Trump accepts key endorsement from police union while celebrating sentencing delay on felony charges

CHARLOTTE, N.C. (AP) — Donald Trump accepted a key endorsement from one of the nation's most influential law enforcement lobbies on Friday by offering a sweeping indictment of the U.S. legal system that has convicted him of almost three dozen felony counts and indicted him in three other pending cases.

The Fraternal Order of Police convention in the battleground state of North Carolina was billed as a way for Trump to pitch himself as a law-and-order figure and cast his Democratic opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, a former prosecutor and California attorney general, as weak.

But in between remarks about crime and law enforcement, the former president and Republican nominee celebrated a New York judge's decision earlier in the day to postpone his sentencing on 34 felony counts in a business fraud case until after Election Day. He repeated his false assertions that the U.S. election system is rife with massive voter fraud and that his 2020 defeat was rigged — arguments rejected in dozens of state and federal courts. He promised to crack down on “Marxist prosecutors,” and he seemed to suggest that domestic police forces could more actively prevent voter fraud because people are scared of them.

Trump's latest broadsides and untruths also underscored the unusual circumstances of a national law enforcement group embracing a political leader who has repeatedly denigrated U.S. institutions and championed a mob of his supporters who assaulted law enforcement officers at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 — a siege at the core of Trump's continuing legal peril as he attempts a comeback bid.