Tuesday in Midtown, New York Governor Kathy Hochul and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani stood behind a podium and accused the President of the United States of defunding the police.
Sit with that for a second.
The charge is that Homeland Security is withholding 40 percent of New York’s counterterrorism money. Eighty-seven million dollars. “Release the $87 million you owe us,” Hochul said. Mamdani read the list — NYPD intelligence analysts, FDNY, bomb squads, transit units. Then the punchline: Donald Trump is defunding the police.
Here’s what actually happened. Last October, after Hochul appealed to him directly, Trump got on Truth Social and announced he was reversing the Biden-era cuts to New York’s homeland security funding. “This is my honor to do so. Thank you for your attention to this matter.” About $100 million came through. New York wanted the full $217 million.
So he didn’t defund them. He refunded them, and they’re unhappy with the size of the tip.
Their argument is that a promise was made and not completely kept, and there is a shortfall. Fine. Except FEMA’s response was that New York is sitting on more than $300 million in unspent homeland security money it already has. Their words: “Hochul is manufacturing a funding crisis.” Whatever you think of the accusation, the arithmetic is not complicated. Three hundred is more than eighty-seven.
And there’s the small matter of what New York did one week before this press conference. The Local Cops, Local Crimes Act took effect — Hochul’s law banning every local police department in the state from cooperating with federal immigration enforcement. She stood in front of cameras and bragged about it. Twelve agencies had to unwind their agreements. Fifteen sheriffs sued.
So the position is: we need more federal money for law enforcement, and also we have made it a crime for our law enforcement to work with federal law enforcement.
Oh yeah… remember how like last week, Hochul signed a bill that makes enforcing the law in cooperation with the feds illegal? lol.
But the main thing is that money is fungible.
The NY brigade is clearly hoping to bilk the taxpayers for more federal money so they can use internal state money to cover their butts elsewhere.
But back to the whole “Trump is defunding the police” thing. Here’s why I want them to keep making that “argument.”
There is no undoing the “defund the police” slogan. That’s the libs to own. They can’t shake the bad press they got from it and they certainly can’t try to pin it on conservatives. The only thing they’re doing by making an attempt to call Trump a defunder is reminding everyone of the worst political slogan in political slogan history.
And everyone remembers who supported it.
You cannot un-ring this bell. Every American over the age of ten knows which party spent the summer of 2020 chanting those three words. You can’t hand them to the other guy. You can only remind everyone you said them first.
They spent five years trying to bury that slogan. Tuesday they dug it up on live television and handed the country a shovel.
