Trump’s ‘Law and Order’: One More Deceptive Tactic Is Exposed
The president’s response to the riot at the Capitol underscored the ways he has twisted the phrase “law and order” over the past four years.
If President Trump spent much of his presidency casting the G.O.P. as the party of law and order, he is concluding it by clarifying just who, in his view — and in his base’s view — the law was designed to order.
If President Trump spent much of his presidency casting the G.O.P. as the party of law and order, he is concluding it by clarifying just who, in his view — and in his base’s view — the law was designed to order.Credit…Jason Andrew for The New York Times
Elaina Plott
By Elaina Plott
Jan. 16, 2021
WASHINGTON — For years, the phrase rolled off his tongue in times of strife, a rallying cry to his predominantly white base.
So it was unsurprising when, on the day after his supporters stormed the Capitol, he uttered those familiar three words just 20 seconds into a video filmed from the White House.
“America is, and must always be,” Donald Trump declared, “a nation of law and order.”
He teed up the language as he often does, steadying his cadence before the big reveal of the first word — law — and letting it linger for half a beat before unfurling the rest: and order.
Yet Mr. Trump’s face, expressionless as it was, appeared to register a different truth: That in the aftermath of the attack, where his supporters overwhelmed the police and created anarchy, his favored mantra had become all but meaningless.
Ever since descending the gilded escalator of Trump Tower to announce his presidential bid in 2015, Mr. Trump has tethered his success to the politics of law and order, stoking fears and then positioning himself as the only person capable of confronting them. As for what — or whom — Americans should fear, Mr. Trump virtually always targeted people of color and people who protested for their rights: Mexicans, migrants from Central America, Black Lives Matter activists, the diverse array of protesters in major cities last summer.
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But this month, it was a largely white mob trawling the Capitol grounds with Trump banners and zip ties, and killing a police officer. And yet the president did not preside over a tear-gas-fogged show of force, as he had during a protest for racial justice before the White House last summer. Instead, he praised these supporters on the evening of the riot — “you’re very special,” he assured them, “we love you” — before trotting out the “law and order” comment the next day under pressure from advisers.
If Mr. Trump spent much of his presidency casting the G.O.P. as the party of law and order, he is concluding it by clarifying just who, in his view — and in his base’s view — the law was designed to order. It’s the Black Lives Matter protesters who are confronted and arrested by the police in Mr. Trump’s law-and-order America; the white mob, on the other hand, can expect officers who pause for selfies.
“This ‘Blue Lives Matter’ stuff was just a code word for race that they were using,” said Stuart Stevens, a longtime Republican strategist. “‘Law and order’? Here you have a police officer murdered on Capitol grounds, and the White House doesn’t even acknowledge it. It’s incredible.”
Republicans saw “law and order” slipping away from them long before last week. Even as Mr. Trump and much of his party put crime and public safety at the center of their campaigns, few voters were ultimately moved by it. In key states like Arizona, many white suburban women found the Trump campaign’s narrative — that a Biden administration would overhaul the nation’s law enforcement and usher in an unprecedented crime wave — more off-putting than resonant.
That’s not to say that no Republicans found success in staking their campaigns on law and order. In New York’s 11th Congressional District, Nicole Malliotakis celebrated her sizable victory over Max Rose, the Democratic incumbent, by declaring that voters had “sent a very clear message that they want law and order.” Ms. Malliotakis had spent much of her campaign linking Mr. Rose to the Black Lives Matter movement.
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Yet if some Republicans had succeeded in positioning their party as the one more committed to law and order, Mr. Trump, in refusing to accept the results of the election and encouraging his supporters to “fight back,” has seemed committed in proving them wrong.
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