How Trump Supporters Came to Hate the Police

Oct 10, 2023

By Luke Mogelson

In early August, after agents executed a search warrant at Mar-a-Lago, Donald Trump's private club in Palm Beach, Florida, allies of the former President were quick to villainize the F.B.I. Although the raid had recovered more than a hundred classified documents, at least eighteen of which were labelled "Top Secret," Republican pundits and politicians questioned its legitimacy and denounced the federal agency as a "gang of dangerous criminals," "wolves," the "Gestapo," "the K.G.B.," and "the enemy within." Calls for retribution spread online. A forty-two-year-old Trump supporter named Ricky Shiffer wrote, "You’re a fool if you think there's a nonviolent solution." Shiffer then attempted to enter an F.B.I. field office in Ohio, equipped with body armor, an assault rifle, and a nail gun. After triggering an alarm, he fled the scene in his vehicle, and a high-speed pursuit ended in a shoot-out with state troopers, during which Shiffer was killed. Three weeks later, Trump gave a speech in which he called F.B.I. agents "vicious monsters."

Given the broad support that Republicans have historically enjoyed from law enforcement, their escalating hostility toward the F.B.I. may seem paradoxical. Right-wing extremists, however, have always viewed state agents as pernicious antagonists, and so the institutionalization of that mind-set should come as no surprise as the G.O.P. embraces the ideas and attitudes of its radical flank.

In the early days of the pandemic, as Trump supporters began mobilizing against lockdowns and other public-health measures, much of their rage was directed at law enforcement. On April 30, 2020, heavily armed conservatives descended on the Michigan state capitol, in Lansing. Facing off against police outside the barred doors of the legislature, they denounced the officers as "traitors" and "filthy rats." Some members of the mob belonged to the Michigan Liberty Militia, whose founder later told me that he had created the outfit in 2015, after "seeing what happened with the Bundys." Cliven Bundy, an elderly rancher in Nevada, had declared war on the government when the Bureau of Land Management impounded his cattle over his refusal to pay outstanding grazing fees. After a tense standoff in which Bundy supporters surrounded law-enforcement agents and trained rifles on them from nearby hilltops, the Bureau of Land Management released the livestock and withdrew from the area.

Following the incident in Lansing, Mike Shirkey, the Republican Senate majority leader in Michigan, condemned the protesters as "a bunch of jackasses" who had used "intimidation and the threat of physical harm to stir up fear and rancor." Shirkey seems to have quickly realized, though, that such principled nonpartisanship was no longer tenable in American politics. A couple of weeks later, at an anti-lockdown rally in Grand Rapids, I watched him publicly laud the Michigan Liberty Militia and assure its members, "We need you now more than ever."

In the weeks that followed, resentment of law enforcement intensified sharply, with anti-lockdowners perceiving individual officers as complicit in an oppressive, tyrannical order. "They deserve to wear the Nazi emblem on their sleeves!" one retiree told me of the state police who’d served a cease-and-desist order to a barber violating the governor's suspension of personal-care services. "People like me used to fucking back you!" a veteran shouted at police handing out citations at a gathering in Lansing. "But you are trash!"

Then, on May 25, 2020, a police officer murdered George Floyd, in Minneapolis. I left Michigan to cover the ensuing demonstrations and riots, and when I rejoined the anti-lockdowners I found that their stance toward law enforcement had undergone a dramatic reversal. That June, I attended a demonstration outside the capitol orchestrated by the Michigan Liberty Militia and a right-wing organization called the American Patriot Council. Ryan Kelley, a co-founder of the latter group, climbed the steps and pointed to several officers who were monitoring the scene. Not long ago, I had witnessed anti-lockdowners furiously berate these very same men. "We say thank you for being here," Kelley told them now. "Thank you for standing up for our communities."

