Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
‘Law and order’ catchphrase’s catch
Capitol riot bares meaninglessness of Trump mantra
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,” President 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 Trump’s face appeared to register a different truth: That in the aftermath of the attack, where his supporters overwhelmed 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, 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, Trump virtually always targeted people of color and people who protested for their rights.
But this month, it was a largely white mob trawling the U.S. Capitol grounds with Trump banners and zip ties, and killing a police officer after striking him in the head with a fire extinguisher. And yet the president did not preside over a teargas-fogged show of force, as he had during a protest for racial justice before the White House last summer.
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 Trump spent much of his presidency casting the GOP 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.
“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 Jan. 6. Even as 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.
Trump endeavored to make the Black Lives Matter movement synonymous with unrest, and paint Joe Biden as a candidate too meek to quell it, too likely to accede to the rioters’ demands to defund the police. Yet by the time of the election, of all the concerns animating even Republican voters, crime and safety did not crack the top five.
The message sputtered in no small part because many Americans largely supported the goals of the Black Lives Matter protesters, according to polling, a stark contrast to the 1960s and ’70s, when surveys showed that Americans were less likely to view police brutality as a problem and more afraid of demonstrations and riots spilling into their community.
Richard Nixon’s elevation of the phrase during that time to a “term of art,” as Theodore Johnson, a senior fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice, put it, was not just in speaking to the anxieties sweeping the nation at the time, but in knowing what to leave unsaid.
“In the ’60s, there was a lot for people to be worried about,” Johnson said. “Political assassinations, hundreds of riots, high crime rates — people genuinely did want to do something about crime and feel safer and more secure in their homes and communities.”
“But who communities needed to be safe from was always sort of the undercurrent of law and order,” he continued. “It wasn’t just that crimes were up, it was who the criminals were.”
For Trump, the latter was never so much the undercurrent as the main event. Long before running for president, he liked talking about who the criminals were, even when he got them wrong. In 1989, Trump took out a full-page ad in multiple New York City newspapers to call for the execution of those responsible for the rape of a white female jogger in Central Park, wondering what had happened to “law and order.” The police wrongly charged a group of Black and Latino men, known as the Central Park Five, for the crime.
Fast forward to 2016, and there Trump was invoking law and order again, this time rallying supporters in Virginia Beach, Virginia, as the presumptive Republican nominee for president. “We must maintain law and order at the highest level, or we will cease to have a country,” Trump declared. “One hundred percent: We will cease to have a country. I am the law-and-order candidate.”
The law-and-order candidate went on to become the self-fashioned law-and-order president, which for Trump quickly meant attacking the FBI, his own Department of Justice and, ultimately, firing his attorney general for recusing himself from the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.
“The attack at the Capitol was the outcome of years of eroding the line between fact and fiction and right and wrong,” said Rory Cooper, a Republican strategist. Cooper argued there was an opening now for a “conservative candidate” to definitively decouple appeals to law and order from the selective enforcement of the Trump era, “but we’re some distance from that time.”
Hogan Gidley, a spokesperson for the president, argued Trump’s message of love had not included those who stormed the Capitol. “The president was not talking about those people; clearly it was the people who were there to peaceably assemble, peaceably protest,” Gidley said, though Trump had not specified this fact. “Because we believe in protecting not just the concept of law and order, but the actual brave men and women who institute law and order.”
Yet if law and order means a commitment to equal security and justice, not even Trump’s own aides seem sure that, in the final days of his presidency, his supporters will abide it.
And so the law-and-order presidency ends like this: hundreds of National Guard troops posted behind a 7-foot fence looped by razor wire, protecting the Capitol not from the people Trump spent his presidency demonizing, but all the ones he didn’t.