VP Pence set to visit Greensburg to support local police
At a time when the White House is deploying federal officers to quell protests that the nation’s top law enforcement official claims have been “hijacked” by “violent rioters and anarchists,” Vice President Mike Pence will visit Greensburg on behalf of the president’s re-election campaign to reaffirm the administration’s support of police officers.
The vice president’s event Thursday at the Greensburg Police Department will bring together the Cops for Trump coalition, one of the campaign’s many groups designed to coalesce around President Donald Trump’s re-election platform.
According to the Trump campaign, Mr. Pence will talk about the president’s “commitment to always back the blue” and criticize Mr. Trump’s Democratic opponent, former Vice President Joe Biden, for “[embracing the] far-left ‘defund the police’ movement.”
The Trump campaign is alleging that the Democratic Party and its prospective presidential nominee are submitting to the demands of the “radical left,” which they say has made efforts to “demonize, disparage, attack and vilify cops,” according to the coalition’s website.
“Our nation’s law enforcement officers leave for work every day not knowing whether they will return home safely,” the campaign coalition’s website reads. “For President Trump, supporting those who serve and protect while upholding the rule of law is critical in the fight to Keep America Great.”
Mr. Biden has never called for completely defunding the police. In a July interview that was shared thousands of times on social media — including by White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany — Mr. Biden agreed with an activist that some funding for police should be redirected into other programs, like mental health counseling, The Associated Press reported.
“We don’t have to defund the
police departments, we have to make sure they meet minimum basic standards of decency,” Mr. Biden said July 8, according to the AP.
Still, the president has made law-and-order a pillar of his re-election campaign, and earlier this month announced his administration would deploy a “surge of federal law enforcement into American communities plagued by violent crime.”
“For decades, politicians running many of our nation’s major cities have put the interests of criminals above the rights of law-abiding citizens,” Mr. Trump said. “These same politicians have now embraced the far-left movement to break up our police departments, causing violent crime in their cities to spiral — and I mean spiral seriously out of control.”
Mr. Pence has been a routine visitor to Western Pennsylvania, and in June, talked of “law-and-order” — as well as action addressing “the historical, underlying inequities that have beset minority communities” — during a roundtable with faith leaders in Wilkinsburg.