Trump accepts approval from national police task force

Former President Donald Trump accepted an endorsement for president from a national organization of rank-and-file police officers Friday night, hours after a New York court stayed his sentencing on 34 counts of aggravated fraud. He also pledged to bring back “stop and frisk” policing, a policing strategy that has been deemed unconstitutional.

“You don’t hear this, but I’ll tell you it’s true for all law enforcement officers here today. I have so much respect for you. I admire you, and as your president, I will always support the blue party, just like I did. I supported the blue party more than anyone else,” Trump said at a reception for the Fraternal Order of Police, the nation’s largest grassroots law enforcement membership group.

In the same breath, he launched a favorite attack against his Democratic opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris.

“I wasn’t a defunder like Kamala. She was a defunder. She was a 10-year defunder. If you defund for 10 years, that’s the end of that year. I think I can leave now and you say, there’s no way we’re not voting for this guy,” Trump said, apparently accusing Harris of trying to get “defund the police,” as he had previously accused her of doing. “That’s the ultimate, right?”

Harris, however, has not publicly advocated defunding the police. Instead, she has called for “reimagining policing,” a term often used to refer to rethinking and reforming use of force policies and police tactics. The term has been used by the Obama Foundation, and the Obama administration has made policing a priority through the President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing.

In an attempt to play on police, Trump insisted that officers “can’t do their jobs,” though he didn’t specify what that meant or how officers are limited in their work. Whether or not they’re doing their jobs, the fact remains that case clearance rates — the percentages at which police close cases — have declined since May 2020, the same month George Floyd was killed by a Minneapolis police officer.

“As we gather today, American cities, suburbs and towns are under siege. Kamala Harris and the communist left have unleashed a brutal plague of bloodshed, crime, chaos, misery and death upon our land,” Trump said.

However, federal crime data from 2012 to 2022 shows violent crime rates have declined from a recent high in Trump’s final year in office. According to the FBI, the violent crime rate in 2020 was 398.5 violent crimes per 100,000 people, before dropping to 380.7 per 100,000 people in 2022, the most recent data set available. However, Trump dismissed federal crime data as “fake,” saying that “30% of jurisdictions don’t report crime statistics” to the FBI.

Trump vowed to “get tough on Marxist prosecutors” and return to “proven methods of fighting crime, including stop-and-frisk and broken windows policing,” as implemented in New York City under then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani, a now-disgraced Trump ally. More than a decade ago, stop-and-frisk policing was declared unconstitutional by a federal court that found the policy led to systematic racial profiling and violated New Yorkers’ Fourth and Fourteenth Amendment rights.

“But we’re making our cities and towns safe again. We’re making them clean and beautiful again, and we’re having places where you can live the way you’re supposed to live, because people are living in hell right now,” Trump insisted.

The former president also continued to rehash the 2020 election, insisting that “if we can keep the cheating to a minimum — because these people cheat, they cheat like hell — if we can keep it to a minimum, we win easy,” and encouraging law enforcement to “watch out for voter fraud, because we win without voter fraud.” There is no evidence that widespread voter fraud caused Trump to lose the 2020 election — a point Trump finally appeared to concede earlier this week, telling podcaster Lex Fridman that he “lost by a hair.”

Then, running through a list of promises for actions he would take if he won the White House, Trump promised on his first day to “sign an executive order…making it the official policy of the United States government to completely eliminate the presidents of drug cartels and foreign gangs in the United States.”

Trump celebrates stay of sentencing

Trump also celebrated the news that his sentencing in the New York hush-money case had been postponed until after the Nov. 5 presidential election. The reasoning, according to Manhattan District Judge Juan Merchan, was to “avoid any appearance — however unwarranted — that the proceedings have been influenced or are attempting to influence the impending presidential election in which defendant is a candidate.”

Trump, however, gave his own reason for the delay.

“The Manhattan District Attorney’s witch hunt against me has been postponed because everyone realizes there was no case because I did nothing wrong. It is a witch hunt,” Trump said. “It is an attack by my political opponents in Washington, D.C. and Comrade Kamala Harris and radical left opponents with the goal of election interference,” he continued, adding that “every legal scholar, expert, shining example — including people and very respected people in this room…they all said this is a case that is not a case, and it shouldn’t even be brought. Political.”

While Trump has repeatedly argued publicly that the case should be “terminated,” his attorney has sought to delay sentencing to avoid a “politically damaging” impact on the presidential election. “He seeks to bolster his application by rehashing a litany of perceived and unsubstantiated grievances from prior filings that do not merit this Court’s attention,” Merchan wrote in Friday’s decision brief.