The first few weeks of Donald Trump’s second administration have been characterized, among other things, by an obscene display of policing power, one that has largely alarmed liberals because it appears completely lawless. One of Trump’s initial acts was pardoning and commuting people convicted of crimes related to January 6, including some who had injured law enforcement officers or had substantial criminal histories. Heather Cox Richardson, the official Democratic historian chronicling presidential politics in her Substack, Letters from an American, described these pardons as “signaling . . . that the judicial system that tried to hold him [Trump] — and them — accountable is corrupt and that he will protect those who fight for him in the streets.” Law enforcement objections were remarkably muted, probably because, just a day later, Trump pardoned two Washington, D.C., officers who had been convicted of second-degree murder and obstruction of justice for killing 20-year-old Karon Hylton-Brown in a car chase and then lying to cover it up (a pardon not mentioned by Richardson). The president wrongly described the officers as arrested and convicted “for going after a criminal. A rough criminal, by the way.” (Hylton-Brown’s mother has asked for, but has not received, a meeting with the president.)
Of course, this is not new for Trump. During his first term, he met regularly with county sheriffs, encouraging them to help his administration arrest and jail immigrants, directed the police to clear protestors from Lafayette Park using pepper balls and tear gas so that he could take a picture holding a Bible, and celebrated when federal officers fired 34 bullets at Michael Reinoehl, killing him. “A retribution,” Trump crowed. This time, Trump has ordered immigrants to be jailed in Guantanamo Bay, demanded that federal prosecutors use the death penalty more often despite obvious concerns with lethal injection protocols, and has threatened to send the military to police protests. During his first speech to Congress, he promised to provide the mandatory death penalty for those convicted of killing law enforcement, to “[enhance] protections for America’s police officers so they can do their jobs without fear of their lives being totally destroyed,” and gave an honorary Secret Service badge to a child. (Notably, as in keeping with Trump’s first term, the president offered no funding to law enforcement.)
While the usual gaggle of liberal commentators have spent their time worrying about, well, the lack of liberalism in the Trump administration — indeed, Trump and his cohort have no scruples about trampling on free speech, threatening prosecutors and members of Congress, and sending teenagers to handle sensitive information — the same liberals have been slow to condemn the fascistic way that this administration uses law enforcement because the Democrats have a similar relationship to the police. While many have noted that the immigrants who were sent to Guantanamo Bay in shackles were not the super-criminals Trump claimed, they have conveniently ignored that it was Joe Biden who not only ramped up contracts for private prisons but also prepared a plan to reopen Guantanamo in order to jail immigrants from Haiti. It was, in fact, the Democratic party who gave millions of dollars to law enforcement without ever passing comprehensive police reform. And it was the Democratic candidate for president who ran as a police-defender against, in her words, a “felon.” Yet, many are still confused by a movement that worships violence when in pursuit of a great cause, that cause being American dominance. As Trump posted on X, “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.” The Democrats do not recognize their own work in midwifing this movement.
But all of this is the direct result of a Democratic politics that continues to rely upon and revere law enforcement — prosecutors, criminal courts, police, prisons, and all the violence contained within these systems — despite abundant evidence that the criminal legal system does not keep us safe, that militarized violence does not protect communities, and that the Democratic party want a violent law enforcement so long as they are not forced to see it. The ASMR of people in leg chains — the same leg chains that incarcerated women wear while giving birth and that children wear while appearing in criminal court even if they are charged with shoplifting — is offensive to Democrats not because they find people in chains morally offensive but because they do not want to see a practice that they themselves have supported revealed as the monstrosity it is.
The protests against police violence in the summer of 2020 were a truly popular uprising with a coherent set of demands that were not just ignored but openly scorned by Democrats and many popular figures on the left. (Even Bernie Sanders advocated for more funding for the police, and derided calls for police abolition.) Since then, as the party bled out what meager law enforcement support was left, the Democrats have tried in vain to reestablish themselves as the party of law and order. Witness the New York Police Department’s violent siege and arrests of student protestors against genocide at Columbia University or the city of Atlanta’s push to criminalize and demonize protests against “Cop City.” Both (again) were popular uprisings met with disproportionate force and condemnation from the left. Because police see themselves as a separate class of people unbridled by concern for citizens’ rights, they were happy to oblige with battering rams, flash bangs, and SWAT teams, even if their disdain of Democratic politicians remained overt and unchanging.
