WASHINGTON ― As Donald Trump continues to glorify the accused and convicted criminals who beat and maimed police officers as part of his Jan. 6, 2021, coup attempt, he appears to have unlikely allies: police unions, who thus far have not offered a single word of criticism.
One, in fact, has already endorsed the former president as he runs for the White House again. “President Trump’s history of support for the men and women of law enforcement is unmatched,” the International Union of Police Associations said in its Feb. 6 announcement.
An employee at the Florida-based union this week declined to explain why it was supporting someone who describes people who attacked officers ― one died hours after the assault ― as “patriots,” “political prisoners” and, most recently, “hostages.”
“It’s our policy not to comment to press,” the employee said.
IUPA’s silence on Trump’s praise for accused and convicted cop-beaters, though, is not unique. Police unions across the country, most notably the 375,000-member Fraternal Order of Police, which represents the Metropolitan Police Department of Washington, D.C., and the Capitol Police, the two agencies whose officers were attacked that day, have said nothing.
In 2020, the FOP endorsed Trump over Democrat Joe Biden, even though Biden had often won the support of police unions when he was a U.S. senator and vice president. “The FOP is proud to endorse a candidate who calls for law and order across our nation,” FOP president Patrick Yoes wrote of Trump then.
Yoes did not respond to HuffPost queries about Trump’s praise for the Jan. 6 attackers, which has included a promise of pardons.
Michael Fanone, a former metro police officer who on Jan. 6 was attacked with a stun gun by a Trump follower until he suffered a heart attack, said the reason is as simple as it is disturbing: “Lots of officers are ideologically aligned with the people who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6,” he said. “I get more threatening phone calls from people who identify as police officers than anyone else. We’ve been dismissed and vilified by even our police union.”
Indeed, a number of current and former police officers actually participated in the riot. One, Karol Chwiesiuk, at the time an active member of the Chicago Police Department, received legal help from his local Fraternal Order of Police chapter. That chapter’s president initially justified the Jan. 6 assault by repeating Trump’s frequent lie that the 2020 election had been “stolen” from him.
“There were police officers and, hell, military officers, both current and former, there on Jan. 6 participating in crime,” said Harry Dunn, a Black former officer who was called the N-word by Trump’s mob as they tried to push past him into the Capitol that day.
He called the Florida union’s endorsement of Trump “a slap in the face” but said it was not a great surprise, given how readily elected Republican officials and everyday Americans have gone back to supporting Trump despite what he did. “I don’t think that police officers are the exception to the rule of people supporting someone who doesn’t have their best interest at heart,” said Dunn, who is now running for Congress in Maryland as a Democrat.
Joe Walsh, a former Republican congressman from Illinois, said Fanone and Dunn are correct about their fellow officers. “They’re afraid to speak out for political reasons, and way too many in law enforcement are pro-Trump and pro-Jan. 6,” he said. “And I say all of that as someone who’s hugely pro-cop.”
While more than 1,200 among Trump’s mob that day have been arrested, only several hundred have been charged with assaulting police officers. And those who have been jailed pending trial are among those whose charges and underlying actions are the most serious.
A study by New York University Law School’s Just Security forum found that 17 of the 20 Jan. 6 inmates in the District of Columbia lockup at the time a group of them recorded a version of the Star Spangled Banner were accused of violent felonies against police. Trump contributed his reading of the Pledge of Allegiance which the “J6 Choir” then spliced into their recording and released via iTunes. Trump has played that at the start of his rallies while he stands at attention, hand over his heart.
At a campaign stop in Houston last November, Trump said: “I call them the J6 hostages, not prisoners. I call them the hostages, what’s happened. And it’s a shame.”
“The ones who are currently incarcerated are the ones who assaulted police officers,” Fanone said. “One of the choir members is one of the guys who assaulted me.”
Trump’s embrace of his violent mob has led to other Republican office holders and Trump-adjacent enterprises like Turning Point USA and the Conservative Political Action Conference to also back accused criminals over police officers.
Georgia congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene routinely calls the Jan. 6 criminal defendants “political prisoners” and has visited them to offer encouragement and moral support. At this week’s CPAC conference, one of the exhibitors is featuring Jake Lang, who is charged with assaulting officers by hitting them with a baseball bat.
“Police departments are a microcosm of society,” Dunn said. “It’s the norm. But we can’t accept it as OK.”
Like the 1,200 of his followers already arrested, Trump is also facing legal consequences for his words and deeds in the weeks leading up to and on Jan. 6. A federal prosecution includes charges of conspiring to defraud the United States, obstructing an official proceeding, and conspiring to deprive millions of Americans of their votes in an attempt to overturn the election and remain in power. A separate Georgia state prosecution charges him with trying to overturn his election loss in that state.
A second federal prosecution is based on his refusal to turn over secret documents he took with him to his South Florida country club upon leaving office, while a New York state indictment accuses him of falsifying business records to hide a $130,000 hush money payment to a porn star in the days ahead of the 2016 election.
Trump is nevertheless on track to clinch the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, potentially putting the party in the position of having a convicted felon at the top of its ticket in November.