Mr. Bloomberg’s record on stop-and-frisk has gotten limited attention since he began running for president in November. The three-term New York City mayor defended the aggressive policing tactic for years, even after a federal judge ruled that it had violated the constitutional rights of minority men in New York. He apologized for it only after he announced his presidential campaign. In the weeks since, he has mischaracterized when and why he made changes to the policy in 2013, his final year in office.
Snippets of Mr. Bloomberg’s blunt comments about the stop-and-frisk policy during a speech at the Aspen Institute in 2015 had been previously reported. But the audio, edited to string the most damning statements together, was taken by Mr. Trump and his online supporters and shared repeatedly on Twitter.
But Mr. Trump has his own history of support for stop-and-frisk.
In 2016, he endorsed the policy, saying it had been used effectively in New York City. And in 2018, after he was president, Mr. Trump suggested that police departments in heavily minority cities, like Chicago, ought to use such aggressive tactics. The police in that city should “strongly consider stop-and-frisk,” Mr. Trump said in a speech at the time.
“It works, and it was meant for problems like Chicago,” the president said. The White House declined to comment about Mr. Trump’s tweet or his history of support for the policy.
Mr. Trump has also repeatedly been accused of racism, both as a 2016 presidential candidate and during his time in office. His efforts to curb the use of food stamps, his administration’s attempts to dismantle provisions of the Affordable Care Act and his restrictive immigration policies have all been denounced as harmful to blacks and Latinos.
Mr. Trump has often turned the criticism he gets back on his opponents. When he was running against Hillary Clinton in 2016, Mrs. Clinton said during their third debate that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia preferred having “a puppet as president of the United States.” Mr. Trump replied, “No puppet — you’re the puppet.”
When The Washington Post reported the existence of the “Access Hollywood” tape that featured Mr. Trump bragging about grabbing women’s genitals, he responded by bringing women who had accused Bill Clinton of sexual misconduct to the second presidential debate two days later.