To the editor : Contributing writer Josh Hammer is trying to rewrite history with this op-ed ( “America wants Trump to fight crime,” Sept. 5). To support President Trump’s threat to send the military to police blue cities like Chicago and Baltimore, Hammer claims that history is on Trump’s side and cites President Washington’s suppression of the Whiskey Rebellion in 1794.

This is a false analogy. Washington led troops into western Pennsylvania to put down a violent uprising of farmers who were flouting a new federal law that taxed whiskey. That’s very different from sending federal troops to perform normal urban policing functions. Hammer’s assertion that “federal force has been called in, or sent in, to assist state-level law enforcement plenty of times” fails to appreciate the curr

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