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Former President Donald Trump on Sunday called for “one real rough, nasty” and “violent day” of police retaliation in order to eradicate crime “immediately.”
The remarks — delivered by Trump at a rally in Erie, Pennsylvania, just 36 days before the election — did not amount to a new policy proposal, according to a Trump campaign official.
“One rough hour — and I mean real rough — the word will get out and it will end immediately, you know? It will end immediately,” Trump said.
Asked whether the former president’s idea amounted to a new proposal and how such an operation would work, a campaign official said Trump was “clearly just floating it in jest.”
“President Trump has always been the law and order President and he continues to reiterate the importance of enforcing existing laws,” Steven Cheung, the campaign’s communications director, wrote in a statement to POLITICO. “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 was found guilty earlier this year of 34 felony counts by a New York jury related to his scheme to cover up hush money payments to a porn actor.
Trump’s comments came during a section of his speech in which he falsely suggested you could steal up to $950 worth of merchandise without consequence in California — a reference to Proposition 47, which reclassified some theft offenses from felonies to misdemeanors. Harris was California state attorney general when California voters approved that ballot initiative, but she remained neutral on the matter. The dollar threshold Trump referenced actually became law four years earlier, signed by then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican.
Nationally, property crime declined 2.4 percent over the last year, according to recently released FBI statistics.
Trump has a long history of endorsing police violence, having said that police reaction to the racial unrest in response to the murder of George Floyd in 2020 “was a beautiful thing to watch. In a 2017 speech, he said: “When you see these thugs being thrown into the back of a paddy wagon, you just see them thrown in, rough. I said, ‘Please don’t be too nice.’”
Harris’ campaign clipped and posted Trump’s comments to X but declined to comment further.
Megan Messerly contributed to this report.
