Trump’s MAGA base finds its own rallying cry:
Defend the police
Trump’s most fervent supporters view the notion of
slashing resources to law enforcement as an attack on a core belief.
By TINA
NGUYEN
06/10/2020
04:30 AM EDT
First, it
was socialism. Then it was antifa. Now, with the latest protests sweeping the
nation, President Donald Trump’s base has found its newest foil: the
snowballing movement to drastically reduce the size and budgets of police
departments to constrain discriminatory law enforcement practices.
The
rallying cry of the far left is now becoming the rallying cry of the right,
energizing the MAGA movement to defend the police.
“It seems
to me that the goal there is to totally abolish the police department and
replace it with something else,” said Ryan Fournier, founder of Students for
Trump. “I don't know what 'something else' is. I don't think we've gone that
far down that rabbit hole. But I think it's counterproductive.”
The
backlash from the right comes even as many conservatives begin to accept the
premise that African Americans are disproportionately targeted by police. A
recent Washington Post-Schar School poll found that 53 percent of Republicans
backed the protests, and 47 percent believed police killings of black men
indicate broader problems, compared with 19 percent in 2014.
But Trump’s
die-hard conservative base is unnerved by what they view as an extreme solution
from extreme leftists. To them, addressing the problem by slashing resources to
law enforcement is an attack on the central tenet of the Republican Party — law
and order — and one that Trump himself is setting up as a wedge issue to
bolster his case for reelection in the coming months.
“First of
all, on some level, I think it's perceived to be more of an empty slogan than a
serious policy response,” said Clark Neily, vice president for criminal justice
at the libertarian-leaning Cato Institute. “And second, it is indelibly
associated with the left, which for many people is all they need to know about
it in order to oppose it.”
Initially,
conservatives across the country — Trump supporters or not — dismissed the idea
as an impossibility as slogans like “Defund the Police” and “Abolish the
Police” first appeared on signs during Black Lives Matter protests. The slogan
morphed virtually overnight from liberal fever dream to tangible policy when
the Minneapolis City Council voted overwhelmingly to disband the city’s police
department and restructure its approach to public safety.
The concept
of defunding the police, as proponents of the movement explain it, is
straightforward: Redirect police budgets toward programs addressing broader
community needs such as mental health care, housing for the homeless and crime
prevention. Further along the spectrum is the idea of either disbanding or
abolishing the police force altogether, replacing first responders instead with
social workers, mental health providers, and other community figures. At the
core of these ideas is the belief that the initial set of reforms widely
adopted by police in the wake of the Ferguson protests in 2014 — implicit bias
training, body cameras and community engagement — were not sufficiently
effective.
In the
immediate wake of George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis, there is little recent
polling on what Republicans and other conservatives believe may be the best
path toward police reform, made even murkier by the fact that even pro-reform
activists in Minneapolis are still grappling with a tangible plan for a post-police
world.
But one
thing is clear. “I don't think it makes sense to replace professional police
officers with decades of training, to have citizens do it. And then to abolish
police in general — like just completely get rid of the police — is getting rid
of the justice system altogether,” said Brandon Tatum, a former Arizona police
officer, pro-Trump commentator and a founder of the Blexit Foundation, which
seeks to persuade black voters to stop voting primarily for Democrats.
“You have
the lawmakers to write the laws, you have the police to enforce them,” Tatum
said. “And you have the court that ensures people have constitutional
protections and due process. They don't have a legitimate argument. It sounds
like people are just talking and virtue signaling and not really coming up with
an effective conclusion.”
Among the
MAGA commentariat — rattled by images of violence, looting and so-called
leftist antifa militants among the largely peaceful protests over the past week
— the premise of slashing police budgets, or axing departments altogether,
sparks the most partisan rage.
“The
‘defund the police’ movement, if it’s enacted, will be the deadliest public
policy disaster in modern American history,” Dan Bongino, a syndicated radio
host and frequent Fox News contributor, tweeted Saturday. “ANY politician who
refuses to speak out against this abomination should be forced to attend the
thousands of funerals of innocents that will result.”
On his Fox
News program, Tucker Carlson predicted that defunding the police was “a move
toward authoritarian social control cloaked in the language of identity
politics,” among other charges, envisioning a future ruled by a “woke militia”
where “the diversity and inclusion department at Brown University had the power
to arrest you.”
“Conservatives
have always taken pride in themselves about being the law and order party, and
Republicans of being the law and order party,” said Jonathan Blanks, a visiting
fellow at the free market-oriented Foundation for Research on Equal
Opportunity, who focuses on police reform. “Because that goes hand in hand, the
idea that you would attack one of the most trusted and respected institutions
in the country, is anathema to that way of thinking.”
Bypassing
subtlety, Trump repeatedly tweeted his opposition to the concept in recent days
by saying that while the “Radical Left Democrats” and Joe Biden wanted to
defund the police, he was the candidate of “LAW ENFORCEMENT.”
“Sorry, I
want LAW & ORDER!” Trump wrote.
At the very
least, Blanks suggested that this rhetoric would cement his loyalty among overt
racists. “The white identity politics that Trump played to 3½ years ago, that
resentment, sometimes it is tied to pro-police sentiment,” said Blanks. “It's
not necessarily that they're like, ‘Oh, I hate black people.’ But they think that
‘black people are different, and they don't love America, and they hate police.
So we love police.’”
