Trump Plays the Carnage Card

Fake crime wave, real power grab

First, some personal news. For those who may not know, I received a great honor this weekend:

I have now added “Deranged BUM” to my Substack profile.

But enough about me. Let’s move on to the subject of today’s post, Trump’s takeover of Washington, DC, where he has seized control of the city’s police force and sent in the National Guard.

Actually, there’s some relationship between Trump’s rage-tweeting about yours truly and his move against the nation’s capital.

Ever since that latest weak jobs report, Trump has been frantically trying to convince the American public that the economy is doing great. He is failing, and predictably so. Experience shows that trying to talk up the economy when people don’t perceive it as good never works, even if the data are favorable. It’s even less likely to work when the data actually aren’t good, and calling people who point out economic weakness BUMs isn’t likely to help.

On the other hand, telling people things are bad even when they’re actually good can work. This is sometimes true when it comes to the economy. It’s definitely true when we’re talking about crime.

In his press conference announcing that he was seizing power in the District of Columbia, Trump declared that

Our capital city has been overtaken by violent gangs and bloodthirsty criminals, roving mobs of wild youth, drugged out maniacs and homeless people.

He forgot to mention deranged bums. Anyway, the media were in general pretty good at pointing out that crime in DC has in fact been falling rapidly. According to the U.S. attorney’s office, violent crime is at a 30-year low. The invaluable Jeff Asher has a chart:

Source: Jeff Asher

As I understand it, there are some technical data issues for 2022. But the basic picture is that DC is safer than it has been since the 1960s. The same is true for the nation as a whole:

But will Trump be universally ridiculed for his absurd claims? Will people understand that what we’re seeing, aside from an attempt to seize even more power, is an attempt to change the subject from the weakening economy and the Epstein affair?

I’m not sure.

Residents of DC will surely notice that Trump’s description of a violence-ridden dystopia bears no resemblance to the city they actually inhabit. But we know that crime is an issue on which people tend to believe that things are getting worse even when they are getting markedly better.

As you can see from the chart above, there was a truly epic decline in crime from the early 1990s to the mid-2010s. Yet throughout that period, according to Gallup, a large majority of Americans said that crime was getting worse. What’s going on?

One possible answer is that there are lies, damned lies and statistics. Maybe official crime numbers are, as Trump would say, RIGGED — although that would be really hard to do with murders, which are kind of hard either to fabricate or to conceal, and have fallen even more than overall crime. Or maybe people’s lived experience just doesn’t match what the crime data say.

But I don’t buy that explanation, among other things because I’m a New Yorker. Much of the nation sees the Big Apple as a dystopian hellhole, but anyone who actually lives there can tell you that the city feels quite safe — certainly safer than at any earlier point in my adult life.

Or if you don’t consider me a reliable narrator, look at actual behavior. According to Trump officials, people are afraid to ride the subway because they’re terrified of crime. But actual subway ridership has been soaring since Covid. It’s still somewhat depressed on weekdays, in part because remote work means fewer commuters, but weekend ridership — which mostly means people who could choose not to take the subway if they were terrified of crime — is rising fast:

But if the data showing falling crime are accurate, and people aren’t behaving as if they personally are terrified of crime, how can public perceptions about crime trends be so negative?

Part of the answer is the old line “if it bleeds it leads.” There are occasional acts of violence on the New York subway, and they make the news. The system’s overall safety — taking the subway is much, much safer than driving — doesn’t.

But I’d also argue that a large part of the answer is that many Americans believe that crime is running rampant — just not where they happen to live. Fox News tells suburban and small-town Americans that New York and Los Angeles are crime-ridden hellscapes, and they believe it.

According to Gallup, last year 56 percent of Americans believed that crime in the United States was an extremely or very serious problem — but only 14 percent said it was an extremely or very serious problem “in the area where you live.”

Returning for a second to my home subject, we saw something quite similar in assessments of the economy during the Biden years, when American had a much more positive assessment of their local economies than they did of the economy as a whole:

Source: Federal Reserve

Which brings us back to Trump’s claim that he’s seizing power in DC because the city is descending into lawless chaos. Anyone who either lives there are looks at crime data knows that this is malicious nonsense. But we can’t take it for granted that the rest of the country will understand that that he’s lying.

And if I may say, it’s the responsibility of the news media to make that clear. Don’t say “Trump makes contentious claims about DC crime.” Don’t say that there’s “dispute over DC crime data.” Just say that he’s lying.

MUSICAL CODA