If you’re wondering just how bad Monday’s executive order about law enforcement is, why would you be wondering that when it was signed by Donald Trump?
Of course it’s bad, but don’t let Trump’s general awfulness obscure the fact that his latest directive is bad in a spectacular number of ways, not the least of which is its name: “Strengthening and Unleashing America’s Law Enforcement to Pursue Criminals and Protect Innocent Citizens.”
Yes, if there’s one thing we’ve learned in the last several years, it’s that law enforcement officers should be unleashed. Truly, they have been hamstrung by far too many rules.
What Trump wants right now is a militarized police state, and he’s going to do everything in his power as president to get it. However, several parts of the order are just demanding that law enforcement be given special solicitude and lots of treats, most of which they already have.
To understand why this order exists, remember that so much of the Trump administration’s rhetoric holds that a vast crime wave is gripping blue cities and that police are powerless to stop it because of wokeness or being leashed or … something. Just look at how terrified Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy is of the New York City subway system, how convinced he is that crime there is skyrocketing when, in fact, it’s plummeting. That decrease in crime isn’t just true for New York City, but for dozens of large cities across the country. But conservatives only feel safe when their boot is on someone’s neck.
Related | The fear is the point
Trump’s latest nightmare order does two separate but related things. One part aims to militarize local law enforcement, while the other seeks to create a police state.
The former is more about showering local law enforcement with equipment and personnel. The order would increase the amount of excess military assets given to local law enforcement agencies. It also calls for determining how military training and personnel could help local law enforcement fight the nonexistent crime wave that’s gripping the nation.
Sure, okay. Except for the part where we already give cops tons of this stuff. There is a robust federal program to dispose of military equipment by giving it to state and local law enforcement. Since 1997, it has funneled $7 billion worth of free military equipment to over 6,000 local law enforcement units. And that’s just one program. Local law enforcement can also get military-style equipment via five other federal grant programs. Local agencies already have ample opportunities to acquire the machinery of war on the cheap.
As for needing federal military personnel to parachute in and help, we already have a mechanism for that as well. State governors can deploy their own National Guard units—and they do it all the time. During the protests that followed George Floyd’s murder by police in May 2020, the Guard was deployed in 23 states. Illinois deployed its National Guard to work with Chicago police during the 2024 Democratic National Convention. New Mexico’s governor just activated that state’s National Guard to assist the Albuquerque Police with crime-fighting efforts.
However, New Mexico activated the Guard for namby-pamby things like security, traffic control, and medical assistance. That’s not what the Trump administration wants. Indeed, it’s not clear that this administration understands that the military has any role other than Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth running around yelling “WAR-FIGHTING.” Neither Trump nor Hegseth is interested in the military providing nonviolent infrastructural support to local officers.
The administration also isn’t interested in letting governors, particularly those in blue states, decide when to activate military personnel. That’s the police-state part of this order, which calls for “holding state and local officials accountable.” This actually aims to strip local officials of the right to control their own law enforcement agencies and to insert federal personnel into the process instead. So, “accountability” here means
threatening to federally prosecute state and local officials for obstruction or for any forbidden diversity, equity, and inclusion policies—the GOP’s dreaded DEI bogeyman— that restrict law enforcement officers in any way..
We don’t have to wonder what this looks like, because we already know: It looks like arresting Milwaukee County Circuit Judge Hannah Dugan at her courthouse. The Trump administration has no qualms about arresting anyone it perceives as getting in the way of its anti-immigrant frenzy, and this order is a not-at-all-veiled threat to state and local officials that they could be next.
The order is also going to empower state and local law enforcement, apparently, but a lot of those “empowering” elements already exist. Increased pay and benefits? Big Bad Blue Cities already employ more police officers and pay them better than their red-city counterparts. Is the order purporting to require some sort of market intervention where the federal government will force red cities to pay their police more? Lol no.
The administration will also implement “new best practices” and expand training to local law enforcement to “aggressively police communities against all crimes.” Weirdly, Federal Law Enforcement Training Centers already exist and have a division dedicated to training state, local, and tribal law enforcement. But this order isn’t about providing actual training: It’s about having the federal government tell local law enforcement agencies that it’s fine to crack skulls.
What about seeking “enhanced sentences for crimes against law enforcement officers”? Surely we can all agree that when people attack police, they suffer very few consequences, right? Well, the people who stormed the Capitol and attacked police at the urging of Trump himself on Jan. 6 got a pretty sweet consequence-free deal, what with Trump pardoning them all. For everyone else, though? Here is a giant, albeit somewhat outdated, list of laws in every state that either enhance the criminal penalty if the victim is a police officer or create a separate law for those crimes. Some states even treat law enforcement officials as a protected class for purposes of enhanced hate crime sentences.
Trump’s executive order is also going to “strengthen and expand legal protections for law enforcement officers.” Everyone was wondering what, exactly, all the giant law firms that bent the knee to Trump by bribing him with hundreds of millions of dollars in pro bono work were going to be doing. Now we know: no-cost representation for cops who “unjustly incur expenses and liabilities for actions taken during the performance of their official duties to enforce the law.” Nothing like turning the nation’s most well-heeled law firms into free labor, backed by the might of the federal government, to defend any police officer anywhere—for who knows what reasons.
Of course, unlike people who are victimized by police officers, the police officers themselves do not typically lack representation! That’s already handled by the state or local jurisdiction. Heck, in New York City, if tax dollars aren’t used by the city to represent police in civil suits, the police union uses tax dollars to defend officers in civil suits instead.
Thanks to a Supreme Court ruling, law enforcement officers also already have the benefit of qualified immunity, which often protects officers when they are sued in civil court. And if they lose? Officers rarely pay settlements, because state and local governments pay them instead. It’s tough to find a group with more opportunities for free legal representation or more robust protections from consequences than law enforcement agents.
What the administration envisions is a world where law enforcement officers are answerable to no one—not to the local elected officials who oversee them, and definitely not to the communities they serve.
That’s not “Strengthening and Unleashing America’s Law Enforcement to Pursue Criminals and Protect Innocent Citizens,” as the executive order’s name suggests. Trump’s goal is to let police officers get away with state-sanctioned brutality.
Campaign Action Lisa Needham May 02, 2025 at 12:00AM From Daily Kos
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