Trump’s Thugs Terrorize Charlotte
The ignorantly named “Operation Charlotte’s Web” puts fear in the hearts of construction, restaurant, and landscape workers in the Queen City.
After terrorizing working people in Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, and Chicago, the Trump administration has turned its baleful visage toward working-class people of color in Charlotte and other cities in North Carolina.
This past weekend, federal border patrol agents moved into the Queen City, the rapidly growing Southeastern city, which is the second largest banking center in the country, after New York City. On Saturday alone, 81 people were reportedly grabbed off the street, arrested, and taken away. No names, no charges — just disappeared.
Demonstrating the utter lack of heart, class, and basic education frequently demonstrated by the Trumpian KKKakistocracy (i.e, rule by the worst, er, racists), this domestic terrorism has been dubbed “Operation Charlotte’s Web,” after a classic of children’s literature written by E. B. White and illustrated by Garth Williams. In the story, never out of print since it was first published in 1952, Charlotte, a spider in a barnyard, doesn’t help send Wilber the pig to the slaughter; she shows compassion and tries to help him.
Stephen Miller’s personal version of the Gestapo has a quota to meet, no matter who it harms, no matter how many families it breaks up, no matter what it does to the local and national economies. Trump said that only criminals, “the worst of the worst,” would be grabbed and deported. Surely, he was, as always, speaking about himself without being conscious of it (though I suspect that he is a tiny bit aware that everybody knows how well criminal and the worst of the worst describe him — with MAGA Republicans, it’s psychological projection 24/7).
My wife and I are not residents of Charlotte, but we have family there. When we heard of the imminent raids, we immediately knew what Stephen Miller and company were after: the large numbers of construction workers who have been drawn to the Queen City in recent decades. The city is growing so fast that it has long outstripped its infrastructure. Massive apartment complexes have been rising in every direction one looks in the decade we have been regularly visiting.
Trump has always been sympathetic to the traitors of the Confederacy because of the racism and love of the wealthy and powerful that his father taught him. As historian Heather Cox-Richardson wrote on Sunday, the far-right move to a new aristocracy here is largely a replay of what the Southern planter class tried to accomplish for themselves in the 1850s:
In 1858, in a period in which a few fabulously wealthy elite enslavers in the American South were trying to take over the government and create their own oligarchy, South Carolina senator James Henry Hammond explained to his colleagues that “democracy” meant only that voters got to choose which set of leaders ruled them. Society worked best, he said, when it was run by natural leaders: the wealthy, educated, well-connected men who made up the South’s planter class.
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Many Republican leaders never believed that democracy gives every citizen the right to vote (despite what Trump and his enablers say, it is incredibly rare for a noncitizen to vote). That party has a deep history of trying to keep people of color and college students from the polls. Republican leaders have often complained bitterly that it was a huge mistake to give women the vote. With the ascendancy of Trump and his celebration of racism, xenophobia, and misogyny, the doddering Grand Old Party (GOP) found itself replaced by what might well be called the Republican Oligarch Techbros (ROT), with their visions of a Dark Enlightenment in which citizens are replaced by serfs.
To Trump and the people around him, brown-skinned people must be put in their place, no matter the cost. Their continued campaign to deport key workers in the American economy is utterly destructive.
To Trump and the people around him, brown-skinned people must be put in their place, no matter the cost. Their continued campaign to deport key workers in the American economy — in agriculture, construction, and service work of all kinds — is utterly destructive. Beyond that, poor people, the unhoused, need to keep moving and stay out of sight, like the tramps in George Orwell’s “Down and Out in Paris and London.”
Trump claims no judge, not even the justices of the Supreme Court, has the right to question his use of the military in American cities. But as Salon’s Sabrina Haake writes, Americans by tradition (and by good sense) do not approve of the use of troops in our cities:
That resistance is rooted in tradition dating back to the American Revolution. After living under the tyranny of King George III, whose hated armed troops ate their food and slept in quarters the colonists were forced to provide under the Quartering Act of 1765, the drafters of the Constitution held a widespread fear of a national standing army, which they believed posed a threat to individual liberty and the sovereignty of the separate states. Because of that distrust, the founders carefully apportioned responsibility over the “militia” — today’s National Guard — between the federal government and the states.
Charlotte, N.C., is nicknamed the Queen City for Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, Queen consort to that very King George of England for 57 years, the monarch Americans rebelled against to become an independent country (though, to be sure, many Southerners did not). Americans today — north, south, east, and west — find themselves rebelling once more against a petty tyrant who behaves as if he were a king.
Which is not at all to bad-mouth Queen Charlotte, lover of the arts and amateur botanist, who played music with an 8-year-old Mozart, and who helped establish London’s Kew Gardens. She also saved London’s General Lying-in Hospital for Expectant Mothers, which had a mission to reduce maternal deaths. A princess from Germany, Charlotte is credited with introducing the Christmas tree to England and the colonies.
As in chess, the queen has it all — intellectually, aesthetically, empathically — over our wannabe king (who cares not a whit about maternal deaths or hungry children) — even down to celebrating Christmas! (Trump’s thugs tried to grab some landscape workers in Charlotte as they were putting up Christmas lights for a homeowner, until the homeowner chased them off.)
Two statues of Queen Charlotte stand in the city: one at Charlotte-Douglas International Airport, one of the 40 U.S. airports Trump threw into chaos by not paying T.S.A. agents and air traffic controllers during the Epstein government shutdown, and the other in front of the International Trade Exchange, an honor that “Tariffs Trump” could never, ever earn.
Queen Charlotte had to deal with her husband, George, becoming mentally unhinged. I wonder what she would think about what the mad king inhabiting the White House is doing in her namesake city.
