Democrats must seize the mantle of law and order

There's a photo pinging around the blogosphere of a pallet of bricks, supposedly placed near Immigration and Customs Enforcement facilities for use by "Democratic militants" during the recent unrest in Los Angeles. The accompanying post says that the bricks were paid for by organizations linked to Democratic financier George Soros, a frequent whipping boy of the American right.

"It's a Civil War!!" the post exclaims.

Actually, it's a hoax. The bricks photo comes from the website of a building supply company in Malaysia. And there is no war — civil or otherwise — in Los Angeles, where President Trump has sent 5,000 National Guard troops and Marines to quell an imaginary scourge of violence.

But the protests aren't entirely peaceful, either. Across the country, we've seen incidents of looting, vandalism and assault. And unless Democrats admit and condemn the violence — forcefully and unequivocally — the voters will come down on us like a ton of bricks.

That's been the historic pattern: the party of "law and order" wins, and the party of crime and chaos goes down to defeat. Too often, my own team has found itself on the losing side.

In 1968, when riots engulfed American cities, Republican presidential candidate Richard Nixon flooded the airwaves with advertisements showing street crime, switchblades and hypodermic needles. The message was clear: If you want to clamp down on crime, vote Republican.

Nixon went on to victory, and law and order has remained a staple of GOP appeals ever since. In 1988, George H. W. Bush infamously used a photo of Willie Horton — a convicted African American murderer who had raped a woman while on furlough from his life sentence in Massachusetts — to defeat Democratic nominee Michael Dukakis, that state's governor.

But no modern politician has played the crime card more vociferously than Trump, who began his first term with a warning about "American carnage" overtaking our cities. Three years later, in 2020, the riots following the George Floyd police murder seemed to confirm Trump's dark vision. 

That's also when some Democrats made a huge tactical error, by indicting all police officers for the sins of a few. Police weren't the solution to the problem, we said; they were the problem, bringing fear and violence to minority communities.

Never mind that most non-white Americans want more police, not fewer. That helps explain why Trump's share of minority voters rose in 2020, and again in 2024.

The insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021, should have allowed Democrats to seize the mantle of law and order. Falsely claiming that the 2020 election was stolen, Trump stood by as mobs defaced the Capitol and assaulted police officers.

One police officer serving at the Capitol Jan. 6 died the following day, and four other officers committed suicide in the days and months following the riot. Those officers should be pictured on every Democratic campaign advertisement for the next three years. And we should have invoked their memory again when Trump pardoned the Jan. 6 protesters earlier this year.

But we just can't seem to pull it off. Democrats condemned the pardons, of course, but rarely in the language of law and order.

So it's time to switch things up, once and for all. In the same breath, we need to acknowledge the violence of the past week and condemn Donald Trump for disparaging the police. That will mark us as the lawful party, and the GOP as the lawless one.

The violence is real, and we shouldn't pretend otherwise. In Los Angeles, looters burglarized dozens of stores, several cars were burned, and seven police officers were injured. In Texas, where Republican Gov. Greg Abbott deployed the state's National Guard, demonstrators hurled bottles and rocks at law enforcement officers.

To their credit, Democratic leaders around the nation condemned these actions. "The violence and damage is unacceptable, it is not going to be tolerated, and individuals will be arrested and prosecuted to the full extent of the law," warned Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, who announced an evening curfew in the city's downtown section on Tuesday night.

That's a good start. But we should also blast the Trump administration for stepping on the toes of Los Angeles police, who insisted that they had the situation under control. Trump said otherwise, of course. "If we didn't do it, there wouldn't be a Los Angeles," he said, defending his decision to send in troops. "It would be burning."

Remember when Republicans told us to "support your local police"? Not anymore. The Trump administration says it knows best, and the local police don't matter.

It's not enough to claim that the deployment of federal troops in Los Angeles was illegal, as the state of California argued in a court filing early this week. We also need to depict Trump as anti-police, and declare that we "back the Blue" — and the GOP doesn't. In America, that's the only way to come out on top.

Jonathan Zimmerman teaches history and education at the University of Pennsylvania and serves on the advisory board of the Albert Lepage Center for History in the Public Interest.