The volte-face reflected a larger pattern of contradiction. The original Michigan Militia was created, along with a wave of other white paramilitary groups, in 1994, following the government's botched attempt to arrest the survivalist Randy Weaver at his cabin, on Ruby Ridge, in northern Idaho. The deadly siege, less than a year later, of the Branch Davidian compound, in Waco, Texas, and the Clinton Administration's subsequent ban on assault weapons reinforced a right-wing narrative that white Christians were under attack. After Waco, the Michigan Militia ballooned to an estimated seven thousand members. In 1995, on the second anniversary of the Waco massacre, Timothy McVeigh, a white supremacist who’d attended several Michigan Militia meetings, detonated an enormous truck bomb in Oklahoma City, killing a hundred and sixty-eight people. The leaders of the Michigan Militia decamped to Alaska, and the organization collapsed. Over the next decade and a half, right-wing militants across the U.S. remained largely dormant. Meanwhile, under President George W. Bush, the federal government enacted unprecedented infringements on personal privacy and other individual rights while the F.B.I. employed extraordinarily invasive surveillance and investigatory techniques against law-abiding citizens, largely on the basis of their religion. The reason that none of this provoked anti-government extremists was simple: the targets of the overreach were Muslims.

Similarly, after George Floyd was killed, conservatives repudiated the national uprising that demanded police reform and accountability, choosing instead to "back the blue." As President Trump and his allies portrayed demands for racial justice as the sinister work of subversives intent on sowing chaos—much as segregationists had dismissed civil-rights activists as Communist agitators—backing the blue became analogous with opposing the left. After my stay in Michigan, I spent a month covering antifascist protests in Portland, Oregon, where demonstrations against the local police department were punctuated by clashes with Trump supporters, including members of the Proud Boys, who presented themselves as allies of law enforcement. As anti-lockdowners had shown in Michigan, however, this alliance was conditional and tended to break down whenever laws intruded on conservative priorities. Right-wingers rationalized the inconsistency by assigning the epithet "oath breaker" to any American in uniform who executed his duties in a manner they disliked.

About a month after the 2020 Presidential election, at a rally in Washington, D.C., I followed hundreds of Trump supporters as they marauded on the streets around the White House, assaulting pedestrians, vandalizing Black churches, and seeking to engage antifascists in fist fights. The Metropolitan Police, the Park Police, and the Capitol Police did their best to keep the two sides separate. Their interference enraged the Trump supporters, who called the officers "piggies," "cunts," and "pieces of shit." Some of the insults were indistinguishable from those shouted by leftists in Portland.

"Fuck your paychecks!"

"Fuck the blue!"

"Vigilante justice will be king!"

"Defund the police!"

Many of these same Trump supporters returned to D.C. on January 5, 2021, and by then it was clear that law enforcement would no longer be exempt from their belligerence. Online, Proud Boys made plain that their days of backing the blue were over. "Fuck these DC Police," one commented. "Fuck those cock suckers up. Beat them down. You dont get to return to your families."

The next day, I followed thousands of people up the National Mall after Trump's incendiary speech from the Ellipse. On the west side of the Capitol, two broad flights of granite steps descended from an outdoor terrace on the third floor. In anticipation of Joe Biden's Presidential Inauguration, huge bleachers had been erected over the steps, with a ten-thousand-square-foot platform constructed between them; the bleachers had been wrapped in ripstop tarpaulin, creating a sort of monolith that functioned as a rampart. Trump supporters climbed the steps and began cutting through the fabric with knives. Officers blocked an opening at the bottom of the bleachers, but they were outnumbered and obviously intimidated as the mob pressed against them, screaming insults, pelting them with cans and bottles. Some people shoved and punched individual officers; others linked arms and rammed their backs into a row of riot shields, their eyes squeezed shut against blasts of pepper spray. A few Trump supporters used their own chemical agents against the police. The stone slabs underfoot were smeared with blood. "You’re a bunch of oath breakers!" a man making his way along the police line barked through a bullhorn. "You’re traitors to the country!"

Seconds later, the mob overwhelmed the officers and everyone flooded into the understructure of the bleachers. Toward the top, a temporary security wall contained three doors, one of which was instantly breached. Dozens of police stood behind the wall, using shields, nightsticks, and chemical munitions to prevent the mob from crossing the threshold. Other officers took up positions on the platform above us, firing a barrage of pepper balls into the horde. A few feet away, I recognized a corpulent man with a graying goatee and glasses leaning all his weight into the bodies directly beside me.

