A Trumped Up Police State Is Coming

Donald Trump’s all-caps executive order on policing — “STRENGTHENING AND UNLEASHING AMERICA’S LAW ENFORCEMENT TO PURSUE CRIMINALS AND PROTECT INNOCENT CITIZENS” – is less about policy and more about intent. And that intent is clear: To give Trump direct control over local law enforcement and further shield police from accountability. 

As journalist and author of “Rise of the Warrior Cop” Radley Balko puts it, “It’s a statement of intent and whether or not Trump is able to do a lot of the more pernicious and unconstitutional things he wants to do.” 

The executive order calls for “military and national security assets” to assist in local policing, directs federal resources and protections for state and local law enforcement, and enhances police protections, among other proclamations. But it reflects a deeper ambition. 

“He wants more federal militarized law enforcement under his thumb instead of under the thumb of governors or mayors,” says Balko. “He wants to use them to help with immigration deportations. He wants help with cracking down on protest.” And the concern and fear, says Balko, is that Trump will also “use law enforcement to go after his critics and people he perceives to be his enemies.” 

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This week on The Intercept Briefing, Balko joins senior reporter Akela Lacy and host Jessica Washington to break down the Trump administration’s push to federalize local law enforcement and “unleash” police who already face minimal meaningful restraint.

“We’re really getting to the point where law enforcement officers have almost no accountability at all,” says Balko, who writes the newsletter The Watch. He adds, “All of this is based on a premise that isn’t true, which is that we’re in some sort of massive crime wave that’s been sweeping the country.” 

The fearmongering, Lacy notes, is that cities run by Democrats — San Francisco, New York, Chicago, Baltimore — are dangerous. 

But as Balko points out, “When [Trump] took office for the first time he had actually inherited the lowest crime rate of any president since like Eisenhower. And [he] was the first president in 40 years to leave office with a higher homicide rate than when he entered it.” While crime spiked during the pandemic under Trump, Balko continues, “Under Biden it started going down over the last two years of [his] administration and it continues to go down.” 

“The narrative,” Lacy adds, ”is extremely detached from reality.” 

But that narrative serves to justify a sweeping law-and-order agenda. 

“The vision is for police to respond to everything,” says Lacy. It’s a vision for a militarized police force with no accountability under the discretion of the president that “they can deploy to enforce any and every part of their agenda beyond criminal issues, and then further criminalize participation in the public’s sphere and exercise of constitutional rights.” 

Over the last few months, Balko adds, the federal government has increasingly used masked, unidentified agents to snatch people off the streets — not for violent crimes, but for political speech, protests, and civil offenses “in a deliberate effort to evade judicial review.”

“They’re snatching people off the street and taking them to an overseas prison that’s more like a gulag and imposing on them what’s effectively a life sentence with no due process,” Balko continues. “No habeas corpus, no judicial review whatsoever. These are very classic characteristics of a police state.” 

Listen to the full conversation of The Intercept Briefing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.