Democratic politicians supported the proliferation of law enforcement, on public transportation, in schools, even inside homes, a move that has only served to increase the number of people killed by police. Democratic policies are what first empowered the police to become a violent force against the left and in deference to Trump. What Trump understands is that the glory, power, and social currency of the police serve as the backbone for authoritarianism in the United States. It is a militaristic, hyper masculine system which is impervious to change and maddeningly difficult to monitor.
The Fraternal Order of Police represents around 330,000 law enforcement officers organized into local “lodges” across the country. It has endorsed Donald Trump for president three times. In their September 2024 press release endorsing Trump with “zero doubt,” the FOP president raised the specter of “defund the police” movement, which has become irrevocably, albeit wrongly, yoked to the Democratic party. “During his first term, President Trump made it clear he supported law enforcement and border security,” the FOP statement reads, in part. “In the summer of 2020, he stood with us when very few would. With his help, we defeated the ‘defund the police’ movement.” Severing calls to “defund the police” from democratic legitimacy — millions of people of all races participated in protests during the summer of 2020 — the FOP turns civil rights on its head, insisting that that police, like Trump, are an embattled minority.
But the Democrats do not point out that the prevalence and empowerment of police is a danger to all Americans. Instead they cast themselves as the “true” law and order party and repeat over and over again that Trump was criminally charged and found guilty on three felony counts. The anti-Trump movement describes Trump as a “felon” or “the first felon in the White House,” even though 19 million people in this country are also “felons” none of whom are the President of the United States. (In most states, those charged with felony convictions cannot vote, so they are also barred from participating in the government, something neither party has been inclined to change.) Because Democrats accept the delusion that Republicans are the party of “law-and-order” and that Democrats are the party of equitable policing, they believed that calling attention to Trump’s criminal convictions would sway Republicans to their side. How could someone who supported the police support Trump? But the Democrats don’t understand that neither the police nor Republicans see Trump as a criminal, they see Trump as wrongly charged with crimes.
Despite constant Republican claims to the contrary, Democrats never supported any form of police abolition. The FOP’s characterization is utterly divorced from reality. While some politicians running in 2020 gestured towards the massive movement that erupted across the country to protest police violence — notably, Kamala Harris suggested once that the government “invest in communities” — there was no real momentum for change on the national level. Politics as usual dictated condemning protests and reassuring law enforcement that they would not be forced to change. Democrats were eager to counter the perception that they supported any form of a reduction in police funding. As Joe Biden put it in 2022, “The answer is to fund the police.”
While there was a modest desire for community investment in lieu of police militarization on the local level, it quickly dissipated. A recent study points out that Democratic mayors no more defunded nor reformed the police than their Republican counterparts; another shows that no police departments were defunded at all. Nonprofits quickly pivoted away from the problem of de-policing the country, instead focusing on the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act — introduced by Nancy Pelosi in a kente-cloth — which was weak, watered-down, and never passed because of intense opposition by police unions and Republicans. Biden issued an executive order in May of 2022 calling for “advanc[ing] effective, accountable policing and criminal justice practices to enhance public trust and public safety.” But by 2024, the pretense of caring about police violence had ended. The 2024 Democratic platform explicitly said, “We need to fund the police, not defund the police” and did not even mention concerns about police violence or racism in the criminal legal system.
None of this is new. Democrats have been overfunding the police since the “war on poverty” in the 1960s even though in 1964 Barry Goldwater attacked Democrats with ads blaming them for “Juvenile Delinquency! Crime! Riots!” The next year, Democratic President Lyndon Johnson launched the “war on crime” and in 1968 he signed, with the help of a Democratic Congress, the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act, which, as Elizabeth Hinton has explained in her work, greatly contributed to the prevalence of police officers in the streets of Black neighborhoods. Why? Because liberals were afraid of popular uprisings by Black communities tired of incessant oppression. They were not afraid of the police.
