Richard Nixon, law and order’s most famous practitioner, used the reality of domestic unrest to defeat Hubert Humphrey in the annus horribilis, 1968. President George W. Bush persuaded voters in 2004 that John Kerry would provide uncertain leadership in the post-9/11 war on terror.

Donald Trump, always willing to test the limits of any thought, is campaigning for law and order on a global scale. He’s accusing Hillary Clinton of being soft on crime at home and soft on terror everywhere in the world. It’s “Law and Order: Global Victims Unit,” Donald J. Trump producer.

Tuesday in Milwaukee, which last weekend looked a lot like Baltimore’s 2015 street riots, Mr. Trump said: “The Hillary Clinton agenda hurts poor people the most. There is no compassion in allowing drug dealers, gang members and felons to prey on innocent people. It is the first duty of government to keep the innocent safe.”

In Monday’s foreign policy speech he pledged to do a reverse-Obama by keeping Gitmo open and trying accused terrorists in military tribunals. Likening his strategy to “the effort to take down the mafia,” he said “this will be the understood mission of every federal investigator and prosecutor in the country.”

With most of the battleground states looking more like Republican burial grounds, it may be pressing the membrane of believability to say the Trump law-and-order strategy just might work. That said, Mr. Trump’s naming this week of the adept Republican political strategist Kellyanne Conway as his campaign manager means he may yet give his supporters a competitive presidential campaign.