WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump 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 before adding. “They're not politically correct sirens.”
Coming as it did during an otherwise somber event to posthumously award the Presidential Medal of Freedom to conservative activist Charlie Kirk, the moment encapsulated how Trump's push for law-and-order-at-all-costs 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 has suggested that U.S. urban areas could become military “ training grounds ” and toyed with invoking the Insurrection Act 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 administration has sometimes trampled law enforcement norms and critics say Trump has weaponized the Department of Justice, using it to go after political opponents.
On Wednesday, he touted the results of a crackdown named “Operation Summer Heat” in the Oval Office. Flanked by FBI Director Kash Patel and Attorney General Pam Bondi, Trump said the FBI made 8,000-plus arrests.
Trump said that he had talked about crime during his campaign last year, but never expected it to be such a major second-term focus.
“Now it’s like a passion for me,” he said, and that his actions were “many many steps above” what he’d pledged and “we're just at the start.”
It's 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 city residents clamored for crackdowns.
Trump's efforts have drawn resistance from local leaders. His plans to send soldiers to Chicago and Portland, Oregon, have so far been thwarted by legal challenges. He has said he is confident he will 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 took control of the California National Guard in response to protests against immigration raids in Los Angeles and sent the National Guard into Washington, D.C. and Memphis, Tennessee.
Trump also has mused about taking similar action in Baltimore, New Orleans and New York, and also threatened Boston, 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 accused criminals — guilty or not — burst into public view more than 30 years ago. He stirred racial tensions by calling for the execution of the Central Park Five, a group of Black and Hispanic teenagers who were 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.
“That’s the very same spirit that’s at work now,” said 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 killing of George Floyd, 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 bipartisan achievement 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 cashless bail and other measures aimed at reversing systematic bias in the justice system.
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 Trump's most extreme impulses and have long been replaced by loyalists.
“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. “It’s 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 The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research found that the administration's tough-on-crime approach has emerged as one of Trump's best issues, 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 violent crime is down across the nation following a pandemic-era spike.
The White House rejects suggestions that 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 president’s bold actions in cities across the country are making all Americans safer,” said White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson, 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 that Washington crime has fallen to zero — which also isn't true.
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.”
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Colvin reported from New York.