Trump tore into the media and Joe Biden on Thursday Former President Donald Trump lashed out at the mainstream media on Thursday morning, accusing outlets of ignoring a surge in crime cropping up in America's cities. Over the last month California has grappled with a troubling wave of smash-and-grab incidents, including in House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's hometown of San Francisco. 'You know, the media, outside of you people and a few others, the media isn't reporting this problem but when you have hoards of people running in, kids mostly, running in and stealing, robbing stores where drug chains are closing all their stores in different cities because they can't keep them open, we just don't have law enforcement, we're not allowed to have law enforcement,' Trump told Fox & Friends. During a half-hour interview Trump also claimed President Joe Biden is 'knowingly destroying our country' and forcing people out of work with his COVID vaccine mandates. Co-host Ainsley Earhardt asked the former president about a tweet from the National Fraternal Order of Police claiming that ambush attacks on US police officers rose 126 percent from 2020, when Trump was still president. 'Well when you look at San Francisco and you look at 100 kids or people running into a store together and the cops are standing out there not allowed to do their job, they aren't allowed to do their job and you allow a thing like that to happen, we have a country that has no law enforcement, has no law and order,' Trump fumed. 'They're not allowed to do their jobs and they're now being hit. People aren't even afraid. They go and shoot police, they don't respect them.' California was hit by a string of robberies last month, including Nancy Pelosi's home town Trump called in to Fox News for roughly half an hour to bash Biden and promote his book Last month, a band of up to 40 thieves stormed a Louis Vuitton store in San Francisco, smashing windows and grabbing whatever items were in reach before loading them into cars that were waiting outside. They made off with over $1 million in merchandise. On Black Friday, a roaming pack of burglars ransacked the Bottega Veneta store in Los Angeles' trendy Beverly Grove before making their way to Home Depot. At the home improvement chain, eight of them stole sledgehammers, wrenches and hammers, threatened customers and then fled in 10 getaway cars. And earlier in the week, so-called 'smash-and-grab' gangs struck a Nordstrom in Canoga Park, Los Angeles, snatching $25,000 of high-end luxury goods and bear spraying a security guard in the process. Nordstrom was also targeted by flash mob thieves who raided a branch of the department store in Walnut Creek, east of San Francisco. 'If you allowed them to do their job that would stop and crime would stop, but they're not allowed. You look at what's going on in New York. You look at what's going on in Chicago, and look at what's happening in San Francisco - and it's happening in many other cities that they don't want to report about.' In another Black Friday incident, dozens of looters descended on a Minneapolis mall and brazenly marched through two Best Buy locations, taking whatever they liked with them off the shelves. One incident occurred near the Burnsville mall in suburban Minneapolis with about 12 people rushing in to steal items, while a second incident occurred in Maplewood - about 25 miles northeast - on Friday night with a larger group of 30 people looting electronics. Police investigate a crime scene outside of the Barclay's Center in downtown Brooklyn on October 01, 2021 in New York City Evidence technicians collect evidence at the scene where a 28-year-old man was shot during an attempted car jacking on the 4700 block of West 64th Street in Chicago's West Lawn neighborhood in May Both incidents occurred at around the same time and police are looking to see if they are connected in any way. The wave of robberies come as a number of Democrat-run cities are reversing plans to divert funding from their police force. New York City allocated an additional $200 million to its police department this year after cutting its budget last year; Los Angeles gave its department a three percent boost. New York overwhelmingly elected a tough-on-crime former police officer to be its next mayor come January. Cities like Dallas and Austin brought their police budgets to new heights this year after slashing them last. On Tuesday Trump called on Democratic leaders to active the National Guard to fight the crime wave. 'If Democrats don't immediately stop smash-and-grab robberies, which are taking place in their cities, the National Guard must be called out,' the former president said in a statement at the time. He said the Biden administration's policies are wreaking havoc across the US. 'I don't know if it's Biden, it might not be, but we have a group of people that are destroying our country, and perhaps knowingly destroying our country,' Trump said. Trump called in to Fox News on Thursday morning where he spent roughly half an hour attacking Biden over his COVID-19 mandates, taking credit for the vaccines and accusing the current administration of turning the United States into a 'dumping ground' for migrants coming to the southwest border. Toward the end of his interview Fox & Friends host Brian Kilmeade appeared to catch the former president off-guard with a question about his 2024 prospects - and whether his wife would stay by his side. 