THE REPUBLICAN PARTY under Donald Trump is obsessed with crime. In its efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election, it has cast Democratic victories as illegal and illegitimate. In order to win elections in the future, it has passed a slew of restrictive voting laws on the state level that characterize Democratic votes as fraudulent. And to conjure a climate of fear, it has depicted Democratic-controlled metropolises as being overrun by murderers and overwhelmed by violence. The GOP wants voters to see crime everywhere—at the ballot box, swallowing cities whole.
Crime has long been a fruitful fixation for Republicans. From Richard Nixon to George H.W. Bush, “law and order” posturing from the right has sent Republicans to the White House and put Democrats on the defensive. Trump’s evocation of a mobocracy is couched in similar terms, but this time his party’s ambitions are grander and more dangerous. The Republicans are no longer trying to merely win elections with cynical, racially inflected campaigns. They are in the midst of enshrining that message’s logical extreme: a climate so paranoid that their own misdeeds seem not only reasonable by comparison but necessary.
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