How fear of crime propelled Trump to victory

Donald Trump’s critics like to paint his supporters as hardcore right-wingers. The truth is rather plainer: many of those who voted for Trump are refugees from the conservative establishment desperate for a leader unafraid to speak their truth. 

We Americans are scared. Literally 

Shamed by the elites, mocked for their beliefs — sidelined by rising “wokeness” and DEI-culture for being white or straight or male — they saw in Trump a man-of-action sympathetic to their back-to-basics worldview. Tired of being told what to say and how to feel, Trump’s supporters were ready to reclaim their voices in the safest space possible: the ballot box.

The anti-elitist populism that swept Trump to power in 2016 remains alive and well. But today it looks far different. In place of hard-riding truckers and Carolina coal miners, are an almost unimaginable coalition of disaffected black, Jewish and Latino voters failed by the progressive establishment. The economy, of course, is among their chief concerns — particularly the disappearance of working-class jobs now being siphoned off by illegal migrants. But crime and safety are just as pressing. Both black and Jewish voters are bearing the brunt of the Joe Biden era’s laissez-faire approach to law and order. 

Both groups have found themselves on the front-lines of the nation’s criminality crisis. Trump is seen by many as their savior. For Jews, it’s keffiyeh-clad activists chanting for Hamas who’ve helped boost antisemitic attacks in America. Meanwhile, under Biden, the number of African Americans killed by gun violence has hit an all-time high.

Trump made clear that his second term will be far more heavy-handed than his first. The nation’s crime crisis is much of the reason why. He told Mexico he’ll send “hit squads” to take out narco-traffickers. For illegal migrants, he’s planning “the largest domestic deportation operation” in history; he’s promised to enlist the National Guard to crack down on bad guys — America’s “enemy within,” as Trump has termed them. Most crucially, he’s made clear he has little tolerance for Gaza protesters, whom Trump has described as ‘raging lunatics.’

Back in his 2017 inauguration speech, Trump railed against the “American carnage” he believed was killing our nation’s greatness. The Obamas, the “elites” — Hillary’s emails — all were symptoms of an existential rot only he could recognize and only he could remedy. Today, that carnage has become real, manifested and metastasized as much in the thousands protesting for Palestine, as the number of black men gunned down on an average weekend in inner-city Chicago.

But a backlash is already brewing — if not poised to boil over — boosted by a belief that returning Trump to the White House is key to restoring law and order. The conflict here is less right versus left — and more centre versus the extreme. But it’s a big center. Indeed, vast swaths of the nation — myself included — have had enough. Along with our very real financial challenges, we Americans are scared. Literally. 

A backlash is already brewing

Post-George Floyd “defund the police” threats? They worked. Across the nation, cities of all sizes have seen their police forces decimated just as fentanyl turns urban centers into ghost towns and shoplifting has become epidemic. The cops have seen their resources depleted at the very moment crowds of protesters are shutting down bridges — and cities like New York and Los Angeles endure terrifying spikes in high-profile violent public transport crimes. It is little wonder that Americans today want calm and certainty. They want a return to law and order that transcends traditional divides, such as race or politics or class. 

With abortion and affirmative action already rolled-back, Americans understand they can survive when once sacred progressive totems are no longer the law of the land — even if they don’t agree with it. They’re willing to sacrifice a few “soft” rights (the recriminalization of minor drugs, a return to stop-and-frisk) in exchange for the most sacred right of all: sleeping without worrying about never-ending bills or our kids OD-ing on opioids or yet another anti-Israel protest disrupting our commutes to work.

In some places this is already happening: Oregon, for instance, recently recriminalized the possession of small quantities of narcotics which were decriminalized in 2020 in favor of treatment services for addicts. The subsequent fentanyl crisis has proven this model to be both ineffective and deadly. San Francisco voters seem favorable to a pair of measures that curtail freedoms sacred to the left: welfare recipients could soon undergo drug testing, and restrictions on police officers pursuing suspects look set to be loosened. Meanwhile, Republican senator Tom Cotton has called upon the Pentagon to root out Hamas supporters like Aaron Bushnell, the active-duty serviceman who set himself on fire outside the Israeli embassy in Washington.

If this all sounds a tad totalitarian it very well could be because that’s where we are right now. The White House’s failure to protect Americans today is symptomatic of a far-larger cultural rot — from lowered education standards to criminal offenders let off the hook. These things have undermined the values that have long made America so exceptional. This is a betrayal of our nation’s ideals so grave that nothing less than a tip-to-tail examination and accounting will do. As he begins to lay out his return to Washington, Trump has made clear that accounting has already begun.

This article was originally published on The Spectator’s UK website.