Trump and Republicans use calls to 'defund the police' to attack Democrats

Donald Trump is “appalled” by calls to “defund the police”. The Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, called the suggestion “outlandish”. And the House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, promised police officers “Republicans will never turn our backs on you”, unveiling a new line of attack ahead of the November elections.

Calls to reform, defund and abolish the police have been embraced by protesters and activists amid a national upheaval in response to the police killings of George Floyd in Minneapolis and Breonna Taylor in Louisville, both of whom were African American. But Trump, his re-election campaign and his Republican allies are seizing on the movement in an effort to weaponize the rallying cry against Democrats and the party’s nominee, Joe Biden.

Related: US police have a history of violence against black people. Will it ever stop?

“The president is appalled by the ‘defund the police’ movement,” the White House press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, said on Monday. She compared it to past calls to abolish US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) ahead of the 2018 congressional midterms, which resulted in Democrats regaining control of the House.

“It’s remarkable to hear this coming from today’s Democrat party,” she continued, declining to say whether the president supported any specific policing reforms.

The effort to turn the national debate over racism and policing so that it works against Democrats comes as Trump continues to fall behind Biden in key battleground states, according to several recent polls, amid his incendiary response to the mass protests against police brutality and his widely criticized handling of the coronavirus pandemic.

Though Democrats have vowed to curb the powers of the police, few support defunding police departments. On Monday, Biden distanced himself from the slogan while embracing the growing activism around reforms in policing and criminal justice.

Biden “hears and shares the deep grief and frustration of those calling out for change” and “supports the urgent need for reform”, a campaign spokesman, Andrew Bates, said in a statement on Monday. But he stated bluntly that Biden “does not believe that police should be defunded”.

Bates said the former vice president, who on Monday met privately with the family of George Floyd in Houston, believes that coupling additional funding for “public schools, summer programs, and mental health and substance abuse treatment” with support for police departments would lead to improved outcomes.

In stark contrast, Trump has implored law enforcement to “dominate” the streets where Americans were marching en masse against police brutality and racism.

“LAW & ORDER, NOT DEFUND AND ABOLISH THE POLICE,” Trump tweeted on Monday. “The Radical Left Democrats have gone Crazy!”

Later, at a roundtable with law enforcement officials at the White House, Trump declared: “We won’t be defunding our police. There won’t be dismantling of our police. There’s not going to be any disbanding of our police.”

He conceded that the nation had witnessed “some horrible things” at the hands of police officers but insisted that virtually all – “let’s go with 99%” – of them are “great, great people.”

Republicans sense an opportunity to portray Democrats as extremists eager to disband police departments, while driving a wedge between energized protesters and elected officials advocating for more incremental change.

Yet many supporters of the campaign to defund the police say it isn’t necessarily about dismantling police departments or stripping them entirely of funding. Rather they say it is an effort to address systemic problems in policing by radically re-prioritizing community budgets to divert funding from law enforcement to programs related to mental health, poverty and education.

And as protests continue to swell in cities across the country, their political influence was apparent. On Sunday, a veto-proof majority of the Minneapolis City Council pledged to dismantle the city’s police department, promising to replace it with a new community-based system of public safety. Meanwhile, several major cities, including Los Angeles and New York, are already considering changes to their policing budgets while others are considering policy changes.

Democrats on Monday forged ahead with a far-reaching plan to overhaul policing in America, called the Justice in Policing Act of 2020. The plan would make it easier to prosecute police misconduct when officers violate a citizen’s civil rights, limit the transfer of military weaponry to state and local departments and put pressure on the justice department to address racial profiling and systemic racial bias in policing.

Though the legislation has galvanized Democrats, it remains unclear if congressional Republicans will join the effort, particularly in the Senate.

“We’re already seeing outlandish calls, defund the police. Abolish the police,” McConnell said in a speech on the Senate floor Monday that did not address the Democrats’ proposal. “I think you may want a police officer to arrest a criminal before you try to work through his feelings.”