President Trump spent 18 months as the ultimate law-and-order candidate, promising to rescue an American way of life he said was threatened by terrorists, illegal immigrants and inner-city criminals.
But during seven months as president, many critics and legal scholars say, Mr. Trump has shown a flexible view on the issue, one that favors the police and his own allies over strict application of the rule of law.
Over the past two years, in ways big and small, the critics say, Mr. Trump has signaled that taking the law into one’s own hands is permissible, within the executive branch or in local police departments, or even against a heckler at one of his rallies.
The president’s pardon last week of Joe Arpaio, the former sheriff of Maricopa County, Ariz., and a strong supporter of Mr. Trump’s during the 2016 campaign, illuminated the impulses that shape his opinion.
The case, and the pardon that ended it, involved an assumption that minorities were more likely to commit crimes, a belief in the use of force to keep people in check, and what some of the president’s advisers privately describe as at best a lack of interest in becoming fluent in the legal process.
