All the president’s men are coming to Charlotte. After several days of rumors, federal officials confirmed to local leaders in North Carolina that, indeed, Border Patrol agents will be conducting operations in the state’s largest city. I used to live in Charlotte. I still have a lot of friends and family there. I’m told Donald Trump is coming to save them, but from what? We don’t know.
If Charlotte residents are living in terror — other than the terror President Trump has created by frightening the city’s immigrants this week — it is not apparent. The air is gentle and cool. The leaves are turning or have turned. Christmas trees are going on sale. Everyone is preparing for the holidays, but are we unknowingly in danger of total anarchy? Has there been a surge in dangerous undocumented immigrants in Charlotte? Is crime through the roof?
We stand with our neighbors.”
North Carolina Gov. Josh Stein
There’s no evidence of either. Charlotte seems to be the latest winner of America’s worst game show: Which U.S. city that happens to be run by Democrats will President Trump invade next?
On Friday, North Carolina Gov. Josh Stein, who as attorney general was once the state’s top prosecutor, skewered Trump’s “law and order” cosplay.
“We should all focus on and arrest violent criminals and drug traffickers,” Stein said. “Unfortunately, that’s not always what we have seen with ICE and Border Patrol agents in Chicago and elsewhere around the country. The vast majority of people they have detained have no criminal convictions, and some are American citizens.”
Stein also urged North Carolinians not to be provoked.
“We stand with our neighbors,” he said. “And when we see injustice, we bear witness. If you see any inappropriate behavior, use your phones to record and notify local law enforcement, who will continue to keep our communities safe long after these federal agents leave. That’s the North Carolina way.”
Context is everything. This latest Border Patrol deployment is the work of an increasingly unpopular administration that is desperate to change the conversation.
Trump has made himself look like he’s hiding something in the Jeffrey Epstein scandal. His party lost the Nov. 4 elections — badly. His tariffs have predictably made inflation worse. His administration spent the shutdown fighting tooth and nail to deny Americans food stamps and enhanced subsidies for Affordable Care Act plans. The loss of subsidies, in particular, will hurt many of his voters: ACA subsidies drove record health insurance enrollment in rural places and in the South — areas that Trump has consistently dominated.
It’s a performance. But it won’t work.
Trump has been exposed for what he is: a false populist, lifted to the White House by working-class voters he doesn’t appear to care about. The Border Patrol invasions — like the crackdowns in Portland, Chicago, Los Angeles and elsewhere — are meant to distract voters from these truths.
When the show’s over, what they’ll leave behind is predictable. They’ll beat up some protesters. They’ll arrest people they’re not supposed to, including U.S. citizens. And afterward, the legal system will sort through the mess they’ve made. It’s a performance. But it won’t work. The president’s insistence that he’s only deporting “the worst of the worst” has given way to countless clips of innocent people (including U.S. citizens) being snatched off the streets. And theater only counts for so much when you can’t afford groceries or see a doctor. The pain of our immigrants will not buy Americans prescription drugs or pay their bills. In the end, these games won’t be able to distract from that one, searing truth. It will drag him down. Truth is the president’s enemy. He has flouted it more than any American president in history. In the classic book “All the King’s Men” — based on the rise and fall of populist Louisiana politician Huey Long — author Robert Penn Warren wrote that “the truth is a terrible thing.” “You dabble your foot in it and it is nothing. But you walk a little farther and you feel it pull you like an undertow or a whirlpool. First there is the slow pull so steady and gradual you scarcely notice it, then the acceleration, then the dizzy whirl and plunge into darkness.” Trump’s second administration is less than a year old, but it speeds toward that darkness with astonishing velocity.
Billy Ball is an award-winning journalist from North Carolina who founded The Living South, a journalism project focused on changemakers in the American South. He is also a senior editor at Cardinal & Pine, an online news site that covers North Carolina politics. His work has been published in The Atlantic, The Washington Post, and others. 