Biden himself has supported law enforcement throughout his career. He was a key proponent of the 1994 Crime Bill (signed by Democratic President Bill Clinton), bragging to the Senate: “The truth is, every major crime bill since 1976 that’s come out of this Congress, every minor crime bill, has had the name of the Democratic senator from the State of Delaware: Joe Biden.” And now we also know that Biden was increasing immigrant detention and installing more surveillance equipment at the U.S.–Mexico border. Biden set aside billions of dollars to get “more officers on the beat.” And while Biden set a record for commutations, he also pardoned his son, other family members, and a group of MAGA political targets. Despite the #resistance explanation that this was necessary to prevent Trump’s weaponization of the criminal legal system, it is nonetheless outright disdainful for Biden to ignore, for example, the many women still in prison for killing abusive partners. In much the same way, Biden’s commutation of most of the federal death row now feels ineffectual, avoiding any definitive statement on the death penalty itself and leaving the apparatus intact for Trump to use, which was exactly MAGA’s plan all along.
Over the past decade, Democrats writ large, alongside some Republicans, understood that the appearance of reducing mass incarceration was good politics. Republicans focused on costs and austerity; keeping people in prison is expensive, never mind that those same people could become a viable working force for industry. As for liberals, there was an ontological conflict between humanitarian impulses and a desire to mobilize law enforcement as community service. Trapped in the mindset that policing and jails are “good government,” they meekly sought to improve conditions for those already incarcerated and nibbled around the edges of the incarcerated population by, for example, litigating limits around the use of the death penalty and attempting to reduce the number of children sentenced to die in prison. Most reforms focused on so-called “non-violent” crimes, especially drug possession, and these reforms yielded an overall societal shift on marijuana legalization (now being debated) in lieu of a true reconsideration of how criminal law was serving to segregate society.
Not only did many of these small tweaks to the system fail, such reforms produced other problems that Democrats were loath to confront. In 2011, when the U.S. Supreme Court ordered California to reduce its prison population, the state undertook a process it called “realignment,” through which many people serving prison sentences were sent to local jails. Those jails, run by elected county sheriffs, were ill-equipped to provide adequate housing and healthcare. While the state funded these counties, most local politicians did not want to invest in non-carceral alternatives. Instead, jails grew larger and became more dangerous. Reform remained elusive for those trapped in perpetual purgatory, and, even now as jail populations have gone down in the state, jail deaths have not. (This year, blue Californian voters repealed many of the reforms that led to a reduced incarcerated population, so, once again, this small reform effort has been undone by Democrats.)
The failure of many of these liberal reforms was bound to come to a tipping point, mostly because deaths (especially of women), sexual violence, and severe trauma never abated, despite (or because of) police empowerment. Those protests in 2020 included many white people who had been compelled to watch the videos — ubiquitous on social media because of body cameras and cellphones — of police murdering African American men and women. But, savvily, law enforcement used these protests as an opportunity to increase their lobbying strength and consolidate power through threats. Trump, who was president in the summer of 2020, called protestors “thugs” and wanted to shoot them. Joe Biden, who was elected largely because of support from Black voters, forgot the lessons of that summer and worked vigorously to swing centrists to his side.
As I write this, the movement to reduce mass incarceration is in freefall, untethered by any respect for human dignity. Many right-wing figures, centrists, and liberals have decided that the best way to counter perceptions of disorder is to swell police power. But unlike Biden, MAGA does not empower police by pumping them full of funding and equipment. Instead, the right loosens the already weak social, political, and legal pressures on police to constrain violence and respect civilian freedom.
In addition, state lawmakers have been plain in stating that their goal is not to crack down on serious crimes. No, they insist that the problem is lack of enforcement specifically of lower-level crimes. Police must therefore be empowered to address common, nonviolent crime in whichever way they choose, which is through arrests and jail. Liberals should prickle at such rhetoric. What better way to constrain personal liberty than increase police discretion to catch low-level criminals? In California, the Guardian reported that “officers are jubilant,” after a voter referendum downgraded a litany of felonies to misdemeanors. Even though shoplifting has always been a crime — most often a non-violent one — police felt liberated to make more arrests, and the public lauded them for it. Democratic state lawmaker in Maryland told the AP, “Violent or nonviolent, a crime is a crime. And that crime needs to be punished.” Will white Americans support this transition if it means they get arrested for creeping above the speed limit or, say, touching a police officer?
