from the selling-fear-because-someone’s-always-buying dept
This was the way it was always going to end: with Trump turning the Oval Office into the palace of a king. One need look no further than Trump’s attempt to invoke the vengeful spirits of the Overlook Hotel by adding a $200 million ballroom to the White House, as though this were the early 1900s and we, the people, would be easily impressed by gilded, ostentatious displays of excess.
Now that one of DOGE’s dipshits was almost carjacked, Trump thinks it’s time to federalize the policing of Washington, DC. Utilizing the same racist paranoia that fueled his baseless full-page accusations against the Central Park Five back in the 1990s, Trump is pretending DC is such a criminal hellhole, it can only be handled by the imposition of federal force — something that more than likely will involve the National Guard and other war fighters.
Of course, Trump has never let reality intrude on his fantasies. While crime rates continue to drop around the nation, Trump continues to claim the crime problem has never been worse, especially in cities and states overseen by “liberal” politicians. This narrative always existed, even without Trump’s involvement. But anomalous crime rate spikes driven by a once-in-a-lifetime (we hope!) worldwide pandemic gave Trump and his fellow idiots all the ammunition they needed to shove their moral panic narrative into the general discourse. And these opportunists heaped the blame on migrants and “democrat” politicians equally, as though any politician was proactively trying to generate a violent crime surge in their own jurisdiction.
Most media agencies aren’t helping, at least not those on the local levels who know “if it bleeds, it leads” is instrumental to their ongoing existence. But the facts have never matched the outlandish claims, which have far outpaced the crime rate since the early 1990s. America and Americans have never been safer, even if no cop or cop-lover will tell you otherwise.
Because some white dude (one who apparently welcomed the nickname “Big Balls”) got punched in the nose by a couple of teens while (almost) being carjacked in DC, Trump is pretty much declaring war on a city that hasn’t been this safe since the days of liberal hero JFK.
None other than Kash Patel’s FBI has released its latest Uniform Crime Report (UCR), which says none of the things Trump and his cabinet members are saying. As Judd Legum and Rebecca Crosby point out in their extensive report for Popular Information, crime rates continue to recede back to the historic lows Americans have enjoyed (despite thinking otherwise) for more than 30 years.
An overwhelming majority of Americans, 64 percent, believe that crime increased across the country in 2024, according to a Gallup survey conducted late last year. An overwhelming majority of Americans are wrong.
On Tuesday, August 5, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) released its comprehensive report on crime in the United States for 2024. As crime data expert Jeff Asher noted, not only did the report reveal that overall crime was down substantially in 2024, but crime “fell in 2024 across every category and population group.” Specifically, it “was down in all seven categories of crime across all 10 population groups that the FBI measures.”
Moreover, the new FBI data shows that both violent crime and property crime are at their lowest level since the 1960s.
Here’s what property crime looks like when broken down over the past fifty years:
Other declines are evident in the FBI’s data, which shows an across-the-board decrease in violent crime rates from last year.
Here’s the public perception of crime rates, which is, on the whole, tracking with reality.
This chart may make you believe most Americans aren’t buying into the moral panic. But that’s simply not true. If you want to know who’s buying into Trump’s blatant lies about crime rates, it’s the usual suspects. It’s the same people who usually support, believe, and endorse whatever falls out of Trump’s mouth and/or splatters itself across Trump’s extremely captive marketplace of bigoted ideas, Truth Social:
It’s not just small town press outlets skewing the perception of small town residents. Some of the most-read newspapers in the United States (Washington Post, New York Times) are more than willing to give front-page space to factual reports about crime rate increases, like those that followed the pandemic shutdowns around the nation. But when crime rates return to historic lows, coverage is buried by press outlets, even they even bother to report on it at all.
Trump capitalizing on this massive gap between reality and reporting doesn’t make him any different than the thousands of politicians who have come before him. What does set him apart from his thousands of predecessors is his disturbing willingness to leverage public ignorance to lay the groundwork for a police state, if not actual martial law. If these authoritarian desires are ever manifested, the press will have blood on its hands because their willingness to act as the government’s stenographer apparently only manifests when top-level government officials have a narrative to push, rather than facts to report.
Filed Under: bullshit, crime rates, fbi, martial law, moral panic, national guard, trump administration
