Trump’s checkered past proves this massive move was smoke and mirrors

As a life-long and serial violator of law and order – both civil and criminal – and likewise constitutionally, as president of the United States, Donald J. Trump, the Outlaw and Extorting Commander-in-Chief, is someone criminologists would commonly label as a “career criminal.”

Accordingly, Teflon Don or the Houdini of White-collar Crime, as he is known in criminological circles, possesses an unmatched or unique expertise in fraud, corruption, and lawlessness. And ever since the Boss narrowly defeated Vice President Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election, and even before he returned to the Oval Office in 2025, he has been ratcheting up his dictatorial lawlessness and amplifying his corruption more than in his first term.

As Anand Giridharadas writes on Substack, or as he stated August 12th on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, “DC’s real crime problem is the insurrectionist fraudster crime family boss who wants to take it over.”

Unfortunately the rest of the nation’s crime problem is the same one that plagues DC.

To believe for one moment that this enduring and persistent lawless criminal cares one bit about either law and order or crime and justice — other than to exploit them — is like believing in the tooth fairy. That or a stickup man guarding the bank, the police policing the police, an inmate running the asylum, a president pardoning 1,500 convicted Jan. 6 insurrectionists, or Trump’s Department of Justice or Immigration and Customs Enforcement doing anything according to the rule of law.

Trump could care less about whether crime is getting worse or better and whether or not people are safe and secure. His deployment of the National Guard to Los Angeles earlier this year had absolutely nothing to do with curbing civil unrest or political violence. Similarly, the deployment of nearly 800 troops to D.C. for 30 days will have no lasting or even temporary impact on preventing or deterring violent, property and other garden variety crimes.

If Trump and company were sincere about addressing the very real but hardly out of control crime problem in D.C., then instead of having no plan or merely providing “back-up” for the Metropolitan Police Department as a “show of military force,” the administration should have been targeting specific habitual offenders and places by redeploying senior officers into the poorest wards.

Instead, Trump’s inappropriate and disruptive deployment of the National Guard is just another performative and assaultive exercise in cruelty, like the exporting of noncriminal migrants to an El Salvadoran prison or to home-grown places in violation of the Eighth Amendment like “Alligator Alcatraz,” the detention facility in the Florida Everglades.

The mass deployments of the National Guard are also emblematic of an emerging police state and the testing of the boundaries — of an authoritarian strongman’s desire for ever-increasing executive power and central control of institutions across society.

Trump’s fake descriptions of “roving mobs,” “caravans of mass youth,” or “bloodthirsty criminals” being “out-of-control” in Democratic-run cities, as contrasted with supposedly safe Republican areas, only divides the American people further. It stokes the fears and anxieties of mostly white people who have never lived in any of those urban communities.

Likewise, as Giridharadas correctly points out, “more generalized anxiety that the country is ungovernable” will not only “be given flesh by exaggerated tales of cities overrun [with] junkies and criminals,” but such tales will also help to negatively represent nonwhite Christian others as threatening criminals.

As for reactions to Trump taking control of the D.C. police and his “crackdown” on crime and homelessness in the capital, local protesters led by Black Lives Matter activists spoke out against the federal intervention of some 800 National Guard members into their neighborhoods.

‘Suite’ vs ‘street’

Even if Trump wanted to apply his expertise to stopping or preventing “suite” crimes, as opposed to “street” crimes, within his first seven months in office the president and his administration of quackery have pretty much done everything within their legitimate and illegitimate power to exacerbate the very real world nature of both sorts of crime.

Before turning to Trump 2.0’s massive reductions in expenditures for law enforcement and to the mismanagement of criminal justice for social control purposes, as well as to Trump’s upward trends of unproven corruption and lawlessness, allow me to set the stage by underscoring how the president and his network of well-organized disciples have been engaged in an ongoing treasonous enterprise to kill U.S. democracy.

With plenty of toxic masculinity and thanks mostly to the blessings of the 6-3 MAGA Supreme Court ruling in Trump v. the United States, the new administration has been busy sabotaging the rule of law, the separation of powers, and the application of “the one-person, one-vote rule.”

This administration has also been suppressing any person, place, or point of view that upsets the president’s false narrative, renders Trump’s dystopia and repressive America as merely authoritarian hoaxes, or challenges any fraction of his antidemocratic and anti-constitutional agenda as being un-American or anti-patriotic.

The MAGA extortionists have been coming for the attorneys, the judges, the inspector generals, the regulators, the whistleblowers, the consumers, the CEOs, the scientists, and the historians. In brief, they are doing their worst in real time to whitewash, rewrite, and reshape both Trump’s ubiquitous criminality and the nation’s cultural and social history.

MAGA has been coming for the Fourth Estate, National Public Radio, the Public Broadcasting Station, Stars and Stripes, the U.S. Institute for Peace, the Smithsonian Institution, the Voice of America, the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, and the Library of Congress.

MAGA and Trump 2.0 are also doing their darndest to weaken or break altogether the first, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, eight, 10th, 13th and 14th amendments.

Finally, with respect to the civil arenas or the public commons, the Trump administration has done its uneven best to divide them by truncating as much as possible citizen rights, civil rights, consumer rights, employment rights, environmental rights, human rights, immigrant rights, reproductive rights, and taxpayer rights. That pretty much wipes out “liberty and justice for all.”

