President Donald Trump has created a situation in which police are free to "act like thugs," conservative attorney George Conway lamented on MSNBC's "The Weeknight" Monday evening — and in which actual criminals can pretend to be police without too much effort.

This comes as Trump maintains his grip on Washington, D.C.'s law enforcement under the pretext of an "emergency" — and as he threatens to send federal troops to even more cities around the country, with a blatantly obvious political pattern, as former GOP chair and MSNBC anchor Michael Steele noted.

"The focus on these cities is linked to them being Democratic cities," said Steele. "So even within red states, you've got, you know, a city that maybe has a Democratic mayor, right? He can't go after that city because it's in a red state."

"In a red state with a Republican governor," agreed Conway. "And that destroys the narrative that the Democrats have caused — Democrats didn't cause crime in St. Louis or New Orleans or Memphis, okay? This is about — and nothing that the federal government does can help with this in its current form. These troops, again, they are not trained for it."

"This is a prescription for disaster. This is a prescription for a tragedy," he continued. "I mean, these, these guardsmen aren't trained for it. And then you have, you know, you have ICE. I mean, you have this situation now where they're empowering people to take, you know, to behave — not only ICE agents, but others, to behave like the ICE agents, put masks on, and you've got, basically you've got cops dressing like thugs and acting like thugs, and then you've got — there are cases now where there are thugs acting like cops acting like thugs, okay? So nobody can tell the difference."

"Somebody is going to get hurt here," Conway added. "This isn't about, again, this is about getting people used to it, exercising control over places where he doesn't feel he has political control, including this district, the capital."

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