During the last week, President Donald Trump has tried his greatest to make a spectacle of sending federal brokers and the Nationwide Guard into Washington to fight a nonexistent crime surge. The act has been a transparent try to shift focus away from each his administration’s ongoing cover-up of its information on accused intercourse trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, and the deterioration of the financial system due to Trump’s tariff insurance policies.
Violent crime in Washington hit a 30-year low final yr, and that trend is continuing this yr. Nonetheless, Trump, a serial liar, has tried to counteract actuality with conspiracy theories about crime statistics, and his conservative base is consuming it up—however why?
Groundwork for crime narrative
In 2015 and 2016, as he pivoted from pushing the racist “birther” conspiracy concept about then-President Barack Obama and ran for president himself, Trump repeatedly claimed the nation was in the course of a harmful crime surge, although the violent crime fee remained low. After he gained the election, he used his inaugural tackle to talk about so-called “American carnage,” which he attributed partly to immigration—reinforcing the falsehood that Latino immigrants are principally criminals.
Trump’s demagoguery had deep roots within the Republican Celebration. Former President Ronald Reagan blamed societal ills on mythological welfare queens, and former President George W. Bush curtailed civil liberties and pushed for the invasion of Iraq based on fears of terrorist assaults from al-Qaida.
The conservative motion loves to attach worry of crime to rhetoric about racial minorities. It preys on deep-seated bigotry and motivates conservative voters to get out and vote, all as a approach to cease the “different” from gaining management and permitting the unfold of crime.
In more moderen instances, conservatives have circulated lies concerning the homicide of Black teenager Trayvon Martin, and a few right-wing circles have even celebrated his killer, George Zimmerman, as a hero. This resurfaced throughout Trump’s first time period with the murder of George Floyd and the nationwide protests in opposition to police brutality that ensued. As a substitute of taking these natural expressions critically, the precise saw it as an affront to Trump and labeled even essentially the most peaceable protests as riots blessed by high Democrats.
Trump loses to Biden, and the precise doubles down on “crime”
After Trump misplaced the 2020 presidential election, he and the precise had been thrown off-balance. Reeling from this loss, he pushed for the violent assault on the federal government on Jan. 6, 2021, after which spent the subsequent few years blaming Biden for against the law surge that began on his watch, in the course of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Trump, alongside his propaganda allies at Fox Information, noticed crime start to say no underneath Biden however saved pushing the lie that it hadn’t. To do in any other case would have undermined years of assaults in opposition to Democrats and could be an acknowledgement that the precise’s “robust on crime” method had not labored.
The best blamed this supposed crime wave on migrants, reinforcing the conservative motion’s nativist, racist message. And so they used the narrative to strengthen a long-held conservative bias in opposition to cities, which the precise has railed against for his or her profitable progressive insurance policies and their racial and cultural variety.
A lot of this doesn’t make logical sense. The information don’t align with placing crime, racial minorities, and liberal insurance policies all in a pile collectively. It makes even much less sense after we do not forget that Fox Information is headquartered in New York Metropolis, the metropolis Trump himself is a product of.
However the precise loves conspiracies, and it’s far simpler for them to argue that liberal insurance policies celebrating ethnic unity additionally promote crime than it’s for them to reside in actuality.
Trump pulls the set off
Trump understands his core viewers greater than he understands the rest on the earth, and whereas advanced concepts are out of his grasp, he’s fluent within the language of bigotry.
By invoking crime, significantly at a second of political vulnerability, he understands that he’s activating long-simmering conservative resentments. By elevating the thought of against the law wave occurring in cities with giant Black populations, the tensions raised inside the MAGA motion about Epstein might be eased, not less than briefly.
That is why Trump can open prison cells and launch Jan. 6 rioters who had been tried and convicted, and likewise proceed to proclaim that he’s for “legislation and order.”
Proper-wing lawmakers and media have bought conservative voters on a false narrative for therefore lengthy that these voters really imagine Trump and his cohorts are combating crime—at the same time as they proceed to cowl up for an accused sex trafficker and pedophile.
Democratic leaders can bring tons of information to conversations about crime, however a lot of the proper is just too far gone. They’re too steeped in propaganda and paranoia to present actuality an opportunity.
They had been all the time going to imagine the lies from Trump and the remainder on the subject of crime. It was solely a query of when it was going to occur.
