Every police officer in New York City was deployed Friday morning following the indictment of former US President Donald Trump by the Manhattan District Attorney’s office.
A spokesman for the NYPD said that although they had received no credible threats of violence at the time, the department had told all 35,000 of its officers to report to their stations, in uniform, by 7 AM.
The move was "just in preparation for anything that could happen," the spokesman reportedly told Fox News. Previously, Trump has called on his supporters to protest on his behalf should he be arrested. His panicked call for support gained his 2024 presidential campaign $1.5 million in donations after he falsely predicted the date of his arrest.
His call for a protest on his social media platform Truth Social mirrored his Tweets on January 6, when he called on his supporters to protest and to “be wild”. The attack on Capitol Hill resulted in the deaths of five people.
The call for a heightened police presence came a day after the US legal system entered uncharted territory when Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg successfully argued before a grand jury to indict Trump over a hush-money payment made to adult film star Stormy Daniels.
Law enforcement sources reportedly told ABC News that the NYPD, the US Secret Service, US Marshals and New York State Court Officers met on Friday to coordinate Trump’s surrender, which is slated for next week.
Trump’s lawyer, Joe Tacopina, insisted the same day that “the president will not be put in handcuffs,” but suggested that the Democratic Party-controlled district attorney’s office will insist on getting "mugshots [and a] perp walk" from the former president, telling ABC: "I’m sure they’ll try to make sure they get some joy out of this by parading him."
Reactions to the indictment have so far largely been predictably partisan. US liberals expressed delight at the prospect of watching the former president marched into a Manhattan courthouse by police, while conservatives have reacted with fury at what they are calling a “witch-hunt”, echoing the former president’s rhetoric.
With judges and lawyers on both sides of the bar having long acknowledged that a "district attorney could get the grand jury to indict a ham sandwich if he wanted to," as one Rochester defense attorney famously explained in 1979, one Alabama Congressman began handing out ham sandwiches in bags reading "indict this!" at his office in Washington on Friday.
Trump maintains that his successor at the White House is directing the prosecution, declaring immediately after the indictment that "Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg, who was hand-picked and funded by [billionaire ‘Open Societies’ funder] George Soros" is "doing Joe Biden's dirty work."
Characterizing the indictment as the conclusion of a "Witch-Hunt to destroy the Make America Great Again movement," the former President wrote in a statement Thursday that "the Democrats have lied, cheated and stolen in their obsession with trying to 'Get Trump, but now they've done the unthinkable - indicting a completely innocent person in an act of blatant Election Interference."
"Never before in our Nation's history has this been done," Trump continued, before predicting that the prosecution will "backfire massively on Joe Biden."
"The American people realize exactly what the Radical Left Democrats are doing here. Everyone can see it. So our Movement, and our Party - united and strong - will first defeat Alvin Bragg, and then we will defeat Joe Biden, and we are going to throw every last one of these Crooked Democrats out of office so we can MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!"