‘Eviscerate due process’

According to the Council on Criminal Justice, here are some key cuts and reductions reported in May of this year:

• In April, Trump terminated 373 grants from the DOJ’s Office of Justice Programs (OJP) amounting to more than $300 million after $500 million was restored by a judicial decision.
• These terminated grants provided federal support for violence reduction, policing and prosecution, victims’ services, juvenile justice and child protection, substance use and mental health treatment, corrections and reentry, justice systems enhancements, research and evaluation, and other state- and local-level public safety functions.
• The cuts affected grantees from mostly not-for-profit organizations across 37 red and blue states alike as well as in urban, suburban, and rural areas.
• About 40% of those cuts involved references to diversity, equity, race, gender and so on, while the deepest cuts were to organizations that provided training and technical assistance to OJP grantees.

With respect to D.C., we learned from several news outlets including Fox News that three days after White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt announced the formation of the Making D.C. Safe and Beautiful Task Force Law Enforcement Working Group, the Fiscal Year 2025 Homeland Security Grant Program slashed D.C.’s security funding by 44%, to $20 million.

We have also learned from the Prison Policy Initiative that with respect to federal prisons, Trump has “taken actions to eviscerate due process and the rule of law, worsen prison and jail conditions, expand the use of harsh sentences and law enforcement tactics, eliminate oversight, undermine solutions that reduce incarceration and make communities safer.”

Assertions or claims of often overlapping corruption and/or lawlessness by Trump and company have been far too numerous to count.

The allegations of corruption include:

• Undermining oversight by dismantling checks and balances, as in the firing of the head of the Office of Government Ethics and more than 15 Inspectors Generals.
• Numerous conflicts of interests stemming from the president maintaining ownership of his businesses like those involving his bitcoin, media, and real estate ventures at home and abroad.
• Extorting the legal profession, universities, and other corporate businesses.
• Targeting Trump’s political opponents for doing their lawful jobs.
• Selling access and influence for personal gain as in the use of presidential one-on-one meetings for $5 million a pop or conducting global trade talks to benefit his personal businesses or selling more than $100 million in Trump merchandise.
• Suppressing ongoing anti-corruption prosecutions like those of New York mayor Eric Adams as well as ending police reform agreements and halting the ongoing investigations into police abuse, mismanagement, and civil rights violations.
• Turning the Department of Justice into an extension of himself vis-à-vis the purging of senior career civil servants as well as any of those FBI agents or U.S. attorneys affiliated with the criminal prosecutions of Trump.

The allegations of lawlessness include:

• Executive orders targeting law firms in violation of the first amendment.
• Mass firings or layoffs of federal workers across multiple agencies without due process of law.
• Undermining regulatory agencies as in the closing down of the Consumer Protection Agency or Trump’s EPA’s move to repeal the landmark “endangerment finding” that allows for climate regulation by scientific expertise.
• Ongoing false claims that the 2020 election was stolen and taking baseless actions targeting organizations perceived as adverse to the president’s repressive and authoritarian agenda.
• Numerous executive orders including limiting birthright citizenship, imposing travel bans, and restricting access to mandated health regulations as well as federally contracted grants that were immediately legally challenged.

Even if the Republican sycophants in Congress unanimously support Trump’s fearmongering on behalf of supposed “crime control” and extend the president’s takeover of the D.C. police beyond the original 30 days, per some kind of fake emergency, it will have no sustainable impact on the prevention and deterrence of crime and violence in the capital city.

This is because of the administration not treating gun violence in general as a public health crisis, in addition to its criminalizing and stigmatizing of Black and brown urban communities by unnecessarily sending in federal troops.

By the end of its stay, the federal intervention into local policing will prove of dubious value for law and order. It will turn out to be more wasteful, costly, and unproductive than were Trump’s original cuts and reductions to law enforcement while ICE’s resources and manpower have been boosted to the tune of $150 billion.

And worse yet, the “deployment of FBI agents to deal with local crime puts agents from counterintelligence, public corruption and other divisions with minimal training out on the streets in potentially dangerous encounters, diverting them from their typical jobs at the bureau.”

But what else would one expect from a know-nothing administration and its odious, lawless and corrupt Criminal-in-Chief?

Trump is the same self-dealing fraudster who made $600 million in 2024 from his various properties, licensing deals, crypto holdings, and private golf clubs. And as David Kirkpatrick has maintained in The New Yorker, Trump’s profiteering to the tune of $3.4 billion since 2017 would never have occurred without his becoming the president for a second time. That figure also represents more money than Trump ever earned between the years 1973 to 2016.

• Gregg Barak is an emeritus professor of criminology and criminal justice at Eastern Michigan University and the author of several books on the crimes of the powerful, including Criminology on Trump (2022) and its sequel, Indicting the 45th President: Boss Trump, the GOP, and What We Can Do About the Threat to American Democracy (2024). The third book in this Trump trilogy, Regime Change, Authoritarian Treason, and the Outlaw-in-Chief: President Donald Trump’s Struggle to Kill U.S. Democracy & Realign American Global Power, will be published after the 2026 midterm elections.