Crime is plunging, but he can’t handle that truth

Monday was a day ending in the letter “y,” so Donald Trump spent much of the day boasting about how great he is and whining about not getting credit. At this point most observers tune his rants out. However, the screed at the top of this post has received some attention, possibly because it was marked by a kind of purity: every one of Trump’s bombastic claims was completely, verifiably false.

I was struck, however, by the fact that Trump didn’t mention one important thing that has been going right: crime has been plunging. Jeff Asher reports that the number of murders, which rose in the aftermath of Covid but has been declining ever since, is now approaching lows not seen since the 1960s in a number of big cities, with New York probably the safest it has ever been (the numbers in parentheses are the most recent year murders were this low):

One might have expected that Trump, whose inaugural address in 2017 was devoted to “American carnage,” the wave of violence supposedly sweeping U.S. cities, would be celebrating low crime and taking credit. Indeed, every once in a while the Trumpified Justice department puts out a press release attributing falling homicides to Dear Leader’s guidance. But nothing from Trump himself.

Just to be clear, Trump does not in fact deserve credit for falling crime. The bump in murders 6 years ago took place mostly on Trump’s watch, and the big decline began on Joe Biden’s:

Indeed, while there is no consensus about what caused the big decline in crime, many observers give partial credit to social support programs made possible by Biden’s American Rescue Plan Act. If they’re right, by the way, the drastic spending cuts in the One Big Beautiful Bill, the attack on any kind of social spending — having failed to gut funding for Head Start, the administration is trying to sabotage the program, seemingly out of sheer spite — could well show up as an uptick in crime a few years from now.

Yet while Trump isn’t responsible for falling murder rates, claiming credit for anything good that happens on his watch (while blaming others for everything bad) is his normal behavior. Why, then, is he silent about the good news on crime?

The answer is threefold. First, Trump (along with much of his party) hates American cities, and isn’t open to hearing anything good about them. Second, he (again along with much of his party) has an image of what life is like in our cities that is 40 years out of date. Finally — and again in accord with his party — he wants to punish people, and acknowledging good behavior would get in the way.

About city-hatred: During a Monday White House event Trump went off on a tangent about “blue cities” in which he declared

What do they have in common? They’re all dirty. They’re filthy, dirty. Their streets are dirty. Their streets smell. Their storefronts are broken. Their trees are all gross. Everything about the place is dirty.

This wasn’t really a comment about “blue cities,” it was an attack on American cities in general, since almost all major cities — 9 of the top 10, with 95 percent of their combined population — have Democratic mayors. And as usual, try to imagine any public figure saying something similar about rural America.

Also, what would Trump know about what American cities are like? When was the last time he walked around a major city? For what it’s worth, here’s a picture I recently took of New York’s gross trees:

About living in the past: When Trump gave his “American carnage” speech, it was obvious that he was still stuck in a vision of urban life as it was in 1989, when he demanded the death penalty for the Central Park Five, wrongly convicted of an assault on a jogger. (Trump refuses to this day to acknowledge that he was wrong.) The epic decline in crime that took place in the years that followed clearly escaped his attention. To put his anachronistic vision in context, here’s an enlarged and annotated panel from Jeff Asher’s post about plunging crime:

Obviously urban crime hasn’t disappeared. But obsessing about it at this point is wildly out of date. Next thing you know Trump is going to start ranting about the Communist menace. Oh, wait.

Fundamentally, however, the reason Trump can’t claim credit for, or even acknowledge, falling crime isn’t ignorance. It is, instead, as Adam Serwer memorably put it, that the cruelty is the point. Punishment isn’t a means to an end, a way to fight crime; it’s an end in itself, with crime only a rationale.

And if one wants to inflict pain — deporting, imprisoning, and, yes, shooting people — it’s necessary to claim that those people are doing terrible things. They’re dirty, they’re disgusting, they’re criminals. Acknowledging that crime is plunging, even while falsely claiming credit, would undermine the case for cruelty.

So Trump can’t talk about the fact that crime is down, not even falsely to claim credit, even though falling crime is one of the few ways in which America really is doing much better than it was a few years ago. Instead he must claim that “Radical Left” pollsters — like, for example, Fox News — are hiding his immense popularity, and that his Iran debacle was a great victory.