On Friday, in a speech to law-enforcement officers at Suffolk County
Community College in Brentwood, Long Island, President Trump offered one
of the clearest distillations of Trumpism since it became a significant
political force, two years ago. Several Long Island communities have
struggled in recent years with violence associated with Mara
Salvatrucha, more widely known as the MS-13 gang. By some estimates, as many as a thousand members of the gang are living in the area. Trump, whose very first
statement as a Presidential candidate decried “rapists” whom Mexico
“sends” over the border to the United States, struck the familiar
law-and-order and anti-immigration themes of the campaign: the country
has been suckered by wily foreign regimes; the “tough” people who can
handle the problem have been handcuffed by politically correct élites.
He is here to unshackle the hands of our protectors.

That rhetoric was key to him winning the endorsement, last September, of
the Fraternal Order of Police, which stated that Trump “understands and
supports our priorities and our members believe he will make America
safe again.” (Black police organizations, notably, rejected the F.O.P.’s
Trump endorsement.) Alarmingly, Trump urged the police officers gathered
in Brentwood to be more cavalier in their use of force:

The comment drew approving laughter from the crowd. Trump assailed
Chicago for its “unbelievable violence” and pointed to his interactions
with an unnamed, “really respected officer,” who said that, if the
police weren’t held in check, violent crime in the city could be
resolved in “a couple of days.” This is vintage Trumpism: the revelation
that our problems have been presented as unduly complex. There is always
a simple solution that our leadership lacks the gonadal audacity to
implement.

Yet, as with Trump’s rambling, inappropriate address to the Boy Scouts earlier in the week, what he said about killing
Obamacare and hot yacht parties was less troubling than the way people
reacted to it. Pressed to respond to Trump’s statements, the Boy Scouts
of America released a statement distancing itself from the commentary
that brought cheers from many of the youth in the audience. Trump’s
demagogic charisma is disturbing enough when it excites
thirteen-year-olds, but it’s cause for full-blown alarm when law
enforcement—the only institution in American life authorized to kill
citizens—reacts in the same way. In response to Trump’s speech, the
Suffolk County Police Department issued a statement declaring that the
President’s recommendations were at odds with the department’s
procedures, as did the N.Y.P.D., the L.A.P.D., and the International
Association of Police Chiefs. The denunciations of Trump’s rhetoric
always come in the cooler aftermath of his utterances; in the febrile
atmosphere of his rallies, his most anti-democratic statements inspire
rapt endorsement.

Trump has been making inflammatory statements since literally the first
day of his life as a politician, and in that time a life cycle of
Trumpian outrages has become apparent. Whenever his words provoke the
most sustained backlash—his comments implying that gun owners might
shoot Hillary Clinton to protect the Second Amendment and his request
that Russian hackers target the Clinton campaign, for instance—the
tendency is to explain them away as an attempt at humor. Predictably, on
Monday, the White House press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders,
dismissed as a joke Trump’s line about police use of force. There is
little comedy, however, in the ways in which that line reflects his
Administration’s broader priorities when it comes to policing.

In April, the Department of Justice curtailed the use of consent decrees—negotiated best-practice agreements that, in the years since the Rodney King
beating, in Los Angeles, had become the primary tool for reforming
chronically troubled police departments. One result of the Justice
Department’s policy shift was that the Baltimore Police Department,
which came under federal investigation following Freddie Gray’s death,
in April, 2015, had to negotiate its reform agreement over the
objections of the very Justice Department whose examination pointed out
the need for reform in the first place. The implicit message was that
the Trump Administration would be far less aggressive in its oversight
of rogue police departments.

In May, Attorney General Jeff Sessions addressed a gathering of
law-enforcement officers in Memphis, hitting notes similar to those in
Trump’s Brentwood speech: pointing to the specific crime problems of the
local community, decrying the lack of support that police departments
have received in handling those problems, and denouncing the evils of
gangs and pledging to eliminate them. Here is Sessions on gangs:

Nine days before Trump’s Brentwood speech, Sessions issued Justice
Department guidelines strengthening police departments’ ability to use
civil forfeiture, the seizure of assets from individuals who are
suspected of a crime but have not been convicted of, tried for, or, in
some cases, even charged with any offense. As Sarah Stillman pointed out
in the magazine in
2013, the practice has effectively incentivized corruption among
cash-strapped police departments, which now have both a rationale and a
financial motive to pull over motorists and seize their cash and
vehicles with scant cause.

In Trump’s world, toughness is not a means to an end—it is an end in
itself. When Trump invokes Chicago as the exemplar of what is wrong with
American law enforcement, the irony is that the city’s crime problem was
made worse by its anything-goes ethic of policing. The city where police
ran a black site for torturing suspects, attempted to cover up the circumstances in which
the seventeen-year-old Laquan McDonald was killed, and regularly paid
out millions in police-brutality settlements is the same city where seventy per cent of residents do not believe that police can be trusted to treat all
residents fairly. The idea that community trust is more valuable to a
police department than “toughness”—really a Trumpian euphemism for
brutality—might seem quaint, but Chicago’s experience would point to the
contrary. When Trump says police need not be concerned if suspects
suffer head injuries in their custody, it’s not simply a wink and a nod
at the old days of unrestrained policing. It’s a foreshadowing of a
world he’s actively attempting to resurrect.