Former President Donald Trump urged the board of the nation's largest police union Friday to "watch for voter fraud" across the country, an appeal that, if followed through on, could run afoul of multiple state laws and raise accusations of voter intimidation.
Invoking his widely debunked claims of voter fraud in 2020, Trump suggested that the only way he could lose in November was if Democrats cheated. "Watch for the voter fraud, because we win without voter fraud," Trump said at a meeting of the national board of the Fraternal Order of Police in Charlotte, North Carolina. "We win so easily."
Trump added that he believed police could effectively scare some voters. "You can keep it down just by watching, because, believe it or not, they're afraid of that badge," Trump said. "They're afraid of you people. They're afraid of that more than anything else."
Trump's comments follow his repeated statements raising doubts about the integrity of the upcoming election before a vote has been cast. But though Trump has previously urged his supporters to monitor voting activity -- particularly in Democratic cities in battleground states -- his entreaty to the police union heightens concerns that he is encouraging voter intimidation at the polls.
Katie Reisner, a senior counsel at States United Democracy Center, a nonpartisan organization focused on elections, said that election officials and police had been working for years to strengthen community relations around policing and elections, and that such encouragement from Trump could disrupt years of work and planning.
"The idea of Trump telling the Fraternal Order of Police to take matters into their own hands and kind of go rogue, it's certainly not a positive from a healthy elections standpoint," Reisner said. "But it's also really counter to a lot of work that's happening in a lot of jurisdictions to make sure that law enforcement are both adhering to the law and not surprising their communities on Election Day or during voting."
The presence of uniformed officers at the polls has a fraught history in the United States.
In the South, law enforcement was often used to enforce racist Jim Crow-era laws, including poll taxes and tests aimed at suppressing Black voters. And in 1981, Republicans in New Jersey hired off-duty police officers to patrol polling places in predominantly Black communities, wearing armbands proclaiming to be from a ballot security task force and carrying weapons. They were sued, and the Republican National Committee was forced into a consent decree that lasted for four decades. It required the party to receive court permission for any future ballot security programs.
And though law enforcement groups typically take a limited role in investigations of election crimes, which are generally handled by state agencies with input from elections officials, election denial activists have tried since 2020 to get officers and sheriffs to be more proactive.
Trump has a habit of urging police to take more aggressive approaches and has long spoken admiringly of officers who do so. He has promised to push for legislation strengthening protections for police officers if he is elected, and in May, he pledged to give officers immunity from prosecution.
In Friday's speech, Trump pledged to give "hundreds of millions of dollars in federal grants" to cities that returned to the policing strategy of stop-and-frisk, an aggressive practice that has drawn legal challenges, as well as to so-called broken-windows policing. Criminal justice reform advocates have said both practices disproportionately targeted people of color.
Trump's address to the Fraternal Order of Police board came hours after the group, which has more than 370,000 members, announced that it would endorse him for president. The union, which last backed a Democratic presidential candidate in 1996, also endorsed Trump in 2016 and 2020.
Trump has for years tried to portray Democrats as too lax on crime, presenting himself as a law-and-order candidate, even as he faced four criminal indictments and was convicted on 34 felony charges in New York City tied to hush-money payments to a porn star.
During his speech, he celebrated that the sentencing in that trial had been postponed, falsely claiming that the decision was made because "everyone realizes that there was no case."
The statement from the police union endorsing Trump did not acknowledge his convictions or other criminal cases, nor did it address his pledge to consider pardoning those charged in the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol, some of whom attacked police officers.
Trump spent the bulk of the speech portraying himself as tougher on crime than his Democratic opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, a former San Francisco district attorney and California attorney general. Promising to always "back the blue," he called Harris a "defunder" who wanted to end financial support for police.
Though Harris in 2020 voiced some support for the principles of police reform that underpinned that movement, including the need to reexamine police budgets and divert resources to other programs, she told The New York Times that year: "We're not going to get rid of the police. We all have to be practical."
Trump also cited Harris' time as a prosecutor and attorney general as evidence that she was soft on crime. Misrepresenting a California law, he claimed that she was responsible for a statute that allowed shoplifters in the state to steal, without consequence, up to $950 worth of merchandise.
The measure established that shoplifters who stole $950 or less in goods could be charged only with a misdemeanor, and though Harris was attorney general when it took effect, she never took a public position on it.
In his remarks, Trump continued to stoke fear around urban crime, repeatedly insisting that there had been a surge in violent crime despite data showing a decrease in killings and assaults in major US cities.
But even as he deplored violent crime and blamed Democrats for it, Trump also made light of the 2022 attack on Paul Pelosi, the husband of Rep. Nancy Pelosi, a Democrat and former House speaker, at the couple's home in California. The attacker had said that he had sought out Nancy Pelosi.
"Nancy Pelosi has a big wall wrapped around her house," Trump said, adding mockingly, "Of course, it didn't help too much with the problems she had, did it?"
Before Trump's event in Charlotte, the Harris campaign released a letter Friday from more than 100 law enforcement officials who signed on to endorse Harris. The letter argues that Harris and her running mate, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, are "the only candidates we trust to keep our communities safe."
Trump, who has long downplayed the need to prepare for debates, also taunted Harris over her preparations for Tuesday's presidential debate.
"She's locked herself in a room," Trump said. "She's got a lot to learn."