Trick question: Four presidents went to New York City last week. Only one paid his respects to a fallen NYPD officer.
Was it Biden, Obama, Clinton, or Trump?
The answer is obvious without even knowing who was there at the Massapequa Funeral Home.
It was Donald Trump who was welcomed with open arms by the family of Detective Jonathan Diller, the 31-year-old father of one who was gunned down by a recidivist suspect who should never have been on the loose.
It was Trump who said the right things, who had the empathy to know that at a time like this, you show up, you acknowledge the sacrifice and what it means in the wider world.
He’s not a professional politician, but he acted on normal human instinct to comfort a grieving widow and the 1-year-old son who will never remember his father.
He’s from Queens, so he knew what was expected by the sea of cops who stood for miles in the rain in a sign of respect for their fallen brother.
And he’s canny enough as a populist leader to understand that the death of Diller is an epic moment that transcends politics.
It defines the betrayal of the people by a callous, corrupt establishment, whose faces change but whose lie persists: that law enforcement criminalizes poverty.
The truth is that police officers like Diller sacrifice their lives to protect the poor and the powerless, and without them everything is chaos.
Stoking anti-cop vitriol
Diller’s death was the inevitable culmination of the malign criminal-justice “reform” movement that began in the years before the pandemic, that manipulated the death of George Floyd into a grievous assault on law and order, and that Democrats then elevated to a noble cause at their 2020 convention.
The politicians playing footsie with the anti-cop movement have blood on their hands.
That’s what Stephanie Diller said in her heartrending eulogy to her dead husband:
“It’s been two years and two months since Detective Rivera and Detective Mora made the ultimate sacrifice — just like my husband, Jonathan Diller. Dominique Rivera stood before all the elected officials present today pleading for change.
“That change never came. And now my son will grow up without his father, and I will grow old without my husband. And his parents have to say goodbye to their child.
“How many more police officers and how many families need to make the ultimate sacrifice before we start protecting them?
“I don’t wish this kind of pain on anyone. Jonathan lived his life doing good for people, and it’s now time for people to do good for all the officers he represents.”
This is why Gov. Hochul was not welcome in Massapequa and received short shrift from Diller’s wake.
She has done nothing to reverse the law that her predecessor, Andrew Cuomo, angling for the presidency, signed in 2019 to eliminate cash bail for most crimes.
The crime rate immediately jumped as violent predators were released to live among us with no consequences for their actions.
Major crime jumped by 22.5% in February 2020. The COVID lockdowns masked the damage and then Bill de Blasio, New York’s worst-ever mayor, compounded the problem when he ordered the release of prison inmates on compassionate grounds.
Compassion for criminals, not for their future victims. Now we all are living on Rikers Island.
The kid-gloves crew
The perfect storm came with the George Floyd riots and de Blasio cutting the NYPD budget by $1 million.
Then we got Alvin Bragg and Letitia James, who are more interested in prosecuting Trump for imaginary crimes than locking up violent criminals who shoot police and shove innocent people onto the subway tracks or sucker punch women in the face and mug cyclists at knifepoint in Central Park.
Now the NYPD is reduced to putting up billboards in Times Square to warn people about the pickpockets and shoplifting gangs that swarm the city.
Mayor Adams said some of the right things at Diller’s funeral Easter Saturday, but he never does anything to fix the problem.
While New York drowns under the burden of millions of illegal migrants, his only criticism of the Biden administration is that he hasn’t been given enough money to lavish the unwanted “newcomers” with cash cards and free hotel rooms.
Biden was held out as the Democrats’ wise, compassionate antidote to the merry chaos they had created under Trump, only the cure was worse than the disease, and everything he pretended to embody was a mirage.
Did the purported 80 million people who voted for Biden in 2020 imagine that he wouldn’t even try to call the family of Detective Diller?
Or that he would come to New York City on Easter Thursday for a glittering $25 million fundraiser at Radio City Music Hall with Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, and Lizzo, without even mentioning the murder of the police officer then lying at rest in the Massapequa Funeral Home 40 miles east.
It’s not rocket science, as Trump pointed out. It should be politics 101.
To at least pretend you care.
“They didn’t even call the family. They could have called. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist,” Trump told Fox News.
The most that Biden could stir himself to offer was a condolence message, not to the Diller family but to Eric Adams.
He says he is pro-police, but he has turned his back on law and order. He claims to be a devout Catholic but goes out of his way to offend Christianity.
Biden’s lack of grace
It is telling that Biden always stumbles over the mention of God when he tries to recite the Declaration of Independence, the central moral document of the country he has the honor to lead.
“Think about this,” he said on stage Thursday night. “This is not hyperbole . . . We came about as a consequence of an idea, an idea. No, I’m serious about it. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men and women are created equal endowed because — that’s the basis for our existence.”
The actual line is this: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
For some perverse reason he never can bring himself to utter the words “their Creator.”
At least he didn’t call God “the thing,” as he did a few years ago when he said: “All men and women are created, by the, you know, you know the thing.”
For all his overt piety and ostentatious Mass-going, Biden’s presidency has been marked by disrespect to Christianity. Notably this year he proclaimed Christianity’s holiest day, Easter Sunday, to be “Transgender Day of Visibility.”
Trump is far from perfect, but at least he doesn’t pretend to be something he isn’t. For all his manifest faults, what you see is what you get with Trump.
He never changes, warts and all, and in these days of shape-shifting chameleons, that’s a virtue worth preserving.
