It’s Official: Trump Just Made Up the 2024 Crime Wave
Many people were shocked by Donald Trump’s decision last week to fire the nonpartisan Bureau of Labor Statistics commissioner because he didn’t like the July jobs report. But Trump has always disregarded statistics, or just plain facts, that contradict his overheated narrative of America’s treacherous decline under other presidents and its return to Greatness under his administrations. In the case of the jobs report, he asserted that “America is BOOMING” as a self-evident truth because this is his economy; BLS must have “rigged” last year’s jobs numbers to help Joe Biden, whose economy was obviously hellish.
We saw the same thing during the 2024 presidential campaign, when Trump constantly claimed America’s cities were facing an unprecedented violent-crime wave. As the Brennan Center reported at the time, this was a signature Trump issue from the get-go and was always an inversion of the truth:
Donald Trump stoked fears of a migrant-fueled crime wave at the Conservative Political Action Conference on Saturday, describing the United States under President Biden as awash in “bloodshed, chaos, and violent crime.” It was a near cut-and-paste from his CPAC speech last year, when he warned that the country was becoming a “lawless, open borders, crime-ridden, filthy, communist nightmare” …
The first problem with Trump’s narrative is the timeline. The spike in violent crime happened on Trump’s watch, not Biden’s. In 2020, the final year of the Trump presidency, murder rose by nearly 30 percent and assault by more than 10 percent. Crime surges are almost always multifactorial, and the Covid-19 pandemic and associated economic upheaval played a major role in the historic 2020 crime surge. One cause, though, most certainly was not the Biden presidency, which had not yet begun.
Presented with emerging crime data during the campaign, Trump responded with pure ideological denial, much as he responded to the BLS jobs report, as Cornell University’s Glenn Altschuler observed:
Asked about data indicating a decrease in homicides and other violent crimes, Trump replied, “The FBI fudged the numbers and other people fudged numbers. There is no way crime went down over the last year. There’s no way because you have migrant crime. Are they adding migrant crime? Or do they consider that a different form of crime?”
Unsurprisingly, there is no evidence for these claims …
In 2016, candidate Trump falsely insisted that the murder rate in the U.S. was “the highest in 45 years.”
And then Altschuler recalled something from 2016 that should sound very familiar now:
He maintained that the Bureau of Labor Statistics estimate of 4.9 percent unemployment was “phony” and the rate was actually 42 percent.
Two months after he took office, Trump boasted about the Bureau’s jobs announcement. The numbers “may have been phony in the past,” he instructed Press Secretary Sean Spicer to tell reporters, “but they’re very real now.”
If it’s good, that’s because of Trump. If it’s bad, that’s because Trump’s not in power. It’s a simple and terrifying formula.
In case there’s any remaining doubt that Trump was indeed fabricating a 2024 crime wave, the official crime stats for last year are now out, as data analyst Jeff Asher reports:
The FBI released its report on crime in the United States for 2024 today showing a 14.9 percent decline in murder with 4.4 percent and 8.1 percent drops in overall violent and property crime respectively. The nation’s murder rate for 2024 was down 26 percent from 2020’s figure and roughly even — slightly lower, actually — relative to where it stood pre-pandemic. The nation’s reported violent and property crime rates stood at the lowest levels since the 1960s in 2024.
Crime fell in 2024 across every category and population group. Seriously. Crime was down in all seven categories of crime across all 10 population groups that the FBI measures.
Ah, but I forgot! Trump explained last year that the FBI had “fudged” the crime statistics to exclude migrant crime, which we were told by Trump and his running mate J.D. Vance was at a pet-eating epidemic level because they said it was. But wait: Isn’t Trump’s faithful servant Kash Patel in charge of the FBI now? Why is the bureau still “fudging” the numbers? Or were they accurate all along?
If you are inclined to believe partisan propaganda and dismiss the possibility of nonpartisan agencies (like, say, the FBI and BLS) issuing reliable data on conditions in the country, then there’s nothing odd about Trump firing the refs on grounds that only the refs he chooses are fair and truthful. But that makes America a true dystopia in which all the pertinent facts change 180 degrees whenever there is a change in party control. Soon enough, there will be no one we trust or believe, and maybe that’s the nihilistic trajectory we are on.