Donald Trump is, if anything, very skilled at reading the room, or in this case reading the overall mood of the country. In 2015, suggesting that looters become free game for law enforcement and that they should fully expect to be shot while leaving stores might have been the kind of comment that lost him the election. Or at least it would have garnered a tidal wave of outrage and debates over police overreach. Today, the public is tired of certain groups of malcontents being allowed to do whatever they please whenever they please without consequences simply because of their supposed victim group status.
In this day and age, skipping past the arrest process and shooting looters sounds reasonable even to crowds in Anaheim, California. The pendulum always swings the other direction, and in some cases it swings hard.
With numerous Democrats either lying about the ongoing spike in crime across the country or defending the practice of mass theft as a form of righteous "reparations" or activism, the perception among criminals is that it is now open season, and perhaps they are even justified in their actions. According to Dems, the criminals are the good guys.
The perception among conservatives and moderates is that progressives fully intend to let America burn while gaslighting the public about how the fire is not that hot. Americans are obviously not buying it. Since 2022, polls show that at least 78% of Americans believe crime is rising across the nation with 56% saying they have seen a direct increase where they live.
These poll results led to an extensive corporate media campaign over the course of 2023, in which journalists used faulty and incomplete stats to argue that crime is actually going down. In reality, a host of Democrat run cities and states are withholding full reports on their crime statistics while the Federal Government adjusts the manner in which they collate the data. This readjustment conveniently started during the covid lockdowns as crime began to skyrocket.
Needless to say, the country is fed up. However, it should be noted that Trump seems to focus particularly on law enforcement as being held back from doing their jobs while overlooking the reality that property owners in many areas hit with theft are also held back from defending themselves and their businesses. Fear of targeted prosecution is real, with blue cities aggressively pursuing jail time for people stopping a crime, specifically if a minority happens to be harmed.
The first line of defense is not local law enforcement, it is the property owner. When something bad happens, they will be the first people on the scene. The question of freeing up police to do their jobs is secondary to the question of the attempted degradation of the right to self defense. Making shop owners safe to shoot looters regardless of the kinds of politicians and prosecutors that run the cities they live in would more likely have the kind of impact on crime that Trump describes.
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