If elected, Trump will make you and your family less safe. By Catherine Rampell

If elected, Trump will make you and your family less safe

Catherine Rampell — Read time: 4 minutes

Again and again, the former president struggles to tell you who the bad guys are.

5 min

By Catherine Rampell

November 1, 2024 at 8:00 a.m. EDT

Donald Trump styles himself as the law-and-order candidate, but he’s a loser on this issue for a simple reason: He struggles to differentiate good guys from bad guys and friends from foes.

If granted another term, he would allow dangerous threats to multiply — both here and abroad.

Despite Trump’s claims about rising lawlessness under the Biden-Harris administration, violent crime actually began surging in 2020, when Trump was still president. (Murder rates have since been sliding back down.)

It’s hard to blame Trump for this trend, of course, given the social upheaval that accompanied the pandemic. But there are specific choices that Trump made — and continues to advocate — that put Americans at greater risk of violence. Among them: locking up victims and releasing criminals.

This has essentially been his immigration policy.

Trump often claims that Americans (and their pets) should live in mortal fear of immigrants, particularly the “rapists” and “murderers” that the Biden-Harris administration allegedly released into our country. In reality, immigrants (including undocumented ones) are less likely to commit serious crimes than are native-born Americans.

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Even so, within any demographic, there are bound to be at least a few bad actors. Unfortunately, those are not the people Trump aimed his firepower at when he was president.

One of his first actions as president was to rescind an Obama-era order that prioritized the detention and removal of immigrants who are serious public safety threats. This was, in part, because Trump and his underlings were determined to detain and deport as many asylum seekers as possible. As a result, immigration detention centers filled up with parents deliberately separated from their kids, visa overstays, domestic violence victims and others fleeing political and religious persecution.

Because Trump diverted scarce resources away from real safety threats, Trump’s immigration agency ending up releasing more convicted criminals into the United States than the Biden administration did, as the Cato Institute’s David Bier documented. In 2019, for instance, Immigration and Customs Enforcement released more than double the number of convicted criminals as was the case in any year Biden has been president.

Trump’s confusion about who is or isn’t a security threat is hardly unique to immigration. He has also failed to recognize that authoritarian thugs around the world are not our friends — even when those thugs interfere with our elections, murder dissidents or threaten to launch nuclear warheads at U.S. cities.

Trump has often praised Russian President Vladimir Putin, our clear adversary, as “smart” and a “strong leader.” Chinese President Xi Jinping is likewise a “very good friend of mine,” according to Trump. North Korean leader Kim Jong Un is “a very talented man” with a “great personality.”

As president, Trump considered putting his money where his mouth is. He threatened to close U.S. military bases in Japan and South Korea, which are strategically situated to help address threats from autocrats and adversaries. (Trump’s military advisers at the time talked him out of it, his former defense secretary said.)

Meanwhile, the list of law-abiding Americans whom Trump has explicitly labeled as America’s “enemies” is long. It includes duly elected Democratic lawmakers, such as Rep. Adam Schiff and former speaker Nancy Pelosi, both from California; American news journalists, exercising their First Amendment rights; and, at one point, Trump’s own Federal Reserve chair.

Trump describes these people as America’s “enemy from within.” He has said he wants them tried in televised military tribunals. At least, that’s assuming our troops aren’t otherwise busy marching into American cities to mow down protesters, as Trump has also proposed.

In other words, this potential commander in chief wishes to divert precious military resources away from sites strategic to our national security and toward crushing internal critics. This hardly sounds like a plan to make terrified American voters safer or more secure.

Trump’s priorities are skewed because he doesn’t care who America’s allies and enemies are, only his own (or at least, those he perceives to be his own). But his easily manipulated narcissism isn’t the only reason he’ll make Americans less safe.

He’s also proposed other domestic policies that would endanger Americans. Among them: Giving cops full immunity in civil suits, should they kill or maim someone they shouldn’t have. Does he think that would lead to more wrongful deaths, or fewer? Also: Pardoning those who rioted at the Capitol building on Jan. 6, 2021. Would that encourage more right-wing political violence in the months ahead, or less?

Finally, he has opposed a slew of common sense, popular gun reforms, such as requiring mental health and criminal background checks for all firearm purchases. Does that make your kids less likely to be slaughtered in their classrooms, or more?

Americans describe the economy and crime as some of their top issues this election. If I were Vice President Kamala Harris, I’d make my closing salvo against my rival this: Trump will make you poorer. He will make you less free. And he will make you and your family much less safe.