It was Jason Howland, another co-founder of the American Patriot Council. At the Lansing rally on June 18th, I’d watched Howland rail against George Floyd protesters, calling them "operatives of fear and dissent." Now he dropped his head, planted his feet, and added his considerable mass to the others churning over the police. Balanced on a crossbeam above him was his compatriot Ryan Kelley, who, six months earlier, had thanked law enforcement for "standing up for our communities." (Neither man could be reached for comment.) In D.C., a cell-phone video captured Kelley yelling at rioters, "This is war, baby!"

I eventually found myself in the chamber of the U.S. Senate, where Trump supporters rifled through desks, took documents, and delivered prayers and speeches from a dais that had recently been occupied by Vice-President Mike Pence. When a young Capitol Police officer with a medical mask over red facial hair entered the room, he approached a rioter who had been shot with a rubber bullet and was bleeding from his cheek. "You good, sir?" the officer asked with concern. "You need medical attention?"

"I’m good, thank you," the rioter answered.

In the moment, I attributed the officer's incongruously affable demeanor to the fact that he was by himself and perhaps afraid. But shortly thereafter, two more Capitol Police officers arrived. One was a sergeant with a shaved head whose uniform was half untucked and missing buttons, his necktie ripped and crooked. A man wearing a TRUMP beanie with a furry pompom approached him. "Got a little bit of a situation?" the man asked jokingly. He was holding a gold-tasselled American flag over his shoulder. Sticking out of the back pocket of his jeans were rolled-up documents that I had seen him take from a senator's desk.

"I’ve had better days," the sergeant said.

"You all right, man?"

"Yeah, I’m good."

"You sure?"

The sergeant pointed at his colleague. "I feel better than he looks."

The officer was covered with a white powdery substance, as if a sack of flour had been dumped on him. "Some dude got me with a fire extinguisher," he said.

"I think I ate a whole container of pepper spray," the sergeant added, with similar good cheer. It was as if they were recounting some long-ago, amusing experience that had nothing to do with the rioters in the Senate chamber.

It is tempting to understand such bizarre scenes as part of a "de-escalation" strategy. The problem with this is that there was no strategy, to de-escalate or otherwise. "We were on our own, totally on our own," an officer later recalled. In the absence of guidance, officers had to decide for themselves how to engage with the mob. One posed for pictures with rioters inside the building. A video appears to show others allowing a restive crowd to pass through a perimeter on the east side of the grounds. A lieutenant was filmed wearing a MAGA hat and coördinating with Oath Keepers to help his beleaguered colleagues exit the building. In the footage, the crowd cheers and a woman gives the officers a hug. (Later, several members of law enforcement would be placed under investigation and reprimanded for their conduct. According to the Capitol Police, none of the inquiries found that officers had "aided the rioters before or during the attack.")

My impression was that a simple contract—sometimes tacit, sometimes explicit—governed most interactions between Trump supporters and law enforcement on January 6th: the insurrectionists would attack only those officers who stood in their way, while bestowing the usual respect and deference on those who stood down. Still, the vicious brutality encountered by officers who fought back makes the passivity of some of their peers all the more confounding. I’d been in the Senate chamber for about twenty minutes when a large phalanx of Metropolitan Police entered. The Trump supporters were suddenly corralled, with no avenue of escape. Assuming that everyone in the chamber would be detained and that our phones would be confiscated, I withdrew my wallet and prepared to show my press card. But no arrests were made. No one was searched. Nobody questioned. The red-bearded officer approached a rioter and spoke to him privately, after which the rioter announced, "We gotta go, guys, otherwise we’re goin’ in handcuffs." As we filed out through the main door, the sergeant with the shaved head told us, "Be safe. We appreciate you being peaceful."

The corridor outside was also full of police. "This way," one of them said, extending his arm in invitation. Another officer led us to a staircase. His hair was dishevelled, he looked exhausted, and he was limping. A Proud Boy wearing biker gloves and a black-and-yellow flannel kept telling him, "We support you guys, O.K.? We support you guys. We support you guys."

"Thank you," the battered officer replied.

