Four years ago, President Trump held back from invoking the Insurrection Act to deploy federal troops to cities where protesters took to the streets after the police killing of George Floyd. He says he won’t hold back again.
“And one of the other things I’ll do — because you’re supposed to not be involved in that — you just have to be asked by the governor or the mayor to come in,” Trump told an Iowa audience. “The next time, I’m not waiting.” He singled out Democratically run cities of New York and Chicago as "crime dens,” reports Politico
in a review of Trump's likely second-term agenda. Civil rights activists and Democratic lawmakers call his remarks alarming because it’s illegal to use the military for domestic law enforcement. The 1792 law allows an exception for the president to suppress a rebellion or violence. Critics say the statute is overbroad, and some are trying to rein it in before Trump would have a chance to use it.
In a likely preview of his 2024 presidential campaign, Trump in his annual speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference in suburban Washington, D.C., painted a grim picture of a U.S. overrun by bloodshed, chaos and violent crime, The Guardian reports. “If Crooked Joe Biden and his thugs win in 2024, the worst is yet to come,” he said. “A country that will go and sink to levels that are unimaginable." Facing 91 criminal charges in four cases, Trump depicted himself as both martyr and potential savior of the nation. “A vote for Trump is your ticket back to freedom, it’s your passport out of tyranny and it’s your only escape from Joe Biden and his gang’s fast track to hell,” he said. In a rebuttal, the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University noted that after "a decades-long decline, violent crime rose during the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2020, President Trump’s last year in office, murder rates climbed by nearly 30 percent and assault rates by more than 10 percent." Brennan cited an FBI compilation of reported offenses finding that as of 2022, violent crime rates had fallen by 4 percent and murder rates by roughly 7 percent since 2020. The National Crime Victimization Survey, which includes crimes not reported to law enforcement, said violent offenses rose slightly in 2022.