There’s One Big Problem With Trump’s Victory Lap on the Drop in Crime

The steep decline in murders across the country is mainly occurring in blue cities—and began well before he returned to the White House.

“Under President Donald J. Trump’s leadership, America is safer than it has been in over a century,” a White House press release declared in January, claiming the “monumental turnaround” stemmed from Trump “reversing the chaos and carnage unleashed by Radical Left Democrats” and by his administration “ridding the streets of savage criminal illegal aliens, backing law enforcement, and bringing back order where incompetent Democrat politicians surrendered to anarchy and despair.”

Putting aside the racism and xenophobia in that statement, the key word is “reversing.” The administration has been selling hard the idea that Trump, who ran in part on a law-and-order platform, has stepped in and calmed the chaos of our cities, restoring peace to streets made unsafe by naïve Democrats who care more about protecting undocumented immigrants than American citizens. Last week, Trump crowed on Truth Social, “D.C., Memphis, New Orleans, all down to record lows, and quickly!”

He and his acolytes not only are taking credit for the drop in crime, but using it to excuse or hand-wave away a host of transgressions, from the National Guard troops that still occupy the streets of D.C. to ICE raids that continue to break up families and trample on human rights. They even use it to rebut critiques that have no relation to public safety.

In a recent appearance on ABC’s The View, Vice President JD Vance responded to questions about the administration’s whitewashing of U.S. history and its efforts to dilute minority voting power by arguing that it was actually doing more for minorities because crime in D.C., whose population is around 42 percent Black, is down. And FBI Director Kash Patel, during a Senate hearing last month, responded to a question about his indecorous behavior at the recent Winter........

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