On Wednesday, President Donald Trump announced that he is directing a “surge” in the federal effort to tackle the growing wave of violent crime currently plaguing several major U.S. cities. Trump noted that the surge, dubbed “Operation Legend” after a four-year-old boy named LeGend Taliferro was murdered last month in Kansas City, would work to support local law enforcement efforts to arrest and prosecute criminals.

Andrew McCarthy reports, “[Attorney General William] Barr detailed that Operation Legend had already commenced with a ramp-up of federal agents in Kansas City, where 200 arrests were made in a two-week period. The initiative is now being expanded to two other cities with soaring crime, Chicago and Albuquerque. Amid a litany of bloody statistics, Trump noted that 23 people were shot in Chicago just [Tuesday] — 15 of them at a funeral home, where respects were being paid to a man who’d been killed in an earlier drive-by shooting.”

Barr was quick to note that this increased presence of federal law enforcement will be working within existing federal-state collaborative structures, explaining that they are “standard anti-crime activities we have been carrying on for decades.” Essentially, the Trump administration is reinforcing federal law enforcement at federal facilities within these major cities.

Needless to say, Democrats, along with their mainstream media cohorts, are falsely painting Trump’s action to quell the violence as causing the violence. Philadelphia’s Democrat District Attorney Larry Krasner played up the Left’s dubious narrative, warning, “Anyone, including federal law enforcement, who unlawfully assaults and kidnaps people will face criminal charges from my office. … We’re not going to tolerate showing up under the guise of making things safer and [instead] causing violence.”

Unfortunately, this underscores the challenge Trump faces — to support law enforcement efforts to end the raging violence and crime in these major cities while not becoming the face of that violence. Democrats are clearly aiming to scapegoat Trump for the violence, just as they have done with COVID-19. And the mainstream media is more than willing to support the Democrats’ fallacious narrative by promoting images and footage of federal law enforcement agents tangling with “protesters.” See Portland as Exhibit A.

The balancing act for Trump is to on the one hand allow the Democrats running these high-crime cities to politically hang themselves via their own failed policies, while at the same time demonstrating that he is fully committed to protecting innocent, law-abiding Americans from this wave of leftist-orchestrated violence.