Former president Donald Trump was in Erie, Pa., over the weekend, where he offered a new proposal for curtailing the crime that he claims is plaguing the country at record levels: extrajudicial violence.
He began by claiming that Vice President Kamala Harris “created something in San Francisco”: a law where you can steal up to $950 of merchandise from a store. This, of course, isn’t true; state voters passed an initiative in 2014 that, among other things, made such theft a misdemeanor instead of a felony, in part to address prison overcrowding. Nonetheless, he had a solution.
“Now, if you had one really violent day,” Trump said, then detoured briefly into praise for one of his allies in Congress. “One rough hour — and I mean real rough — the word will get out and it will end immediately. End immediately. You know, it will end immediately.”
It’s not clear who would be engaging in this roughness. It falls into the same vague domain as his May 2020 social media post warning those engaged in violence that “when the looting starts, the shooting starts.” Did he mean that store owners would be shooting, and does he mean that store owners — or perhaps the local employees of national merchandisers — would be enforcing that “rough” hour of backlash? Or did he mean, in both cases, that law enforcement would be allowed to take the gloves off? At another point in his speech, he did say, “We have to let the police do their job.”
A Trump campaign spokesman claimed that Trump was joking, but the former president has endorsed forms of punitive policing in the past. During a speech on Long Island in 2017, a phalanx of officers standing behind him, Trump offered up the putatively joking suggestion that police should feel free to crack criminal suspects’ heads against the tops of police cars as they were being detained. Never mind that those suspects might not be guilty of any crimes; this was a way for Trump to present his unfailing and uncomplicated support for local police and opposition to criminals.
Trump has never presented any understanding of how policing balances the power of physical restraint and detention with the constraints of the law and civil rights. But, then, as president he never presented any appreciation for the ways in which the balance of powers constrained the power of the chief executive. Quite the opposite: His allies on Capitol Hill and the Supreme Court, rather than enforcing those constraints, helped erode them. One of Trump’s campaign promises is that he’ll do the same, at least for his allies.
During his presidency, there were multiple occasions on which he demonstrated his indifference to constraints on power that he preferred be unconstrained. When a man in the Pacific Northwest shot and killed a Trump supporter, for example, Trump praised federal law enforcement for not taking him in alive.
“The U.S. Marshals went in to get him. And in a short period of time, they ended in a gunfight. This guy was a violent criminal and the U.S. Marshals killed him,” he said at the time. “And I will tell you something: That’s the way it has to be. There has to be retribution when you have crime like this.”
This was during the unrest that followed the police killing of George Floyd in Minnesota in May 2020. It was one of several moments in Trump’s presidency when he reportedly pushed for the use of live ammunition against those he presented as threats.
Trump’s refusal to respect the emotionless way in which justice is designed to work obviously also manifests in his own brushes with the law. His reaction to the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election was to fire the head of the FBI and to cast federal law enforcement as corrupt and biased — because the exercise of police power against him was unacceptable. He rejects his subsequent indictments as biased. He pardoned allies swept up in the Russia probe (even after some admitted guilt) and offered clemency to other ideological allies who had been prosecuted. He pardoned soldiers accused of war crimes, casting them as victims of an unfair system rather than those found culpable by a fair and just one.
The idea of justice as being blind never seems to have appealed to Trump, any more than does the idea of an independent federal bureaucracy. In each case, he’d rather have the apparatus of power deployed in the way he wishes without constraint. This is what he promises his supporters: criminal investigations of prominent Democrats, a national sweep aimed at deporting immigrants regardless of status, government officials centered on reflecting his will.
Trump’s view of power is that of a guy who ran his own business for decades and relied on expensive teams of attorneys to help him skirt the law. He manifested this approach decades ago, with his full-page ad in New York tabloids demanding that the state reintroduce the death penalty for the teens arrested and accused of assaulting a jogger in Central Park. Those teens — known as the Central Park Five — were later exonerated. Trump to this day refuses to accept that his demand for execution was a mistake.
This is the entire point of the justice system: to work slowly in an effort to avoid mistakes before then bringing the weight of government power to bear. Trump, seemingly like many Americans, appears to believe that it is somehow weak. That removing prejudices in an effort to effect justice evenly means that too many criminals go unpunished.
But, of course, this is also in part because Trump’s definition of “criminal” is expansive. His claim that thieves were rolling into stores with calculators to stay under $950 — as he purported in Erie — is simply an extreme example of the country’s imaginary threats. He regularly presents the actions of his opponents as illegal and the lack of subsequent accountability (which is a function of those things not being illegal) as a failing. Just unshackle police or Trump’s allies for a little bit, let them kill a few people, and those things won’t happen anymore. That may actually be true, but it is very much not the sort of society in which many people would want to live — and not the sort of government that America was created to have.
It is worth noting that Trump has the support of numerous rank-and-file police organizations. His suggestions that police be allowed to exercise power without the constraints of protecting suspects’ rights or shielding the innocent have not deterred police unions from offering their endorsement. His relentless insistence on empowering police officers to act in the way they see fit has, instead, built robust support in a moment where policing and civil rights are still seen as being in tension.
At Trump rallies, the pro-police, “thin blue line” flag sits alongside signs reading “I’m voting for the convict” — meaning Trump. Because there’s a shared understanding between Trump and his supporters about which laws count and which ones don’t.