It is plain that what the Democratic party has done is fund a massive expansion of policing and jailing that will be used by Trump to continue and expand the mechanisms for imprisoning, torturing, and deporting more people. Trump’s promised mass deportation will rely upon the network of immigrant detention facilities that Biden built in order to house the growing number of people Biden detained before Trump’s victory. And Trump has been very clear about what he intends to do with the law enforcement officers and the jails Democrats paid for — at an FOP conference, Trump said, “[W]e will give the heroes in blue the power to legally protect us and the respect that you deserve more than any other group of people.”
In the run-up to the 2024 election, law enforcement cemented their dedication to the GOP, which has moved further to the right. In addition to the FOP endorsement, Trump was perpetually surrounded by uniformed sheriffs, bolstered by law enforcement unions, and praised by rank-and-file. They support civilian access to firearms, restrictions on travel for pregnant people, and the death penalty. While some liberals have fretted about the prevalence of the QAnon conspiracy-laden cult, they have failed to see how ideas promoted by QAnon — especially anxieties about sex trafficking and child abuse — have fully permeated the policing system.
The structure of American policing prevents it from policing itself. Police as a whole distrust the law, epitomized by their tendency to flout it, and, thus, do not see themselves as agents of a neutral system. Democrats remain confident in a system that they believe has the power to enforce justice and mete it out as mercy. And so they are repeatedly confused when law enforcement remains silent on the peculiar fascism of Donald Trump. In reassuring themselves that they were doing the right thing by, for example, channeling massive funding into immigration detention, they have obscured their own complicity in Trump’s new regime.
Even still, the #resistance crowd insists that the carceral apparatus can be put to antifascist use. They have focused on the January 6 prosecutions, led by a prosecutor who wanted to focus on individuals, not Trump. Repeating the failed “felon” strategy, Democratic lawmakers focus on Trump’s pardons rather than stopping Trump from using the military to deport people. Instead, Democrats continue to sign onto policies crafted on the assumption that arrest and detention will make society safer. The Laken Riley Act, for example, empowers ICE to arrest and detain more people for the purposes of deportation. Yet, at least 48 Democrats approved the bill with many prominent Democrats — including Ruben Gallego and John Fetterman — coming out strongly in support of it.
Trump has taken the current policing regime and is transitioning the entire apparatus into the militaristic force that law enforcement see themselves to be. He understands them, revels in the ability to commit violence on the streets or at home. Before Trump even became president, he said, “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody.”
Despite this warning, the Democrats have ignored that they were building their own straightjacket. In their quest to preserve the ruling class with its benefits, the ability to reduce the protests of 2020 into the solution of Robin D’Angelo, Democrats allowed an enormous armed force to acquire enormous power that they use to fight to preserve a racial and social hierarchy. They have paid for Trump’s police force, a violence-making machine that is loyal to him and him alone.
Democrats will be forced to choose whether to embrace abolition to some degree (as they are accused) or to continue to support an increasingly fascist police force that they themselves have wielded to curb political protest. They lost the most important election because they refused to acknowledge the chasm between claiming the mantle of democracy and joy while brutally crushing dissent. They have helped law enforcement to swell in power and violence to the detriment of public safety. Of course, they did this because it benefitted their own quest to protect capital and prevent the ascendance of a truly populist left wing. Watching Venezuelans in ankle cuffs land in Gitmo, the threat may seem far away. But it is coming for everyone, regardless of race or wealth, something even Joe Biden understood.
Democrats reflexively trust the police, and for that reason, more than any other, they have swelled police power rather than insisting on a crackdown that could have forced the creation of a constrained police force. Their failure on this issue has cost the country immeasurably. When a country turns its back on liberalism and embraces fascism, the first question the citizenry must ask itself is: will law enforcement protect us, or, if the President asks them to, will they protect him? The answer to that question is clear, and it is clear because of decisions that Democratic officials have been making for decades.
We can only hope we are given a second chance to correct these mistakes.