Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump recently claimed that "one real tough, nasty" and "violent" day of police brutality would bring an immediate end to crime in the nation, raising alarms for experts on authoritarianism about the danger to democracy should Trump's remarks ever translate into policy.
The former president's comments came during a Sept. 29 campaign rally in Erie, Pa., as he bemoaned what he falsely claimed is "rampant" crime plaguing the nation. Specifically highlighting incidents of theft from stores, he called for police to be able to "do their job" and crack down on the perpetrators, lamenting that the "liberal left won't let them do it."
"One rough hour — and I mean real rough — the word will get out and it will end immediately. End immediately," he told the crowd after falsely linking crime to migration. Recent FBI data shows that overall crime in the U.S. has dipped in recent years, while analyses of historical crime data indicate immigrants commit fewer crimes than native-born Americans.
Geoff Eley, a University of Michigan professor of contemporary history who studies nationalism and the far-right, told Salon that Americans should take Trump's comments seriously even if it's often hard to know his true intent.
"We need to take his comments very, very seriously, partly because this time he's bull-in-a-china-shop determined to get his way, partly because (by contrast with 2016) he's surrounded by a core of smart and ruthlessly committed helpers and ideologues, whose ideas are most definitely coherent, thought-through and focused," Eley said in an email.
Trump's "political accomplishment," Eley said, has been in imparting to large swaths of the country that "democracy, proceduralism, civility, speaking across differences, and the rule of law have outlived their purposes — they're fictions, illusions, tricks, and they no longer matter."
Despite Trump's insistence both at the rally and throughout his campaign that crime "has gone through the roof," data indicates that the opposite is true.
Recently released FBI stats show a 2.4% decrease in property crime between 2022 and 2023. Preliminary data comparing periods of 2024 ranging from the first quarter to the first half to the same periods of 2023 also indicated a drop in violent crime following the COVID-19 isolation-era uptick, suggesting this year will see a continued decline in the nation's crime rate.
While the FBI stats reflect a jump in shoplifting — from 999,394 recorded incidents in 2022 to 1,149,336 in 2023 — those values roughly mirror the numbers reported before the pandemic in 2019, according to NBC News. A July Council on Criminal Justice report found that incidents of shoplifting during the first half of this year were 24% higher than the same period last year, but just 10% higher than during the same period in 2019.
Trump's linking of crime to the rise in immigrants attempting to cross the border also appears to sidestep the data. A 2023 Northwestern study, which used incarceration as a proxy for crime, found that immigrants are less likely than U.S.-born Americans to commit crimes.
Sheri Berman, a professor of political science at Barnard College and Columbia University who studies democracy and authoritarianism, said that the bottom line of Trump's Sunday comments — and likely the interpretation of the ordinary American voter — is that Trump is "doing what all politicians do: trying to paint his opponents as ineffective, ineffectual, and him as being able to come in and solve these problems."
"Trump understands the kinds of things that rile his supporters up and that worry them, so crime, disorder, these are things that not just his supporters, but generally Americans, are quite concerned about," she said in an interview. "The more he emphasizes them, the better it is for him, especially because, over the last three and a half, almost four years now, the country's been run by Democrats."
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In an effort to bolster his appeal to voters, he's creating "this image of disorder and crime that is not entirely out of touch with reality" but is juxtaposed with misinformation through his assertion of "exploding crime" and placement of blame on immigrants, Berman explained.
The difficulty in parsing exactly what the former president means also makes it hard to determine how literally to take him, even if his comments do inspire worry. Berman quoted reporter and columnist Salina Zeto's 2016 assessment that the press took Trump "literally, but not seriously" while his supporters took him "seriously, but not literally."
"This is why rhetoric matters but should be taken differently than actual behavior," she said. "You want to listen to what people say because it tells you something about what they're thinking, but you want to be able to differentiate that from actual actions."
Trump, who had been impeached twice and was convicted of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in New York earlier this year, has a documented history of inflaming his base through violent rhetoric. His Jan. 6, 2021 speech at the Ellipse, claiming a stolen election following his 2020 defeat, resulted in hundreds of people storming the U.S. Capitol.
Last month, his repeating an inflammatory conspiracy theory falsely accusing Haitian residents of Springfield, Ohio, of abducting and eating pets during the presidential debate sparked unrest in the city, which received dozens of violent threats in the following days and is still recovering from the unwanted spotlight.
The former president has also previously voiced support for police violence, once calling the police response to the nationwide social unrest in the wake of George Floyd's 2020 murder "a beautiful thing to watch." In 2017, he also said: "When you see these thugs being thrown into the back of a paddy wagon, you just see them thrown in, rough. I said, ‘Please don’t be too nice.’”
Trump's presidency reflected this endorsement of police violence. During the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, he deployed federal agents to Portland, Ore., to forcefully quash the demonstrations. Department of Homeland Security officials went on to break up crowds with stun grenades and tear gas, pelt protesters with impact munitions and detain demonstrators in unmarked vans.
That October, Trump also praised the actions of the federal task force that killed Michael Reinoehl, a Portland antifa activist who had been wanted for fatally shooting Aaron J. Danielson, a supporter of the far-right group Patriot Prayer. According to The New York Times, a reconstruction of Reinoehl's death based on witness and officer accounts raises questions about whether the officers made any serious attempt to arrest him before opening fire.
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Trump's comments resemble the "strategy of tension" of Italian neo-fascists of the 1970s, or what is contemporarily known as "acceleration," Eley said. Where the GOP presidential candidate aligns is in his use of "provocations and 'plain speaking,'" in effect giving voice to beliefs once considered too inflammatory to be spoken, to "ramp up the tension with the conscious hope that things will fall apart and open the space for the truly effective MAGA-related breakthrough," he speculated.
"As I've argued in my writings about fascism, this is the really frightening breach — the willingness to embrace the necessity (and virtue) of political violence," Eley argued. "As January 6 dramatically showed, this is where we've actually arrived."
The Trump campaign has sought to downplay the Republican candidate's remarks, with spokesman Steven Cheung telling Politico that Trump was “clearly just floating it in jest."
“President Trump has always been the law and order President and he continues to reiterate the importance of enforcing existing laws,” Cheung said in the statement.
Still, Berman, also a visiting scholar at the Harvard Center for European Studies, said that she worries upon hearing Trump make comments like his "violent day" remarks because the action they could reflect should they be literal is "obviously, not only ludicrous but profoundly non-democratic, illiberal, non-constitutional." Even if the language remains just that, such rhetoric evinces "some lack of understanding of what can actually be done within the rule of law," she said.
"Even if [immigration or crime] is a legitimate concern of yours, nobody should want a government — nobody should want a president who seems to indicate that he might be willing to engage in large-scale violence or semi-lawful acts in order to deal with this issue," she said.
She noted that voters who take Trump seriously and not literally are more likely to take his comments as him voicing a commitment to addressing their concerns over crime should he become president again.
"What his supporters would like is someone who takes crime and immigration seriously. Totally fair within the rules of the game," she said. "But you should sanction — that is to say, criticize, threaten, not vote for — someone who says, 'Look, I'm going to take these legitimate concerns of yours, and I am going to address them in ways that go beyond the framework of the Constitution, that go beyond the boundaries of the rule of law, that stress the norms and institutions of our democracy.'"
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