Why Trump is calling for a day of violence in the style of a police “purge.”

In the 2013 dystopian thriller “The Purge,” America follows a tradition whereby once a year, for a specific 12-hour period, any crime is permitted – up to and including murder. During the purge, society is rocked by spectacular violence that is said to have a cathartic effect: it drastically reduces crime and unemployment. “The Purge” warns audiences of the terrible consequences of selective observation of morality and a world governed by a “might makes right” ethos. But at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania on Sunday, former President Donald Trump effectively portrayed the idea as a good thing. Except in his spinoff version, the twist is that only the cops can do whatever they want.

As he has often done in the past, Trump complained at the rally that the police were “not allowed to do their jobs” due to political pressure and that crime was therefore rampant in President Joe Biden’s America. (That’s not the case.) And then he offered his “purge”-like solution: If the police were allowed “a really hard, nasty” and “violent day,” he said, crime would be eliminated “immediately.” . He was so taken with the suggestion that he later returned to it, saying: “In a hard hour – and I mean really hard – the news will spread and end immediately, you know? It will end immediately.”

A Trump campaign official later told Politico that he was “obviously spreading it in jest.” And Steven Cheung, the Trump campaign’s communications director, told Politico that Trump “has always been the law-and-order president, and he continually emphasizes the importance of enforcing existing laws.”

Let’s unpack a few things here. The Trump campaign’s “joking” excuse should be rejected. As I’ve written before, Trump has used comedic tone and “I’m kidding” caveats to float test balloons for his most extreme ideas for nearly a decade.

While Trump obviously wouldn’t have the authority as president to allow police on a day of extreme violence for him to even publicly articulate this idea, it’s still significant — and corrosive. It signals a stance against police misconduct that is helping set Republicans’ agenda — at the federal and state levels — for legislation related to police reform.

It could also impact everyday police culture by encouraging police officers to be more aggressive in their interactions with citizens. And it could encourage Trump’s supporters more broadly to consider vigilantism and political violence as a way to address social problems. The latter is not a far-fetched, abstract problem, but a real, existing social phenomenon that could well get worse. In no context is it appropriate for a presidential candidate — let alone a former or sitting president — to “joke” about law enforcement brutalizing the public, especially in a country plagued by police violence.

Cheung’s attempt to portray Trump’s authoritarian statements as an expression of his commitment to “law and order” is absurd. Trump suggests that the police should be empowered outside the constraints of the law to achieve the social goal of reducing crime; in other words, suspend Regular law to create order. And the worldview underlying Trump’s preferred social order is, of course, reactionary – about protecting the powerful and dominating those who challenge them.

Trump’s vision of “a hard hour” reflects his rhetoric of being “dictator for a day” to crack down on illegal immigration and drill for oil wherever he wants. In both scenarios, Trump invokes the threat of crisis (rising crime or cross-border migration) to legitimize the idea of ​​extraordinary power (unfettered executive authority or police brutality) to achieve a goal.

Trump is trying to portray this as consistent with democracy and the rule of law by portraying the exercise of this extraordinary power as temporary. This, of course, is a familiar playbook for autocratic leaders, who argue that crises require (supposedly temporary) exceptions to the rules in order to manage them. But somehow the crises – and the special rules for solving them – seem to stretch on indefinitely. The reality is that rules are rules only because everyone follows them. If you argue that you alone need an exception to the rule to govern, then you are essentially arguing that you don’t believe in rules.

If Trump wins the White House again, would he be able to conduct a special police “purge”? Not through any conventional laws or institutions. But everything he’s said, especially since 2020, has made it clear he’s interested in trying, and the courts and half of Congress appear ready to let him.