As crime surges on his watch, Trump warns of Biden’s America

With echoes of Richard Nixon’s law-and-order campaign in 1968, Trump is trying to energize his conservative base while also making an appeal to a small patch of undecided voters by posing the question: Which man will keep you safer?

By leaning hard on select scenes of violence, Trump is banking on that unrest continuing. But the protests could wane. Violent crime around the U.S. has been on a downward trajectory for the better part of the last three decades.

Lanae Erickson, a senior vice president for social policy and politics at the center-left think tank Third Way, said Trump’s attempt to use the Nixon playbook and tap into anxieties about crime is odd given that, unlike Nixon in 1968, Trump is already in the White House.

“Trump is the incumbent, so if bad things are happening right now, they get blamed on him,” Erickson said. “I don’t know how he can persuade voters that it’s Joe Biden’s fault.”