Outside of
that core, Trump has ample opportunity to secure Republicans in general with
his defend-the-police stance. Local police are one of the most beloved
institutions among Republicans, second only to the military.
Blanks
observed that it was largely a phenomenon of how Republicans, a largely white
demographic, interacted with police. “There's this really huge disconnect
between the law-and-order folks who think of police officers as people who come
to help and try and keep the road safe, as opposed to people who are trying to
prevent crime by harassing people who happen to look different than they do,”
he said.
While that
perception might be changing among some Republicans and Trump supporters, their
proposed solutions still give cops the benefit of the doubt, even if they were
solutions proposed five years ago: bias training, accountability programs,
better equipment.
But Tatum
thinks the energy behind the defund-the-police movement is largely driven by
opportunists looking toward the November election. “They don't have any
realistic prospect to defund anything before the election,” he said. “But in
reality, I don't think any conservative places or any municipalities, when it
comes down to the citizen's vote, nobody's going to vote unanimously to defund
police officers.”
The
worldwide protests over George Floyd’s death could, in theory, end up with
meaningful police reform, given the growing bipartisan consensus that something
must be done. But confusion about the left’s slogans promises to allow Trump’s
base to define the term the way they want.
“Everybody
seems to need to get on the same page,” Fournier said. “Are you for fully
abolishing the police department and having no law enforcement? Or are you for
taking away some of their funds — which I think is counterproductive because
they need more training, they need to do more reform — and then giving it to
other resources? I think everybody sits on a different page with that. There
has to be a conversation on that because there's many conservatives who think
they fully want to get rid of police.”
Trump to hold rally in Oklahoma, first since
coronavirus pandemic began
President announces rally in Tulsa, city with a
history of deadly racial violence, even as Covid-19 cases continue to rise
Maanvi
Singh
Published
onThu 11 Jun 2020 06.54 BST
Donald
Trump will hold a rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, next Friday – his first since since
states began shutting down in response to the coronavirus pandemic, which has
claimed more than 110,000 lives in the US.
The 19 June
rally will likely rattle some public health experts, as coronavirus infections
rise in about a dozen states. On Wednesday, the US approached nearly 2 million
confirmed cases.
Trump’s
signature rallies often draw tens of thousands of people but have been on
hiatus since 2 March because of the coronavirus. The president’s campaign has
been eager to resume them as it tries to move past the pandemic, even as cases
continue to rise in some parts of the country.
A Trump
campaign spokesperson tweeted a movie trailer-style video earlier Wednesday
that advertised: “This month we’re back.”
“A
beautiful new venue, brand new. We’re looking forward to it,” Trump said during
a White House event. “They’ve done a great job with Covid, as you know, the
state of Oklahoma.”
The
announcement, which comes amid sweeping protests against racism and police
brutality in the wake of George Floyd’s death, also raised eyebrows for its
date – a day known as Juneteenth, which commemorates the end of slavery – as
well as its location in Tulsa, a city with a troubling history of racial
violence.
Tulsa’s
1921 race massacre saw the destruction of black businesses and residences at
the hands of angry, white mobs, and has been described as “the single worst
incident of racial violence in American history.”
Trump’s
announcement comes as the president has criticized the Floyd protests and
referred to those demonstrating against police brutality as “thugs”.
Oklahoma, a
reliably Republican state which Trump won in 2016, was among the earliest
states to begin loosening coronavirus restrictions, with salons, spas and
barbershops reopening in late April. The Republican governor Kevin Stitt’s most
recent reopening phase places no limits on group gathering sizes as of 1 June,
and leaves the decision about how closely to adhere to social distancing
guidelines up to business owners and local officials.
According
to Johns Hopkins data, the overall death toll in Oklahoma stands at 356.
The
president said he would first hold a rally in Oklahoma before moving on to
other states like Florida, Arizona and North Carolina, where the Republican
national convention was originally supposed to be held.
Coronavirus
hospitalizations are currently on the rise in Arizona and North Carolina, which
could intensify public health concerns about resuming the campaign rallies.
While the
rallies will likely spark public health concerns, some of the president’s
allies have argued the recent protests, which have attracted thousands of
people, could shield the rallies from potential criticism.
Some on
Twitter compared Trump’s decision to hold the rally in Tulsa on Juneteenth to
Ronald Reagan’s choice to launch his 1980 campaign with a speech lauding
“states rights” near the site of the notorious “Mississippi burning” murder of
civil rights workers.
In 1964,
three civil rights workers were abducted and killed by the Ku Klux Klan, just
south-west of Philadelphia, Mississippi, and surreptitiously buried in a dam.
Reagan
delivered a campaign speech within walking distance of the dam, proclaiming “I
believe in state’s rights.” His language echoed that of white Southerners who
used the phrase to justify segregation.
It remained
unclear if the campaign’s choice to hold the rally on Juneteenth was
intentional.
The Trump
campaign appeared aware of the significance of the president holding the rally
on Juneteenth.
Responding
to a Bloomberg reporter, a Trump campaign advisor wrote that “Republicans are
proud of the history of Juneteenth”.
The
president has acknowledged the date before. In 2017, Trump released a
statement, saying: “Melania and I send our warmest greetings to all those
celebrating Juneteenth, a historic day recognizing the end of slavery.” That
year, Trump also delivered a rambling speech during Black History month,
calling the famous abolitionist Frederick Douglass “an example of somebody
who’s done an amazing job and is being recognized more and more, I notice”.
Agencies contributed reporting
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