from the unlawfulness-and-disorder dept
Trump was never about law and order. He cozied up to cops and praised police brutality, but when push came to literal shove, he sat back and watched his supporters attack law enforcement officers and commit federal crimes for the sole purpose of destroying democracy itself.
Now that he’s back in office, he’s back to pretending he cares about law and order. His recent executive order echoes one issued during his first term: one that demands people start respecting cops (even if he and his followers won’t during insurrections) and suggests there’s a police state ahead of us because they nation can’t be saved without trampling all of our rights.
But it’s not just about cops or law and order demagoguery. What Trump really wants is zero accountability across the board. That’s why his DOJ has revamped its Civil Rights division to protect only the rights Trump actually cares about. Say goodbye to the First, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, and Fourteenth Amendments. Say hello to protecting the Second Amendment and shutting down anything the administration thinks might protect the rights of anyone but the whitest, male-est US citizens.
The Marshall Project has published a round-up of the DOJ’s actions during Trump’s ignominious return to the ultimate position of power: Leader of the Free World. To be sure, Trump doesn’t actually want a “free world” any more than he wants free and fair elections. What he does want is the erasure of everything he doesn’t like, even if it means doing considerable amount of damage to the country he claims to be making great again.
The good news is… well, I guess there’s not really any of that.
Last week, Attorney General Pam Bondi cancelled hundreds of Department of Justice grants centered on crime prevention to shift its focus toward illegal drug enforcement and the eradication of DEI policies. On Monday, the president signed executive orders to limit police reform and rescind consent decrees that hold police agencies accountable. And recent reporting details how the department’s Office of Civil Rights is transitioning from enforcing civil rights laws to bringing cases against universities and cities passing liberal policies, leading hundreds of attorneys to resign in protest and effectively gutting the division.
If Trump were an unknown quantity, one might suspect he was trying to get fired or, possibly, take down the government from the inside. But Trump loves Big Government architecture and its insular qualities. That’s why he’s converted its sharper edges to weapons to be deployed against all the stuff he hates.
His blind thrashing at anything “woke” is just brain stem responses to stimuli, at least as far as Trump himself is concerned. The bigger problem is that blindly lashing out has resulted in the erasure of American history, at least in terms of women, minorities, and LGBTQ+ citizens. This is by design, but probably not because Trump is such a savvy operator. It’s collateral damage, but damage his supporters are not only willing to embrace, but leverage.
The first line of the quoted paragraph, however, highlights the hypocrisy that the Trump Administration seems to believe is one of its virtues. This president has spent a considerable amount of time claiming this country is constantly under attack by violent criminals. Yet, when given the chance, he has chosen to strip funds from crime prevention programs. Worse, he stripped federal funds meant to help crime victims, as well as police personnel actively engaged in providing this assistance.
The U.S. Justice Department is terminating $811 million in grants, including some impacting victim service programs ranging from trauma centers and sign language interpretation for domestic violence victims to police training, according to internal documents and two sources.
Every cut is designed to favor cops, eliminate accountability, eradicate transparency, and allow people with access to power to abuse it.
Say goodbye to prison rape reporting efforts because Trump doesn’t care about incarcerated people and data shows a sizable percentage of this rape is committed by prison staffers. Funding for gun violence studies has also been cut off.
And, while demanding the DOJ do better at tracking national crime rates, the administration has decided criminals who happen to wear cop uniforms shouldn’t be subject to the same sort of background checks regular people endure pretty much any time they go looking for a new job.
In 2022, the Biden administration created the National Law Enforcement Accountability Database, a central place for police departments to search for information about federal law enforcement officers with criminal convictions and misconduct violations. Trump decommissioned the database on his first day in office.
What’s truly insane is that this wasn’t even a public-facing database, so it wasn’t as though journalists and activists were using this to propel an anti-cop narrative. This was solely for use by federal and local law enforcement agencies to ensure they weren’t just hiring troublemakers who’d already been shit-canned for violating rights or engaging in egregious misconduct. Now, these agencies are going into the hiring process blind. And while many might be fine with that, this gives the worst agencies that are willing to hire the worst ex-cops all the plausible deniability they’ll need to respond to criticism of their hiring processes.
This is the America Trump wants and one his fans are willing to support, right up until they feel the need to bash a cop’s head in with a fire extinguisher or whatever. And while it may work for them (until it doesn’t), the rest of us are going to be forced to live with it and its consequences for years, if not decades, to come.
Filed Under: civil rights, doj, donald trump, pam bondi, police accountability, police misconduct, police state, rights violations
