- Position1 of 3›
- Donald Trump will be better for criminal justice
- Argument‹4 of 4
Donald Trump will restore law and order
Trump strongly supports the police, and will bring an end to the violence breaking out in American cities. His tough-on-crime approach will bring down crime rates.
The argument
In response to the wave of riots and protests across the US in 2020, Donald Trump has shown himself to be the candidate of law and order. He is willing to use federal law enforcement officials and military equipment to control the unrest in many US cities. Trump has taken swift action against looting, arson and violence against police officers, offering federal assistance to local authorities. Trump celebrates law enforcement officers, and has increased funding for officer safety measures such as bulletproof vests. He has also encouraged the use of greater force by law enforcement officers against left-wing lawlessness. In response to the chaotic violence in recent months, only strong law enforcement can restore law and order, and only Trump is prepared to support law enforcement in controlling the unrest.
Premises
Counter-arguments
Trump has used police and military force against a wave of unrest that grew as a result of police brutality and racial oppression. Trump does not understand the reasons why discontent is so intense, and the aggressive tactics employed by law enforcement will only exacerbate problems and heighten tensions. Trump's 'law and order' response to the unrest suggests he views American citizens as things to be controlled rather than citizens to protect and serve.
Rejecting the premises
[Rejecting P1] The premise describes a posture and a set of deployments rather than an outcome. Positioning oneself as the law-and-order candidate is a fact about campaigning, and the 2020 federal deployments were contested at the time by state and city officials as escalatory; whether they reduced disorder is the question at issue, and no measure of it is given. [Rejecting P2] Funding equipment and endorsing greater force is support for police, which the premise treats as identical to good criminal-justice policy. Criminal justice also covers sentencing, prosecution, bail, prisons and re-entry — a field on which the administration's most-cited measure, the First Step Act, points in a different direction from the one argued for here, and which the premises do not mention at all. [Rejecting C] "Restore law and order" is asserted as accomplished in the conclusion while being only proposed in the premises. A comparative claim also requires the alternative: the position is that one candidate will be better than the other, and what the other proposed is never considered.