I followed the Proud Boy to an emergency exit and out of the building. Police in riot gear stood beneath a portico; as I filmed them with my phone while walking backward, a female officer (who had no way of knowing that I was a member of the press) jabbed her finger in the air, pointing emphatically at something behind me. I turned to look. Had she spotted some of the purloined documents? Was she signalling a colleague?

No. There was a low step, and she was worried that I might trip.

Strategic forbearance is one thing. But can we really attribute such outright solicitude, in the midst of what one officer called a "medieval battle," to some tactical shrewdness intended to beguile a volatile adversary? I don't think so. I think that the complex, often contradictory actions of officers on January 6th flowed from their complex, often contradictory relationship with that adversary. The day after the attack, one member of the Capitol Police sent a private message on Facebook to an insurrectionist who had admitted on that platform that he had entered the building. Introducing himself as someone "who agrees with your political stance," the officer advised him to delete the confession.

"Just looking out!" he explained.

More than eight thousand D.C. officers belong to the Fraternal Order of Police, which enthusiastically endorsed Trump twice. In 2019, the organization's D.C. branch held its annual holiday party at the Trump International Hotel. (The decision was controversial and the event poorly attended.) Nor is there any reason to assume that the Capitol Police or the Metropolitan Police was immune from the insidious bigotry, or infiltration by white supremacists, that plagued other police departments. In a 2001 class-action lawsuit, more than two hundred and fifty Black officers claimed that "racial discrimination is rampant in the ranks of the U.S. Capitol Police," and subsequent lawsuits have made similar allegations. (The Capitol Police have disputed many of the claims.) Two months after January 6th, a Jewish congressional staffer photographed a copy of "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion"—a century-old anti-Semitic text that influenced some of the very Americans who spearheaded the insurrection—on a Capitol Police officer's desk.

Numerous law-enforcement agents and their relatives participated in the attack. Thomas Webster, a retired N.Y.P.D. officer, was filmed assaulting a member of the Metropolitan Police with a metal pipe and calling him a "fucking piece of shit." (Webster was sentenced to ten years in prison.) A grand jury indicted Alan Hostetter, a former chief of police for La Habra, California, on multiple charges related to the siege. "People at the highest levels need to be made an example of with an execution or two or three," Hostetter had declared, in a YouTube video. (He has pleaded not guilty.) Two officers from Virginia took selfies inside the building. One of them, Thomas Robertson, posted on social media, "The right IN ONE DAY took the f***** U.S. Capitol. Keep poking us." (Robertson was convicted of five felonies and sentenced to more than seven years in prison.) Scott Fairlamb, the son of a New Jersey state trooper, was sentenced to three and half years after being filmed outside the Capitol punching an officer in the head. Fairlamb's brother was a senior agent in the Secret Service who had led Michelle Obama's security detail. A lawyer representing Fairlamb told HuffPost that his client donated to law-enforcement charities and shared "the same ideological viewpoint" as the police.

One way to think about January 6th is as the consummation, in real time, of a tumultuous shift between two distinct eras of conservatism. Before 2020, most conservatives celebrated law enforcement as the protectors of a system that was, on balance, reliably favorable to their interests. By the end of 2020, after the lockdowns and the election, many conservatives had come to see that system the same way that right-wing extremists did—as corrupt and tyrannical, perhaps even satanic. At the same time, so long as Trump was still in power and weaponizing law enforcement against leftists, neither conservatives nor the police were forced to confront what this meant for their alliance. That reckoning could no longer be avoided on January 6th, and it is understandable that people on both sides of the line persisted in respecting the terms of a compact that was now obsolete.

The platoon members who were cheered and hugged by Trump supporters seconds after being assaulted by them must have experienced the same disorientation as some victims of abusive relationships, and one wonders how many officers at the Capitol believed—or wanted to believe—that the people trying to kill them also loved them. During testimony before a Senate committee, the officer Harry Dunn described a rioter who "displayed what looked like a law-enforcement badge, and told me, ‘We’re doing this for you.’ " As if to memorialize the dissonance, Trump, a couple of minutes after I exited the Capitol, tweeted, "Remember, WE are the Party of Law & Order."

