Trump’s base loves it not because the former president wants to fight crime but because he wants retribution.
Former president Donald Trump speaks at a campaign rally on September 29 in Erie, Pennsylvania. (Jeff Swensen / Getty Images)
Late last week, in Erie, Pennsylvania, Trump, who has long fetishized what he sees as strongman behavior and language, took another leaf out of the Duterte and Bolsonaro playbooks. Specifically, he aped both authoritarians in their approach to crime and punishment.
Throughout his awful tenure, Rodrigo Duterte, former president of the Philippines, gloried in the extrajudicial killing of drug dealers, users, and other criminals; similarly, Jair Bolsonaro, the far-right ex-president of Brazil, pushed for the police—who killed 22,000 people in a five-year spree during Bolsonaro’s time in office, including 6,357 in 2019 alone—to gun down criminals “like cockroaches.”
Trump, in Erie, called for shoplifters to face “one really violent day” and “one rough hour” at the hands of the police, arguing that it was Democratic policy to coddle offenders, and that taking the gloves off in the fight against street crime was the only way to render communities safe again. In a rambling speech notable both for its utter lack of syntax and its extraordinary embrace of illegal violence by state and federal agents, Trump declared ruefully: “They’re [police officers] not allowed to do it, because the liberal left won’t let them do it. If you had one real, rough, nasty day with the drug stores as an example.… she [Harris] created something in San Francisco, $950 you’re allowed to steal; anything above that you will be prosecuted. Originally you saw kids walking with calculators, standing there with calculators adding it up. If you had one really violent day, put Congressman Mike Kelly [a local GOP representative who was attending the rally] in charge for one day. Mike, would you say, if you’re in charge, ‘Don’t touch them, let them rob your stores’?… it’s a chain of events, it’s so bad. One rough hour, and I mean real rough, the word will get out and it will end immediately, end immediately, it will end immediately.”
The violent sentiments underpinning Trump’s word-salad sentences were in and of themselves appalling—as appalling as his reported desire during his time in the White House to let Border Patrol agents shoot undocumented immigrants in the legs as a form of deterrence. Equally disgusting was the reaction of his crowd. At each turn of phrase, at each homage to violence, the crowd roared its approval.
There’s been a lot of talk recently about “understanding” the Trump voter, about not tarring them all with their leader’s fetid brush. Good luck on that front. For, based on that particular interaction between cult leader and cult followers in Pennsylvania, I’d say a significant portion of them, at least the ones who think it a worthy investment of time and energy to attend a Trump rally, are now reveling in out-and-out fascist calls to violence. They’re supporting Trump not despite his propensity to devolve into ugly calls for clearly illegal acts of violence but because of it. And, in these rallies, they are provided the cover of numbers to give their worst, most vicious impulses free rein. That’s the emotional timbre of the lynch mob.
Let’s be clear here: No politician I have ever interviewed is a friend of shoplifters, gangsters (I haven’t interviewed Trump, so I add an asterisk here), burglars, drug dealers. No DA wakes up in the morning thinking of ways to make it easier for criminals to steal from their local Target superstore. But there are better ways to tackle street crime than giving uniformed officers carte blanche to beat the shit out of suspects. There are more effective law enforcement tools than the third degree.
Of course, in reality Trump’s proposals—and the reactions of his fans—have absolutely nothing to do with crime fighting and everything to do with intimidation and hierarchy, with using brute force to make it clear who’s boss.
In office, the MAGA leader sought to invoke the Insurrection Act against racial justice protesters; and he described police violence as a “beautiful thing to watch.” And while his 2016–20 presidency did see some criminal justice reform legislation signed into law, since then Trump has leaned into tough-on-crime policies: he has pledged to dramatically expand the use of the death penalty, to introduce summary executions for drug dealers, and Project 2025, which his campaign is closely tied to, has promised to pull back on federal probes into police violence against suspects. He has also repeatedly stated that he will use the Department of Justice to prosecute his political opponents, elections workers, and even members of the media.
Trump’s base loves all of this not because it’s about crime fighting but because it’s about retribution—against individuals and against groups deemed to be beyond the MAGA pale.
If the GOP and the MAGA movement were even remotely concerned with true crime fighting, they wouldn’t have nominated a man convicted of 34 felonies—not for stealing a few hundred dollars’ worth of drugstore items but for illegally paying off a porn star to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars to keep quiet about her affair with Donald J. Trump. They would not have nominated a man whose business enterprises have been found to have committed fraud and who boasts about his fine-tuned ability to avoid paying taxes. They would not have nominated a man found liable for sexual abuse, fined millions of dollars for defaming the victim of that sexual abuse, and caught on tape bragging about his ability to grab and grope the private parts of any woman he wants. They would not have nominated a man twice impeached, once for holding up aid to Ukraine in hopes of strong-arming that country’s government into dishing up political dirt on Joe Biden, the other time for inciting an armed uprising aimed at preventing the peaceful transfer of power after the 2020 election. They would not have nominated a man facing dozens of additional state and federal felony charges for everything from hoarding top-secret documents through to trying to bully state officials in swing states into changing the election tallies to benefit Donald Trump.
There’s a madness to this moment that fills me with dread. If the media was doing its job, it would have been all over Trump’s calls for extrajudicial violence. Instead, these comments got only a brief mention in a few outlets, and then the great bulk of the media moved on to the next batch of horse race stories, the next batch of Trumpian “own the libs” inanities.
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Imagine, for a moment, if the circumstances were just a tad altered. I suspect that the vast majority of media outlets in America would have paid more than a smidgeon of attention had a Democratic candidate for president gone on stage and told a crowd of baying supporters that one “rough hour, and I mean real rough” at the hands of police for people suspected of inciting insurrections that resulted in serious injuries to scores of law enforcement officers; of sexual abuse, hoarding documents vital to the national security interest, blackmailing foreign governments, evading taxes, grifting again and again and again—often by convincing their most fervent fans to part with hard-earned dollars in exchange for worthless hats, gold sneakers, even embossed Bibles—would end all of these shenanigans. I’m pretty certain more than a few eyebrows would have been raised had a Democrat said that the police were ready and willing to take the gloves off in their fight against insurrectionist billionaire tax evaders but that “the hard right, the GOP, won’t let them.”
Remember that old canard about people who live in glass houses having to be careful of throwing stones. In nominating a convicted felon, with a history of inciting violence, the GOP has built itself an almighty glass house. One would think its nominee ought, at the very least, to hedge his bets before he starts urging law enforcement to beat the crap out of suspected criminals. The modern incarnation of the GOP as the tough-on-crime party? That’s as delirious a concept as thinking of Jack the Ripper as a suffragette.
Sasha AbramskyTwitterSasha Abramsky is The Nation's Western Correspondent. He is the author of several books, including The American Way of Poverty, The House of Twenty Thousand Books, Little Wonder: The Fabulous Story of Lottie Dod, the World's First Female Sports Superstar, and most recently Chaos Comes Calling: The Battle Against the Far-Right Takeover of Small-Town America.