The cops like Trump because he doesn’t look to make their jobs a Sisyphean task.
Maybe it’s a New York thing. Maybe it’s a post-9/11 thing. Maybe it’s the “them vs. us” simplicity of law enforcement. Whatever the reason, Donald Trump appears to carry a genuine affection for the police. Observing two worlds in one apple Thursday evening — Biden attending a $25 million fundraising gala at Radio City Music Hall in Manhattan while Trump pays tribute to a fallen officer, Jonathan Diller, on Long Island — I could not help but be reminded of Hillary in her glass-ceilinged, victory-turned-ruinous-defeat pavilion in November of 2016. Hillary’s Javits Center choice was also in Manhattan. It could be nothing, but seeing Biden cheesing it up surrounded by Hollywood royalty is quite the image when his opponent is offering condolences to widows.
Our Andy McCarthy wrote of Diller’s death:
NYPD officer Jonathan Diller was savagely murdered on Monday by a career criminal who was out on the street, with his career-criminal cohort, despite their combined 35 arrests.
Officer Diller was 31. He leaves behind his wife Stephanie and their one-year-old son.
A little before 6 p.m., Diller and his partner approached a Kia Soul that was illegally parked in front of a T-Mobile store near a bus stop in Far Rockaway. The car appears to have been parked there for about ten minutes, according to the New York Post’s sources, one of whom has seen police video.
Lindy Jones (a.k.a. “Killa”), 41, was behind the wheel. Guy Rivera was sitting in the passenger seat. It’s not certain what they were up to, but we can infer it wasn’t good. Rivera, who shot and killed Diller, also had a shiv hidden in his butt. And there turned out to be a second gun in the car. Police suspect the two sociopaths were planning a robbery.
Diller approached the passenger side of the car; his partner the driver side. Diller instructed the car’s occupants to roll down the windows. They refused. Rivera then ignored Diller’s direction that he remove his hands from the pocket of his sweatshirt. Finally, Jones unlocked the automatic door locks, but when Diller tried to open the passenger door, Rivera pulled back from the inside handle.
Diller again told Rivera to remove his hand from his sweatshirt pocket. It was then that Rivera fired his gun and shot the officer — one shot that pierced Diller’s abdomen under the bulletproof vest he was wearing.
Diller’s partner returned fire, wounding Rivera. He has been treated and will recover.
The lawman dies in the line of duty to criminals who should be making burritos out of prison-commissary cheese whiz and crackers instead of roaming the streets of New York. It’s unacceptable, unconscionable. And it’s, unfortunately for us all, common enough to provoke an emotion of “not again” instead of “how could this happen?”
We know why this happened. We’ve watched it happen since the summer of 2020. Leftist prosecutors, think tanks, media outlets, and activists have convinced the party in charge that the No. 1 victim of crime is the criminal himself and that we should do everything in our power to free him from his bondage. Criminal-justice leftists look to make vegans of wolves by allowing the wolf rehabilitation in the sheep pen. Are the decarcerators’ hearts in the right place? Sure, some of them. But compassion doesn’t keep killers from killing — guys with badges and concrete walls do. Biden’s inability to contact the family of Officer Diller, instead expressing his regrets to New York Mayor Eric Adams to pass along, is an embarrassment.
Americans of any political viewpoint can be forgiven for looking at the options and saying, “The guy who’s most demonstrably anti-murder is my guy.” As a group, we want two things: relative safety and to be left alone. Cops accomplish the first. We can’t have the second without the first. The cops like Trump because he doesn’t look to make their jobs a Sisyphean task — except instead of rolling a boulder up a hill, police have to drag lunatics, killers, and drug-addled sons of sin into the precinct only to have the district attorney spring them loose within hours.
When accepting in 2020 the endorsement of the New York Police Benevolent Association, Trump remarked to the assembled officers:
So we’re gonna give you back your stature. We’re gonna give you back your status. I hate to say it, but it’s been taken away. We’re gonna give you back the right to be New York’s finest, the finest of all time, the greatest of all time.
It’s classic Trump, more about himself than the audience, but still: He’s positive about the police without asides, disclaimers, or progressive doublespeak. The guy likes cops, cops like him, and we all sleep better when the cops are happy in their work. One cannot have a functioning society without the assumption of street-level law — if enough Americans think only Trump can manage to provide that, then it doesn’t matter how many galas Biden attends.