At protest after protest in recent years, when police officers have moved in with their pepper spray or rolls of orange mesh to break things up, the same chant has greeted them: “Who do you protect? Who do you serve?” It rang out in the Occupy encampments and in the movement for black lives. It could be heard last week in the streets of Phoenix, Arizona, where thousands of protesters thronged the streets outside Donald Trump’s rally. As Phoenix police fired tear gas canisters, pepper balls, and flashbang grenades into mostly unarmed crowds, it was clear that what the officers were protecting was power. “It was a war zone that was initiated by the Phoenix Police Department,” Alejandra Gomez, an organizer with Living United for Change in Arizona who was in the crowd, told me.

The chant took on a particularly urgent tone in Charlottesville, Virginia, in early August, as armed white supremacists waving torches and wearing body armor marched and assaulted residents. Video released last week confirms that at least one of the white supremacists, as care worker Corey Long had earlier noted, fired his gun into a crowd of counterprotesters and, in the words of the New York Times, “strolled past a line of about a dozen state police troopers who were safely positioned about 10 feet away behind two metal barricades. None of them budged.”

Who do the police protect, and who do they serve? These are real questions, not rhetorical ones, and after the last couple of weeks, more people than ever are asking them out loud. Yet the president of the United States is intent on encouraging the same old horrifying answers. Whether he is denouncing “both sides” in Charlottesville or urging Long Island police officers to replicate the kinds of tactics that killed Freddie Gray in Baltimore, Trump has emphasized at every turn that he is less interested in the rule of law than in order by any means. His decision this week—announced by Attorney General Jeff Sessions at a National Fraternal Order of Police event—to resume at full force the 1033 program, in which the weapons of war are distributed to local police departments, was another such salvo, as was his pardon of the infamous former Sheriff Joe Arpaio, which Trump hinted at in Phoenix and then issued Friday night, even as Texas braced for unprecedented flooding from a catastrophic hurricane.

Arpaio once laughed as he compared his infamous outdoor prison in Maricopa County, Arizona, to a concentration camp; prisoners there, according to Gomez, were denied air-conditioning in 120-degree heat and fed moldy bread. Arpaio neglected to investigate violent crimes against Latinos and instead spent his resources rounding up and terrorizing immigrants. He was convicted of criminal contempt for defying an order to stop his practices, which a court ruled regularly violated the rights of Latinos. By pardoning him, Trump has sent a message to police officers at the core of his base. Not only will he support the worst of police abuses; he also believes that those abuses are part of an officer’s job.

The fact that violent crackdowns on protesters, rough treatment for criminal suspects, and brutal mistreatment of immigrants are seen as simply prerogatives of the police is indicative of “a fundamental crisis in police legitimacy,” writes sociologist Alex Vitale in his forthcoming book, The End of Policing (Verso, 2017). While the police tend to argue that such behavior is necessary to keep people safe and society in order, the leniency we have seen being offered to armed white nationalists this summer suggests that violence is not meted out equally.