‘American Death Squads’: Inside Trump’s Push to Make Police More Violent
For years, Donald Trump had hoped — and tried — to implement programs and federal policies that would allow American police forces to act with impunity and cartoonish levels of brutality. When he was president, several ideas that Trump repeatedly bellowed about in the Oval Office included conducting mass executions, and having U.S. police units kill scores of suspected drug dealers and criminals in urban areas in gunfights, with the cops then piling those corpses up on the street to send a grim message to gangs.
The ideas were so grisly and paramilitary-sounding that some Trump administration officials began privately referring to them as his plans for “American death squads.”
In the years since he left office, following his efforts to cling to power, the former president’s desire to finish the job on policing that his first administration couldn’t, or wouldn’t, has only grown more intense. In the final weeks of his 2024 campaign to retake the White House, Trump is now explicitly running on a platform of encouraging domestic law enforcement to initiate — with an idea that drew immediate comparisons this week to the dystopian-horror movie series, The Purge — “one really violent day” of policing to put the fear of god into retail thieves.
The remarks at his campaign rally weren’t just Trump blowing off steam or trying to sound tough to his fans. His vision for a far more savage standard of American policing is fundamental to understanding the former — and perhaps future — president’s deeply authoritarian policy proposals that have been throttling the U.S. political landscape and society for nearly a decade now. And if Trump and his party defeat Vice President Kamala Harris in this year’s presidential contest, he and some of his closest allies are already plotting to build on what Trump tried to do in his first term, and push law enforcement to be as brutal as possible.
According to lawyers, advisers, and other sources who’ve spoken to the ex-president about policing since last year, Trump has discussed or been briefed on a variety of ways he could mold law enforcement in his MAGA, blood-obsessed image, should he reconquer the White House this November.
During the height of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, then-President Trump toyed with the idea of having his administration pull federal funding from Democratic-majority cities — such as Washington, D.C., and Seattle — that he deemed as “disempower[ing]” their own police departments. If Trump secures a second term, sources say, he has privately stressed on multiple occasions within the past year and a half that his administration should swiftly commit to this supposedly “pro-police” policy of holding funding hostage.
In mid-2020, as mass protests in the wake of the George Floyd killing and a sprawling racial justice movement were spreading throughout the nation, the Trump White House weighed seizing control of D.C.’s police force during the capital’s unrest, though the administration backed down following frantic pushback from the city. Trump has repeatedly told aides and confidants in recent years that if he’s elected again, and if there were again a level of crime or unrest in D.C. that he’d want the police to (in Trump’s words) “dominate” in ways that city officials found too extreme, he could declare an emergency and personally take control of the D.C. police.
Additionally, as recently as within the past several months, Trump has talked to close advisers and longtime allies in Congress and the Senate about how a Trump-controlled government would go about undoing the work of Obama and Biden-era Justice Department officials and civil rights divisions that have investigated police departments for rampant discrimination, brutality, and other abuses.
A new Trump administration would not only shut down and stop conducting those kinds of probes; in recent months, the former president has discussed with at least one MAGA lawmaker on Capitol Hill the prospect of getting a list together of police “warriors” who’ve been federally charged or convicted of offenses Trump deems “fake” or “politically correct,” and issuing a round of executive clemency and pardons early on in a second term.
According to a source with direct knowledge of the matter, since Trump accepted the endorsement of the Fraternal Order of Police last month, the ex-president floated the idea at a private dinner of getting rid of internal affairs units in local police departments, arguing that many police officers spend too much time worrying that an official from internal affairs will intrusively investigate them or “ruin” their lives simply because the officers were “doing their job.”
It is unclear if a president could eliminate internal affairs bureaus, even if he or she wanted to do so. Ironically, eliminating internal affairs is a proposal at times submitted by progressive police-reform advocates — though, unlike Trump, they propose replacing the police-investigating-the-police units with independent outside investigators.
