Dr. Blasey, 51, a psychology professor in California, testified to the Senate Judiciary Committee that during a small high school party in the early 1980s, a drunken Justice Kavanaugh pinned her to a bed, groped her, tried to take off her clothes and covered her mouth when she screamed. Deborah Ramirez, 53, a Yale University classmate of Justice Kavanaugh’s, told the F.B.I. that he exposed his genitals to her during a dormitory party.
Justice Kavanaugh, 53, denied those allegations, and no witnesses came forward to say they witnessed the acts or that they talked with Dr. Blasey or Ms. Ramirez about the episodes at the time. Dr. Blasey passed a polygraph test administered by a former F.B.I. agent hired by her lawyers and many Republicans at first said that she seemed “very credible,” as Mr. Trump himself put it.
But the president has increasingly pivoted away from just attacking Democrats for exploiting the accusers to attacking the accusers themselves. Mr. Trump has himself been accused of sexual misconduct by more than a dozen women and he said during the confirmation battle that his experience made him more empathetic to Justice Kavanaugh.
While his appearance before the annual gathering of police chiefs was not formally a campaign event, Mr. Trump used the event to depict himself as a friend of law enforcement and said he was working to combat crime.
“We are turning that tide around very rapidly,” he said. “We are taking back our streets.”
As he has before, he said he would send federal authorities to help Chicago fight crime and urged the city to adopt more aggressive tactics, like the so-called stop-and-frisk policy used in New York. “Stop and frisk works,” Mr. Trump said. “The crime spree is a terrible blight on that city and we’ll do everything possible to get it done.”
New York began cutting back on its street stops in 2011 even before a judge ruled in 2013 that the city’s wholesale use of search practices violated the Constitution. Such stops have plummeted, but violent crime continued to fall even without them. Seven major felonies measured by the city police are down 9.7 percent since 2011, even as the stop-and-frisk practices were drastically reduced.
Mr. Trump has a fraught relationship with other elements of the American law enforcement establishment, repeatedly assailing the leadership of the F.B.I. and the Justice Department in connection with the investigation into his campaign ties to Russia.