Trump’s 2024 ‘Crime’ Plan: Crackdowns on the ‘Homeless,’ ‘Drug-Addicted,’ and ‘Mentally Ill’
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Donald Trump on Monday released his “Plan to End Crime and Restore Law and Order,” as he continues his quest to retake the White House in 2024. The supposedly “new plan” is largely a rehash of past policy goals — from his 2016 campaign, from his administration — including expanding the use of the federal death penalty, sending in the military when local law enforcement “refuses to act,” and assailing bail reform, for starters. In the video trumpeting these proposals this week, the former president also teased harsher crackdowns — should he return to the Oval Office — on people without homes and those addicted to drugs.
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“We will also take back our streets from the homeless, the drug-addicted, and the mentally ill,” he said, almost offhandedly, at the end of Monday’s announcement, per his presidential campaign’s transcript. Trump then only adds: “I will discuss those plans in much more detail very soon. That is how I will bring back public safety to America.”
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It is unclear what potential planning the ex-president and his lieutenants currently have on this topic, or if any of it would be particularly novel. During his presidency, Trump flirted with sending in the feds to “intercede” on homelessness in major U.S. cities. In 2019, he dispatched senior administration officials to California in an attempt to devise a new, large-scale federal clampdown.
Former Trump aides tell Rolling Stone that his mid-presidency fixation on using the federal government to crack down on the homeless — particularly those with drug and mental-health problems — in cities controlled by the “liberal establishment” was significantly fueled by his own addiction to TV and cable news. “The [former] president would see images of homeless people on Fox News or somewhere else, and there would be times when he immediately called in a White House person right after, and tell us how we gotta do something about this right now,” says a source who was in the room for one such moment in 2019.
However, not much came of Trump’s 2019 push on this matter. Evidently, it’s not something he’s let go of after all these years, and it is something he closely links to his broader, increasingly brutal 2024 pitches for how he would somehow “end crime” in ways that he didn’t during his first term in office.
Trump’s spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Tuesday afternoon.
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