Opinion: Convicted felon Trump rides MAGA crime wave into Aurora

At a candidate forum in January, GOP candidates for Colorado’s 4th Congressional District, including U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert, raise their hands when asked if they’ve ever been arrested (screenshot from Republican Women of Weld’s Facebook).

In announcing former President Donald Trump’s visit to Aurora, the Trump campaign framed the Republican presidential candidate’s purpose in terms of crime-fighting.

The Biden administration’s border policies, it claimed, had left Colorado’s third biggest city vulnerable to criminal migrants who had turned “once-safe communities into nightmares for law-abiding citizens.” Trump, the announcement said, would deport these “criminals” and “Make America Safe Again.”

Most Americans realized long ago that Trump is bereft of normal regulating attributes like consistency and shame. Embarrassment might restrain most felons from reckless criminal accusations against others. Not Trump. And it matters even less to him that his bleak characterization of Aurora, where he is scheduled to speak Friday, is a complete fabrication.

But law-abiding citizens should take his preposterous rhetoric as an occasion to reflect on the breathtaking scale of banditry that is a fundamental quality of Trumpist politics. Any policy that purports to make America safe again would have to address MAGA’s violent tendencies and pattern of criminal behavior.

One of the most dumbfounding moments of the 2024 election cycle in Colorado came during a candidate forum in January, when the simultaneous admission by two-thirds of the Republicans on stage that they had arrest records produced not a moment of humility and regret but rather hilarity fit for a saloon.

Among them was Lauren Boebert, a sitting member of Congress, who is scheduled to appear in Aurora with Trump. Two were state lawmakers, and all were seeking to represent the residents of Colorado’s 4th Congressional District in the nation’s capital. Their brushes with the law generated no detectable reservations, in the audience or on the stage, about their fitness for office.

This expression of lawlessness was audaciously hypocritical for the erstwhile party of law and order, whose members reflexively engage in “crime wave” fearmongering, particularly in relation to immigration.

The current representative of the 4th District, MAGA Republican Greg Lopez, recently delivered a speech on the floor of the U.S. House in which he, like Trump, claimed that Venezuelan criminals were terrorizing Aurora. Just about the whole thing was false, but what is true is that Lopez himself has a criminal record. He and his wife each pleaded guilty to harassment after a domestic violence incident in 1994. Lopez was the mayor of Parker at the time.

The Colorado pattern aligns with the MAGA evolution of the Republican Party. No past presidency in U.S. history compares with the Trump administration’s record of wrongdoing. At least eight close Trump associates have been sentenced to prison. Many more in his orbit have been convicted of crimes, been indicted on criminal charges, or faced formal disciplinary action, such as former Trump attorney Jenna Ellis, whose Colorado law license was suspended after she pleaded guilty in Georgia to a felony count of aiding and abetting false statements and writings.

Though previous Republican administrations produced rafts of law-breakers — Nixon-era Watergate indictments numbered in the dozens — Trump wins criminal gold for being the first president to achieve felon status. He faces felony criminal charges in two other pending cases, and a jury in a civil lawsuit determined he raped a woman. One of the criminal cases against him relates to his role in the violent Jan. 6 insurrection, which Trump was impeached for inciting and in which more than a thousand people have been criminally convicted of participating.

When Trump appears in Aurora, he will be by far the most consequential criminal ever to set foot in the city.

Aurora found itself in the national spotlight after conservative local figures, particularly City Council member Danielle Jurinsky, spread the false claim that Venezuelan gang members had assumed control of several apartment buildings in Aurora. The city’s own police chief debunked the claim, and even Jurinsky has walked back some of her rhetoric. But national right-wing media went with it regardless of facts, and Trump seized on it as an anti-immigration campaign talking point. He mentioned Aurora last month during his debate with Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential candidate, and later promised he would visit Aurora, maligning the whole city by suggesting it is so dangerous, “you may never see me again.”

Aurora police recently have arrested a handful of people who they identified as Venezuelan gang members, and Aurorans should be grateful for this routine local law enforcement response.

But the suspects had not taken over any part of the city. And whatever threat they posed to the community is dwarfed by the menace the Trump gang poses to the country.

Editor’s note: This opinion column first appeared on Colorado Newsline, which is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Colorado Newsline maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Quentin Young for questions: info@coloradonewsline.com. Follow Colorado Newsline on Facebook and X.