Trump attacks Kamala Harris and the 'Marxist Left' in his speech to police about crime | Donald Trump

Donald Trump has promised to protect police officers from prosecution if he is re-elected. He previously falsely claimed that the US was in the grip of a wave of violent crime, blaming the Black Lives Matter movement and migrants crossing the Mexican border.

In a speech to police officers in Michigan on Tuesday, the former president sought to shift responsibility for the perceived crisis onto his Democratic opponent, Kamala Harris, describing her as one of the “Marxist district attorneys” who proved to be anti-police and pro-crime during her tenure as San Francisco district attorney in the 2000s.

At the same time, Trump lamented his own legal troubles, including his criminal conviction for fraud in New York and other looming prosecutions.

“They're after guys like me, but not guys who kill people,” he said.

Flanked by local sheriffs in Howell, a small town in metropolitan Detroit where a group of white supremacists marched last month, chanting “We love Hitler, we love Trump” and carrying signs reading “White Lives Matter,” Trump painted a picture of Americans living in fear of leaving their homes because of crime.

“It's just crazy, but you can't just walk across the street to get a loaf of bread. You get shot, you get robbed, you get raped, you get… whatever,” he said.

The former president claimed that this alleged crime wave began with the inauguration of Joe Biden and Harris.

“Since Comrade Kamala Harris took office, her administration's crime statistics show that violent crime has increased by 43% under her leadership. These are all government numbers,” he claimed.

In fact, official statistics show that violent crime in the United States is at a 50-year low.

Yet Trump promised to crack down on “local Marxist prosecutors who refuse to enforce the law” while, he said, ruining the lives of police officers doing their jobs.

“For the last four years, the Marxist left has waged a bitter war against law enforcement in our country. They have stripped some of these police officers of their dignity, their spirit and their lives, and that's why you see it – crime in our country is so out of control,” he claimed.

Trump said the police were having “great difficulties with the laws of our country.”

“We will eliminate this problem because our police should not have problems,” he said.

Trump added: “We will guarantee immunity.”

The former president accused Harris of having a “pro-crime, anti-police attitude.”

“She has repeatedly advocated defunding the police,” he said. “If she ever had the chance, she would do anything to defund the police because that is her soul, that is her heart, and we cannot have a president like that.”

In 2020, then-Senator Harris supported the “Defund the Police” movement following the murder of George Floyd by a white police officer in Minneapolis and the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement. Harris said at the time that BLM was right to question the level of spending on the “militarization” of police departments at the expense of social services, housing and education.

“This whole movement is about rightly saying that we need to look at these budgets and find out if they reflect the right priorities,” she said on the radio program “Ebro in the Morning.”

The former president also claimed that Harris was responsible for a rise in shoplifting in her role as California's attorney general a decade ago.

“She came up with this concept: $950 and under, you won't even be prosecuted. So people go to the stores with calculators to calculate [it] out,” he said, to the obvious amusement of the police officers around him.

“Did you know they have calculators that add that up? They want to make sure they stay under $950, but it didn't matter because they didn't prosecute those who went over that.”

However, there is no such regulation in California, and the allegation appears to be based on a 2014 ballot proposal that reclassified certain thefts and misdemeanors.

Trump blamed the alleged rise in crime primarily on migrants crossing the Mexican border. He also blamed Harris for being a supposed “border czar,” even though immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than U.S. citizens. He also claimed that some Latin American countries export their criminals to the United States.

“Currently, criminals from all over the world are streaming into our country,” he said.

Trump, however, was angered that prosecutors upheld the law in at least one case.

“We don't get justice in New York,” he said of his own conviction for paying hush money to a porn star.

The former president also faces criminal prosecution for his attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential election, the storming of the Capitol on January 6, 2021, and his handling of classified documents.

“Every time I fly over a state, they charge you. I've been charged more times than the great Alphonse Capone,” he told the police amid laughter.