After leaving the Capitol, I followed several people around a corner, to the north end of the building. Incredibly, a renewed offensive was being mounted there, and some of the intruders who had just been politely escorted from the Senate chamber—including the man with the TRUMP beanie and the rolled-up documents in his back pocket—joined the attack. Using metal barricades as battering rams, the mob charged officers guarding an entrance and screamed at them, "Choose a side!" and "We stood behind you—you stand behind us!"

At some point, a gaunt and somewhat tremulous officer from the Metro Transit Police stepped forward and asked to borrow a rioter's megaphone. "Ladies and gentlemen, can I have your attention, please?" he said. The obsequious request was met with jeers and insults. Nevertheless, the transit officer persisted: "I hear you. President Bush also said this after 9/11. ‘We hear you.’ "

This was a remarkable reference. Three days after the attack on the World Trade Center, Bush had visited Ground Zero. Standing amid the ruins, he had borrowed a megaphone to address the firefighters, paramedics, and other rescue workers clearing debris. "I can hear you," Bush told them. "The rest of the world hears you. And the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon." It was an expression of solidarity with the victims of a grave injustice, and it was a vow to the bereaved that their dispossession would be avenged. We now know that Bush was also uniting the country against an imaginary enemy, honoring American patriots while invoking their injury to legitimize a bogus war. His audience had chanted, "U.S.A."

In May, 2020, when I had arrived in Minneapolis after a nine-hour drive from Michigan, I had gone directly to the Third Precinct house—the station to which Derek Chauvin, the officer who’d killed George Floyd, belonged. When I got there, the building was on fire. As I stood in the street watching flames leap from the second-story windows, a young Black resident of the city remarked, "Hopefully, they hear us."

During the seven months that had passed since then, I’d attended many protests for racial justice—yet the transit officer standing before the Trump supporters was the first member of law enforcement I had seen offering an assurance that he had heard anyone. Black protesters in Minneapolis had taken heed of the indiscriminate violence with which the police and military responded to their appeals (at least eighty-nine people, ranging in age from fifteen to seventy-seven, went to the hospital); they had believed President Trump when he threatened their lives ("When the looting starts, the shooting starts"); and they had reasonably surmised that demonstrating came with a risk of being killed. Conversely, on January 6th, Trump's followers also listened to him ("We have truth and justice on our side"), took heed of the military's absence and of law enforcement's restraint, and reasonably surmised that they could proceed with impunity.

None of the insurrectionists I observed appeared to experience fear—certainly nothing resembling the physical terror that I had seen police and soldiers elicit during Black Lives Matter protests following George Floyd's death. One day in Minneapolis, I was following peaceful marchers when troops in armored Humvees surrounded and brutalized them with less-lethal munitions. Some of the marchers panicked, fearing that the bullets were real. "Don't shoot!" a young Black man pleaded, raising his arms. "Let us leave!" (Minutes later, a rubber bullet struck him squarely in the chest.) The Trump supporters who attacked the Capitol, on the other hand, assumed that there was a limit to what could be done to them, and one ingratiating law-enforcement official after another—from the transit officer to the sergeant with the shaved head—confirmed this assumption.

In April, 2021, an inspector general testifying before a House committee revealed another likely reason that so many insurrectionists felt so undaunted: the Capitol Police had not availed itself of sting-ball grenades or of 40-millimetre launchers capable of shooting beanbags, sponge bullets, and other large-bore projectiles, both of which had been regularly deployed against racial-justice protesters across the country over the summer. (A sergeant's body camera in Minneapolis recorded him telling officers, "You got to hit them with the forties.") Such weapons "would have helped us that day to enhance our ability to protect the Capitol," the inspector general explained. Nonetheless, an assistant deputy chief of police had forbidden their use, because of their potential to "cause life-altering injury and/or death." While I was under the bleachers, the rounds that rained down on us, whatever calibre they were, did nothing to repel or even discourage the attackers from crossing that critical choke point. "Is that all you got?" one Trump supporter had taunted. The answer was no—but that was all they were willing to use. (The sole exception was Ashli Babbitt, who was fatally shot while breaching a lobby adjacent to the House chambers, where lawmakers were fleeing. The officer who fired the round would be condemned by Trump and his supporters.)

