By Bo Erickson
MEMPHIS, March 23 (Reuters) – Under pressure to improve Republican chances in November’s midterm elections, President Donald Trump highlighted his crime crackdown in a visit to Tennessee on Monday in a return to an issue he hopes will resonate with voters.
Trump’s roundtable event in Memphis with some members of his senior leadership team took place as the war against Iran entered its fourth week, a conflict that is dominating his agenda and driving up global gasoline prices.
The Trump administration last September launched the Memphis Safe Task Force, a multi-agency effort involving federal officers, local police and the Tennessee National Guard to fight violent crime.
Trump was joined on Monday by Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth, Attorney General Pam Bondi, deputy White House chief of staff Stephen Miller and FBI Director Kash Patel as he sought to show that the initiative in Memphis is paying off.
Before the initiative was launched, the city of Memphis had the highest rate of violent crime per capita in the country, according to the FBI.
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.
“You have now developed a reputation as a city that’s coming back stronger than any city in the country because of what’s happened with crime, and because your political leaders had the courage to do what they did,” Trump said, sitting on a stage arranged with long guns, marijuana and methamphetamine seized in the operation.
Trump’s event marked a return to an issue that he hopes will show voters he has their concerns on his mind as he tries to redefine his law enforcement record after a tumultuous crackdown on illegal immigration in Minnesota earlier this year.
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 talk about what he is doing to tackle high prices.
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.
The change in tactics could be politically advantageous to Trump’s Republican Party in November, when it hopes to build on its current slim majorities in Congress.
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 hardline 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; Writing by Steve Holland; Editing by Sergio Non, Ross Colvin and Alistair Bell)
