President Trump wrote in his 2000 book that he supported the same crime measures he is now attacking Joe Biden for.
Trump slammed the 2020 Democratic presidential candidate this week, saying in a set of tweets that “anyone associated with the 1994 Crime Bill will not have a chance of being elected.”
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“Super Predator was the term associated with the 1994 Crime Bill that Sleepy Joe Biden was so heavily involved in passing. That was a dark period in American History, but has Sleepy Joe apologized? No!” he said.
In his book The America We Deserve, Trump wrote that he supported tougher sentencing and street policing, according to CNN. The president also warned of “wolf packs” of young criminals on the streets, citing statistics linked to the “super predator” theory that has since been discredited.
Trump did not directly mention the 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act in his book, though many of the arguments he made fell in line with those supporting the bill when it was passed.
“President Trump never supported the disastrous 1994 crime bill, which disproportionately incarcerated black Americans, nor did he ever use the term ‘super predators.’ Actions and facts tell the story,” Trump campaign spokeswoman Kayleigh McEnany said, adding that Trump signed a bipartisan criminal justice reform bill that has eased mandatory minimum sentences.
During the 2016 campaign, Trump also targeted Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton for her previous use of “super predators” when talking about young gang members who had no remorse or conscience.
Trump cites James Q. Wilson as his “favorite crime expert” in his book. Wilson wrote Americans “rightfully” believe “the prospect of innocent people being gunned down at random, without warning and almost without motive, by youngsters who afterward show us the blank, unremorseful faces of seemingly feral, pre-social beings.”
By 2000, Wilson said, “there will be a million more people between the ages of 14 and 17 than there are now” and “six percent of them will become high rate, repeat offenders — thirty thousand more young muggers, killers and thieves than we have now.”
Trump agreed with the theory in his book, and also said he supported putting more people in prison.
“Most serious crime experts believe rates will skyrocket early in 2000 because there will be more adolescent boys around, and adolescent boys are especially dangerous,” he wrote. “A lot of these boys don’t have fathers. All they’ve got is a mother and that mother might well be a teenager herself. As anybody knows, a single mother is going to have a hard time controlling a normal boy, especially when he hits strutting age.”
“A government study of crime in America warns that when the population of adolescent males rises early next century, we’re going to have wolf packs roaming the streets, and not only downtown. If these kids are anything like those who terrorized urban America in recent years, we’re in for a very bad time,” Trump said.