Even if the docility of some law-enforcement members on January 6th could be chalked up to a good-faith attempt at de-escalation, it was a profound misjudgment that only emboldened many insurrectionists. After the transit officer told the Trump supporters that he heard them, he went on to say, "We are not here to kick you out and use force. That is not why we are here."

"We have guns, too, motherfuckers!" a man yelled over him. "With a lot bigger rounds!" Another added, "If we have to tool up, it's gonna be over! We’re coming heavy!" I also overheard a woman talking on her phone. "We need to come back with guns," she said. "One time with guns, and then we’ll never have to do this again."

Less than a year later, on August 22, 2021, Proud Boys once more mobilized and battled with antifascists in Portland. Videos showed Trump supporters in body armor smashing up vehicles with baseball bats and shooting semi-automatic paintball guns on busy streets. A man shot a pistol at antifascists, two of whom drew their own sidearms and returned fire.

Two days earlier, the department had released a statement telling Proud Boys and antifascists that it would not "keep people apart" should they choose to assault one another. The hands-off policy, which effectively assured the Proud Boys that they would receive a wide berth to commit violence when they came to town, underscored how little January 6th had changed law-enforcement blindness to the threat posed by right-wing extremists. At the same time, the efforts of Trump and his allies to diminish and distort the events of January 6th have precluded any meaningful reckoning with right-wing extremism, and have all but guaranteed that it will continue to metastasize, irrespective of the specific groups, movements, and causes through which it finds expression.

On the night of January 6th, after the Capitol had been secured, Trump tweeted, "These are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from great patriots." The statement was not only a defense of the insurrection and a tribute to its perpetrators; it was also a threat. This is what happens; this is what will happen. Since then, numerous conservative politicians have more or less promised violence if Democrats continue to win office—or if Trump is held accountable for any of his alleged crimes. The Arizona state representative Wendy Rogers tweeted in July, 2021, "The election fraud will either be exposed and stopped and many people will go to jail or they will keep doing it ushering in a new era of 1776." That October, at a conservative conference in Idaho, an audience member asked, "How many elections are they gonna steal before we kill these people?" On Twitter, a Republican lawmaker responded, "The question is fair." Senator Lindsey Graham recently told Fox News that "there’ll be riots in the streets" if Trump is prosecuted for illegally removing classified material from the White House. Trump swiftly shared Graham's comments on Truth Social, his social-media company.

Hoping to stave off an encroaching despair on the morning after the Capitol attack, I caught a taxi to the Lincoln Memorial. When I arrived, the monument was closed. Squad cars were pulling up. Officers expelled a braying mob.

Many of the people wore red MAGA hats and TRUMP 2020 shirts. I asked someone what had happened. It seemed that a woman had been posing for pictures with an American flag and a Gadsden flag—DON’T TREAD ON ME below a hissing snake, on a yellow field—when an officer advised her that such displays were not allowed. (She later claimed that the officer had grabbed the flags away from her.) A fracas had ensued. Now the Trump supporters converged at the bottom of the steps and began calling the officers Nazis, Marxists, and pigs. Young men in Oxford shirts waved their middle fingers. "Aren't we the pussies?" a little bald man asked others in the crowd. "Honestly, we’re not overrunning them?"

"That's when they just start executing people," a petite, bespectacled woman said, glaring hatefully at the police.

It occurred to me that some of the officers impassively absorbing this abuse probably had friends in the hospital. Roughly a hundred and fifty law-enforcement agents had been wounded the previous day. Some had sustained brain injuries. According to the Capitol Police Labor Committee, one had suffered "two cracked ribs and two smashed spinal disks." Another was stabbed with "a metal fence stake." Now, though, it was not the police but the Trump supporters who were outraged.

The woman with the Gadsden flag was a pastor from Los Angeles. "How dare they?" she demanded. "What is wrong with this country? This is not my America. I don't understand."

That made two of us. I could think of only one question to ask. "Where do we go from here?"

The pastor wiped her tears. "I will tell you this," she sobbed. "I will not turn the other cheek to what's not right. This is not right. This is not right." ♦

This is drawn from "The Storm Is Here: An American Crucible."