Moreover, Trump has spoken frequently about offering police “immunity from prosecution” — particularly as it relates to the central role he wants cops to play in carrying out the largest mass-deportation regime in U.S. history.
Those who study fascist history warn that such promises should give us chills. Ruth Ben-Ghiat is a professor at New York University, an expert in Mussolini’s fascist reign in Italy, and the author of Strongmen. “The fascists did the same thing,” she says. “They made a deal with the police.”
In Trump’s case, she insists, he’s taking advantage of the “worst part of our institutions,” namely the racially disparate and often brutal realities of American policing. There’s a name for what Trump is proposing. “These are called ‘authoritarian bargains,’” Ben-Ghiat says. “He courts the police by saying, ‘You won’t pay a price for any violence I ask you to do.’ He is arranging these things ahead of time.”
Reached for comment on this story, the Trump campaign did not have anything directly to add to the former president’s Purge movie-esque policy recommendations. Instead, Team Trump repeated its vow that the twice-impeached ex-president and convicted felon would restore his brand of “law and order” to America — an incarnation of law and order that puts himself and his friends above the law, and punishes his enemies.
“President Trump has always been the law and order president and he continues to reiterate the importance of enforcing existing laws,” Trump spokesman Steven Cheung said in a statement. “Otherwise it’s all-out anarchy, which is what Kamala Harris has created in some of these communities across America, especially during her time as [California] attorney general when she emboldened criminals.”
Trump’s support of police officers is, as is true of all things Trump, conditional. When it comes to cops who defended the U.S. Capitol during the Jan. 6 riot that Trump instigated, when those officers speak out against Trump, he has in recent years privately derided them as “pussies.” But when it comes to militarized police forces that want to commit excessively violent, potentially unconstitutional, or illegal acts against suspects, Trump is almost always on board, and he sought to put the full force of the White House behind them.
Since the beginning of his first term, Trump has publicly glorified police brutality, directly encouraging officers to behave more violently than they already do, and making it one of his biggest laugh and applause lines at rallies.
“When you see these thugs being thrown into the back of a paddy wagon, you just seen them thrown in, rough. I said, ‘Please don’t be too nice,’” the then- president told assembled law enforcement, at a speech he delivered on Long Island, New York, in 2017. “When you guys put somebody in the car and you’re protecting their head, you know, the way you put their hand over [their head] … ‘Don’t hit their head and they’ve just killed somebody, don’t hit their head.’ I said, ‘You can take the hand away, okay?’”
Trump continued: “I have to tell you, you know, the laws are so horrendously stacked against us, because for years and years, they’ve been made to protect the criminal. Totally made to protect the criminal. Not the officers. You do something wrong, you’re in more jeopardy than they are.”
At a campaign stop in North Carolina in 2020, the then-president blessed the highly controversial killing of Antifa activist Michael Reinoehl, telling the applauding audience that “we sent in the U.S. Marshals, it took 15 minutes,” adding: “We got him. They knew who he was, they didn’t want to arrest him. Fifteen minutes, that ended.”
In concocting his violent policing fantasies, Trump has taken inspiration — as he has openly boasted — from autocratic leaders such as Rodrigo Duterte, who oversaw mass extrajudicial killings in the Philippines, and Xi Jinping of China.
In February 2023, Trump and his presidential campaign released bullet points of what he declared his “Plan to End Crime and Restore Law and Order.” Some of his agenda items featured promises such as directing “the DOJ to open civil rights investigations into radical leftist prosecutor’s officers, such as those in Chicago, Los Angeles, and San Francisco to determine whether they have illegally engaged in race-based law enforcement.”
His campaign also reminded his followers that “President Trump has committed to deploying federal assets, including the National Guard, to restore law and order when local law enforcement refuses to act,” emphasizing that should he return to the White House, he’ll have heavily armed military units that he could swiftly unleash to bolster his demands for police impunity.
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