'Back the blue! Back the blue!' Trump roots for police despite history of stiffing them

As the crowd of delegates chanted “Back the blue! Back the blue!” on Tuesday, former President Donald Trump flashed a thumbs up at Republican National Convention speaker Randy Sutton, a retired law enforcement officer who founded a nonprofit benefiting wounded cops.

Trump, the Republican nominee for president, has leaned heavily into his public support of the police recently.

He publicly thanked law enforcement for their response when a gunman attempted to assassinate him in Butler, Pa., on Saturday, wounding Trump in the ear.

The week before his joint fundraising committee sent out an email with the subject line “Cops! Cops! Cops!” selling $45 Make America Great Again hats in blue to symbolize support of the police.

“My message to our brave police officers: I love you!” Trump said in the July 7 email. “Democrats hate the police, but not me!”

Screen grab from Trump National Committee email.

But Trump has a history of not supporting the police, at least financially.

A Raw Story investigation found that eight of Trump’s 2024 election campaign visits cost local taxpayers at least $100,000 in security expenses, which the campaign refused to pay and local municipalities covered.

For instance, Trump-headlined events like the North Carolina Republican Party Convention cost the City of Greensboro about $45,000 for 1,150 police officer work hours, causing officials to question whether it was worth hosting such an event at all.

Trump’s campaign was told to pre-pay more than $54,000 before a May campaign appearance in Wildwood, N.J., after previously failing to pay a $33,900 bill from the city in 2020. The 2020 bill appears to remain unpaid.

The Trump campaign’s unpaid police bills from his 2016 and 2020 runs previously grew to nearly $2 million in December 2020, Business Insider reported.

Sutton, founder and chairman of Wounded Blue, said at the convention that if the “radical left” defunds and destroys the police, “they will break apart the cornerstone of our system, law and order.”

“There’s one man that these pro-criminal, anti-police extremists fear most, and that is the once and future president of the United States, Donald J. Trump,” Sutton said.

Iowa Attorney General Brenna Bird followed Sutton’s speech with more criticisms of the “radical left” who she said “believes in handouts, not handcuffs.”

“President Trump knows that keeping Americans safe isn't a 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. job, and rank-and-file cops know that President Trump, he has their back,” Bird said.

Steven Cheung, a Trump campaign spokesperson, did not immediately respond to Raw Story’s request for comment.