” What’s not needed “is heavy-handedness from Washington.”

Foreign desk: UK Joins US’s Huawei Pushback

Britain, “America’s closest friend in Europe,” is finally getting with the program, cheers Bloomberg’s Eli Lake. Prime Minister Boris Johnson has “pledged to eliminate Huawei equipment from its 5G networks by 2027 and will ban the purchase of new Huawei gear after December.” Despite Trump’s “intermittent and sometimes wavering support of his government’s position, America’s campaign against Huawei has nonetheless been effective.” The US also had an unlikely assist from the Chinese Communist Party, with its handling of COVID-19 and its “draconian national-security law” for Hong Kong, a former British colony. While “Beijing sought to persuade the world that Huawei posed no threat, its actions elsewhere were quite threatening.” The United States now “has an opportunity to press its advantage.”

Media watch: 2020 ‘Tests’ To Avoid

Suggestions that President Trump passed a cognitive test — recalling five items in order — only because it was “super easy” backfired, writes Steve Krakauer at the Fourth Watch newsletter, posted by Mediaite. When CNN’s Erin Burnett, for example, asked the doctor who created the test, Ziad Nasreddine, to confirm it was a cinch to pass, he did the opposite, noting the average person gets just 3.7 words right. Yet Krakauer urges the media not to make cognitive tests a “major” issue in the 2020 election. Attributing Joe Biden’s “offensive” comments to “cognitive decline,” for example, “diminishes the fact that a lucid presidential candidate” is making them. Besides, “there’s more than enough” to critique the candidates about “without trying to diagnose them with a disorder.”

Congressman: Anti-Israel Tilt at State Dept.

Even though, under the Trump administration, the “friendship between the United States and Israel has never been stronger,” career State Department bureaucrats “continue to undermine Israel’s standing among the nations,” Rep. Doug Lamborn (R-Colo.) laments at the Washington Examiner. A recent State Department report on Palestinian terrorism, for example, “deliberately omits entire categories of terrorist attacks” that Palestinians have committed against Israelis and incorrectly suggests Israeli settlers had committed three times as many attacks on Palestinians, a charge apparently based on “cherry-picked stats” from left-wing non-governmental organizations and “Palestinian advocacy groups.” The Trump administration cannot allow such “malfeasance” to “become (or to remain) the norm at the State Department.”

— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board