'Does it make you want to get another four years and be the 47th president?' he asked of Trump's feelings toward his signature MAGA rallies. 'And is it true that the first lady, Melania Trump, first lady has told you "I'm not going back if you run again?"' 'No, that's not true,' Trump chuckled. 'That's an interesting one - more fake news. That's not true.' Co-host Steve Doocy tried to step in by reasserting the ex-president's claim that it was 'more fake news' but Trump continued to speak over him. 'She was a great first lady, she did a great job, she loves the people, they love her. I see how they love her - but no, I will say this - we have to fix our country. Our country is going bad. We're not going to have a country no longer if we keep doing this when we allow other countries to empty their prisons into our country,' he said. Trump appeared to be caught off guard by a question about whether his wife would be by his side if he took the White House in 2024 A CNN report from October cites 'several people' who have said she saw her husband's four-year stint in the White House as a 'chapter' and 'it's over, and that's that.' Elsewhere in the interview the Fox hosts gave Trump the opportunity to lambast Biden over his handling of the pandemic. Trump told them Biden did a 'terrible job' rolling out coronavirus vaccines, which were first administered at the end of his presidency in December 2020. 'He's done just an absolutely terrible job getting it out, and getting people to take it,' Trump said. 'I have to be very proud of the vaccines. We did it in less than nine months.' He stopped short of recommending the shot. Though the US vaccination rate among adults is slowly increasing, GOP voters make up a significant chunk of those still refusing to take it. 'They worked incredibly well, some people don't want to take them and that's their freedom and that's what we have to do, but people don't want to take them because they don't trust Biden. They don't trust the administration,' Trump said. Trump said that distrust is what compelled Biden to enact his sweeping vaccine order affecting roughly a third of the US workforce. 'I think that's the problem and that's why they're trying to setup mandates and really hurting things with the economy with the mandates,' he said. Trump said Biden was turning the US into a 'dumping ground' and forcing people out of work with his sweeping vaccine mandates Trump attacked Biden for tightening restrictions as the new Omicron COVID variant arrives in the United States He also blamed the vaccine mandates for the supply chain bottlenecks that are wreaking havoc on the holiday season and leading to empty shelves at the grocery store. 'We would have never had a supply chain problem, but one of the causes is the mandates, because a lot of people aren't working because of forced mandates,' Trump claimed. 'The mandates had a lot to do with the supply chain problem.' During the phone call he was also asked about White House chief medical adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci telling Fox reporter Peter Doocy that migrants crossing the border were being tested for COVID-19 'under certain circumstances.' 'But not by the federal government,' Steve Doocy prompted, before co-host Ainsley Earhardt added: 'Mr. President, your reaction?' Trump gave a somewhat rambling answer on Biden's handling of the border crisis compared to his own. 'We have millions of people flowing across and we're not only talking about the China virus or COVID, whatever you want to call it, we're talking about many other diseases coming over the border that are far worse,' Trump claimed. 'Nobody is being tested, nobody is being checked, prisoners of other countries are being dumped in our country - we're like a dumping ground. 'We had the strongest border in the history of our country. The wall was largely built and could have been finished in three weeks, and they decided not to finish the openings, just some openings.' Biden signed a proclamation on his first day in office halting construction on Trump's wall. But recently, the president invoked left-wing ire by resuming it on a small portion in Texas' Hidalgo County. He also angered progressive supporters by restarting Trump's controversial Remain In Mexico immigration policy in a bid to stop the record surge of migrants at the border that's overwhelming local, state and federal officials. 'They should have never ended it,' Trump said on Thursday. 'If Joe Biden would have come in and just gone to the beach, he would have been successful in many ways because all of this stuff - the border was the best it ever was, and getting better, drugs coming in was getting at a level that we've never seen before, meaning in a positive way.' He also went after Biden's green energy goals for the US, claiming fossil fuels were America's 'strength' and his Democrat rival's policies were killing the country's birds. 'They're destroying our landscape, our birds, they're destroying with wind - and by the way those turbines are all made in Germany and they're made in China,' Trump said. But as to whether he'll be running to challenge all of those policies in 2024, Trump remained vague as ever - referencing polls that show a majority of GOP voters want him as their candidate. 'Nobody has ever had that and overall approval numbers are great, so you know, I'm not going by polls. I'm just saying, I did it before and really did it twice,' he said, alluding to baseless claims the 2020 election was somehow rigged in Biden's favor. All rights reserved for this news site (dailymail) and under his responsibility