By WILL WEISSERT and JILL COLVIN, Associated Press
WASHINGTON (AP) — President was telling a Rose Garden audience about his efforts to quell violence in the nation’s capital when, as if on cue, his words were drowned out by the wail of sirens from passing vehicles.
“Listen to the beauty of that sound,” Trump said, grinning. “They’re not politically correct sirens.”
Coming as it did during an otherwise somber event to the to conservative activist , the moment encapsulated how Trump’s law-and-order-at-all-costs push has become a centerpiece of his second term.
He’s deployed troops to Democrat-majority cities and directed federal officials, often with their faces obscured by masks, to round up people living in the country illegally. He’s suggested urban areas could become military and toyed with so political opponents can’t use the courts to foil his plans.
Now settled into his second term, Trump has embraced the kind of tough-on-crime approach he has always campaigned on but was unable to achieve with the naysayers who often checked his most extreme instincts during his first four years in office. In the process, his Republican administration has sometimes trampled law enforcement norms and critics say Trump has weaponized the Justice Department, using it to .
On Wednesday, he named “Operation Summer Heat.” Flanked by FBI Director Kash Patel and Attorney General Pam Bondi in the Oval Office, Trump said the FBI made 8,000-plus arrests.
Trump said he’d talked about crime during his campaign last year but never expected it to be such a major second-term focus.
“Now itap like a passion for me,” he said, and his actions were “many, many steps above” what he’d pledged and “we’re just at the start.”
Itap in some ways the full realization of the mindset Trump has had since his early days as a real estate mogul back in the gritty days of 1970s and ’80s New York, when crime was rampant and residents clamored for crackdowns.
Trump’s efforts have drawn resistance from local leaders. His plans to send soldiers to and , Oregon, have been thwarted by legal challenges. He has said he’s confident he’ll win on appeal but hasn’t ruled out using the Insurrection Act as a workaround, if needed.
But elsewhere, his moves have dramatically altered day-to-day lives. Earlier this year, he in response to protests against immigration raids in Los Angeles and sent the National Guard into and , Tennessee.
Trump also has mused about taking similar action in Baltimore, New Orleans and New York and , suggesting World Cup games set to be played in nearby Foxborough next year could be moved if law enforcement actions aren’t intensified.
‘Bring Back Our Police’
Trump’s eagerness to embrace the hardest possible line against crime suspects — guilty or not — burst into public view more than 30 years ago. He stirred racial tensions by calling for the execution of the , a group of Black and Hispanic teenagers wrongly convicted of rape in 1989.
Trump took out full-page newspaper ads under the headlines: “Bring Back The Death Penalty. Bring Back Our Police!” Those convictions were vacated in 2002, after evidence linked a serial rapist to the crime. Today, the case is remembered by activists as evidence of a criminal justice system prejudiced against defendants of color.
“Thatap the very same spirit thatap at work now,” said the Rev. J. Lawrence Turner of the Mississippi Boulevard Christian Church in Memphis. Turner said Trump had “demonized” and “targeted” Memphis, which is 62% African American and has a Black mayor and county leader.
Trump “seems like he is bent on seeing us in the way he has seen other persons of color throughout his first term, and possibly, I would say, throughout his public-facing life,” Turner said. “We have this president unleashed in this second term.”
First-term flirtations
Trump covered some of the same political ground in his first term during the protests over racism and police brutality sparked by the 2020 , when he sent troops to the streets of Washington and to Portland. But his advisers at the time staunchly opposed many of his calls to more broadly deploy the military to beat back unrest.
Trump’s former defense secretary Mark Esper later told CBS’ “60 Minutes” that Trump had asked during the protests whether the National Guard could be tougher on demonstrators. “’Can’t you just shoot them? Just shoot them in the legs, or something,’” Esper said he recalled Trump saying.
However, a Trump signature in his first term was a 2018 criminal justice reform measure meant to reduce federal prison populations and address disparities in sentencing, after lobbying from advocates including Kim Kardashian.
Trump was attacked from the right for that policy, though, during the 2024 Republican primary and rarely spoke about his criminal justice reform bill while campaigning. He instead drew cheers with calls for the death penalty for drug dealers and those who kill police officers and railed against and other measures aimed at reversing systematic bias in the justice system.
‘We’re going to save all our cities’
Trump now sees getting tough on crime as a winning political issue that only gets stronger for him the more he pushes.
“We’re going to save all of our cities, and we’re going to make them essentially crime-free,” he said Wednesday.
The shift also reflects a Trump no longer encumbered by chiefs of staff, generals and others who saw their duty as reining in his most extreme impulses and have long been .
“This time around, he has people around him that are not simply supporting what he’s doing, they’re encouraging him,” said Patrick G. Eddington, a senior fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute. “Itap completely terrifying that any of this stuff is going on.”
As a political issue, Trump’s tough-on-crime approach has benefits for his party heading into next year’s midterm elections. Recent polling from found his administration’s tough-on-crime approach has emerged as , amid frustrations over his handling of the economy and immigration.
The vast majority of Americans, 81%, see crime as a “major problem” in large cities, even as statistics show following a coronavirus pandemic-era spike.
‘Making all Americans safer’
The White House rejects suggestions Trump’s crackdown on crime has anything to do with race. It says the National Guard is being utilized in different cities for different reasons.
Washington is a crime-fighting push that Republican state leaders in Tennessee asked be replicated in Memphis, it argues. In Portland and Chicago, as in Los Angeles previously, the goal is protection of federal authorities working on priorities like immigration enforcement.
“The presidentap bold actions in cities across the country are making all Americans safer,” White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said, describing Trump’s actions as the fulfillment of a campaign promise.
Still, deploying troops to cities gives Trump the opportunity to paint Democratic opponents as soft on crime while overstating — often in apocalyptic terms — how bad the problem really is. He then exaggerates the results his crackdowns get.
He spent weeks suggesting Portland is “on fire” and declared, about Washington: “When I got here, this place was a raging hellhole.” Trump now suggests Washington crime has fallen to zero, which .
Maya Wiley, president and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, said the administration’s efforts are an extension of Trump’s brand, which she described as “using race overtly to drive division, to consolidate a base and to use that to usurp power a president does not have, or should not be deemed to have.”
Indeed, Trump now routinely speaks of criminals as people without redemption.
“They’re sick,” he said recently, “and we’re taking them out.”
Colvin reported from New York.
