It’s been reasonably clear for a while that immigration and crime are Donald Trump ’s two best (relatively speaking) issues in a second-term agenda that is generally quite unpopular. These are also issues that tend to excite the MAGA base, particularly since the Trump-Vance campaign relentlessly combined them during the 2024 presidential election to suggest America was drowning in an immigrant-driven national crime wave .

The intersection of these “law and order” issues has now taken on a whole new importance during the administration’s campaign to send federal and state military assets into Democratic-governed cities to crack down on crime. In two cases, Washington, D.C., and Memphis, the rationale for using National Guard units was the specious argument that violent crime was out

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