By Bo Erickson
MEMPHIS, March 23 (Reuters) – Four weeks into the Iran war, U.S. President Donald Trump will shift his focus from overseas conflict to law‑and‑order, visiting Memphis, Tennessee, on Monday to highlight his crime crackdown to bolster his party ahead of November midterm elections.
Trump’s expected tough talk on crime and immigration marks a return to an issue that he hopes will resonate with voters as he faces high‑stakes military decisions and war‑driven economic uncertainty, and tries to redefine his law enforcement record after the tumultuous crackdown in Minnesota earlier this year.
The surge of thousands of federal agents to Memphis started in September. The city had the highest rate of violent crime per capita in the country, according to the FBI, prompting Trump to stand up the Memphis Safe Task Force.
“The city, a beacon of American culture that was Elvis’s home and is often called the birthplace of rock and roll and the blues, should be safe and secure for all of its citizens,” Trump’s order said at the time, mobilizing National Guard troops for patrol, as he did in Washington, DC.
Overall crime is down in Memphis about 43% compared to last year, according to local law enforcement data. The task force said recently it has made close to 7,000 arrests and seized almost 1,100 illegal firearms since the crackdown began.
POLITICAL PUSH AHEAD OF MIDTERMS
Trump’s top political advisers want him talking about kitchen table issues, but Americans’ affordability concerns and his recent foreign policy pursuits have overshadowed his domestic trips to areas controlled by Republican politicians.
Fuel costs have risen since the U.S. and Israel started attacking Iran on February 28, with oil and gas exports from the Middle East held up by the hostilities. Gas prices in Tennessee are on average up more than $1 per gallon compared to last month, according to travel analyst AAA.
“We’re in a war that we know nothing about, and we really do make a decent salary, but gas is getting too expensive for us,” said Kimberly Jenkins, 55, a hospital administrator visiting Memphis from Houston, Texas.
Republicans hope that highlighting a crime reduction in a large city will help bring the conversation back to political territory that their party has often embraced in the past.
In recent months, Trump’s top immigration officials often cited the Memphis operation — which was welcomed by some of the city’s Democratic officials — as a positive example that stands in contrast with strong-arm immigration enforcement efforts in Minneapolis, which prompted large protests after federal agents fatally shot two U.S. citizens in the city.
“We don’t have this problem” in Memphis, then Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said in January after the immigration officers’ second fatal shooting in Minneapolis. But since that time, the president has tried to reset the issue and replaced Noem, told governors he would only surge agents if requested, and directed his officials towards a more “targeted” approach.
The change in tactics could be politically advantageous to Trump’s Republican Party in the November midterm elections, where his conservative party hopes to build on its current slim majorities. About 61% of respondents in a Reuters/Ipsos poll last month — including 92% of Republicans and 35% of Democrats — said they “support deporting unauthorized immigrants” but generally disapprove of the Trump administration’s hard-line tactics.
The night before Trump’s visit to Memphis, residents and tourists on Beale Street, where neon signs emphasize the city’s history of blues and jazz, said they were split on the visible increase of law enforcement.
“The crazy presence of National Guard and ramped-up police is only in the predominant tourist areas,” 33-year-old law student Darius O’Neal said in an interview, questioning Trump’s political motivations for the surge.
But Dewayne Hambrick, a 60-year-old Memphis photographer who considers himself a Democrat, said that while crime still continues, “I think it’s been great that the law enforcement is here.”
(Reporting by Bo Erickson; Editing by Sergio Non and Michael Perry)
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