Donald Trump is counting on his “tough-on-crime” message to carry him and his party through the midterm elections and even to 2028, when it seems increasingly likely that he will seek an unconstitutional third term.
It’s clear that he sees crime as the key to his continued authoritarian rule.
“So the line is that I’m a dictator, but I stop crime,” Trump said during a cabinet meeting on Tuesday. “So a lot of people say, ‘You know, if that’s the case, I’d rather have a dictator.’”
He returned to the topic of dictatorship again a bit later: “And most people say… ‘if he stops crime, he can be whatever he wants.’ I’m not a dictator, by the way. But ‘he could be whatever he wants’.”
He chortled that Democrats have fallen into his trap by opposing him on the issue. “I think crime will be the big subject of the midterms and will be the big subject of the next election,” he said.
And showing his enthusiasm for using crime as a wedge issue, he said: “I would say that crime is stronger than men playing in women’s sports.”
Indeed, if he can get the media and the public worked up about crime, that’s a much better issue for him than the topics he’s distracting from, notably the Jeffrey Epstein scandal.
But it seems to me that Trump telegraphing so clearly how he intends to manipulate voters is an existential challenge to Washington journalists.
Three Massive Lies
For Trump to make crime a winning issue depends on his ability to perpetuate three massive lies:
- That he actually cares about crime, which he doesn’t;
- That crime has reached emergency status in big cities run by Democrats, which it hasn’t; and
- That his approach to crime is helpful, which it’s not.
On that first point, as I wrote last week, journalists should be aggressively reporting on Trump’s real motives for invading U.S. cities, which include perpetuating racism, normalizing military takeovers, and, most notably, changing the subject from the Jeffrey Epstein scandal to a topic that polls well.
On the second and third points: Journalists should not be indulging those lies, they should be countering them. In fact, they should be countering them as enthusiastically and repeatedly as Trump spreads them.
In the short run, that means reporting that what Trump is doing in Washington isn’t helping at all: How crime was already going down; how his federal law enforcement surge is accomplishing nothing; how the National Guard deployment is a farce; and how it’s actually distracting law enforcement from doing more important things.
(Good news: Some of this is already happening, in dribs and drabs. See below.)
In the longer run, that means giving the public an accurate sense of the extent of crime in our society, what causes it, and what brings it down.
That means distinguishing between those interventions that help, and those that hurt. That means interviewing criminologists about what experience says, and interviewing civil libertarians about due process and constitutional protections against unreasonable search and seizure.
That means exploring why people’s perceptions about crime – especially crime in other places – is so pessimistic.
And most importantly, that means injecting the lessons learned from this reporting into the incremental stories about what Trump is saying and doing — countering his lies in real time, over and over again.
That last part is the biggest failure in the reporting so far.
A perfect example of what not to do was provided earlier this week by Rachael Bade, who wrote a pure handicapping-the-horserace article in Politico. She dutifully credited Trump with a master stroke. She wrote that his ploy is “already backing Democrats into a corner.” And she opined: “If his recent escalation was an attempt to goad Democrats into declaring that crime isn’t a problem, repelling swing voters in the process, top Democrats did not disappoint him.”
The Best So Far
There has been some fairly good coverage of the situation in Washington on occasion.
Back on August 14, Tyler Pager and Devlin Barrett wrote in the New York Times about how Trump has historically undercut crime-fighting efforts in Washington:
[I]n the more than six months since taking office, Mr. Trump’s actions, and in some cases inaction, have hobbled Washington’s efforts to reduce crime, drawing complaints from city leaders who say he is now trying to solve a problem that he has actually made worse.
The Times’s race reporter, Clyde McGrady, deserves kudos for actually interviewing people living in crime-ridden Washington neighborhoods – and finding them deeply skeptical of Trump’s words and deeds.
And just today, the Times did an excellent analysis of arrest records — although the article about it seriously underplayed its findings, in my opinion.
Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs, Jeff Adelson, Campbell Robertson, and Bernard Mokam looked at arrests that were made during the first two weeks of the federal law enforcement surge and concluded, somewhat lamely, that “the operation has been more of a sprawling dragnet than a targeted crime-fighting operation.”
In fact, their analysis is much more damning. Arrests were up only 13 percent over the previous two weeks (my calculation); and the biggest change appears to be an increase in busts for minor infractions.
This paragraph was good:
Records show that officers from some of the nation’s most elite federal law enforcement agencies are often conducting traffic stops, performing low-dollar buy-and-bust drug operations or checking to see whether someone is drinking liquor from an open container.
What has occurred in Washington is an enormous surge in immigration-related apprehensions. Or, as the Wall Street Journal’s Vera Bergengruen, Michelle Hackman, and Lara Seligman put it on April 20:”Trump’s ‘Law and Order’ Push in D.C. Looks a Lot Like an Immigration Raid.” They wrote:
Authorities have pulled delivery drivers off mopeds, arrested construction workers and demanded proof of legal status from vendors selling mangos and watermelons. Vehicle checkpoints have sprung up nightly, and ICE vans have parked outside daycare centers and churches that tend to employ immigrants.
They had a different set of arrest records to look at:
Of the 465 total arrests from the start of operations in the District of Columbia through Tuesday, roughly 44%, or 206, have been arrests of immigrants in the country illegally, according to a White House official.
Combine the New York Times and Wall Street Journal analyses and you reach the obvious conclusion that Trump’s “crime surge” isn’t what it was billed to be at all: It’s about theatrics and ruthless immigration enforcement, not crime.
The Washington Post has been shockingly lame in its coverage of the invasion in its hometown, with a few slight exceptions.
Salvador Rizzo and Michael Laris wrote effectively about how “Trump’s surge of federal law enforcement on the streets of D.C. is meeting resistance in the city’s federal courthouse, where magistrate judges have admonished prosecutors for violating defendants’ rights and court rules, and grand jurors have repeatedly refused to issue indictments.”
And Tara Copp wrote about the National Guard’s idiotic duties:
More than 2,200 troops, some from as far away as Mississippi and Louisiana, have been deployed in D.C. since Trump’s declaration of a “crime emergency” here. Ostensibly, they were mobilized to support federal law enforcement and local police, but in recent days those orders have expanded to encompass “beautification” tasks such as trash removal and groundskeeping around the National Mall and other federal property. Service members may work on removing graffiti, too.
The one thing journalists have done reasonably well is counter Trump’s lies about how crime is up. Case in point, Ed White and Christopher L. Keller wrote for the Associated Press today:
President Donald Trump has threatened to deploy the National Guard to Chicago, New York, Seattle, Baltimore, San Francisco and Portland, Oregon, to fight what he says is runaway crime. Yet data shows most violent crime in those places and around the country has declined in recent years.
Reality Check
As usual, much of the best reality-checking so far appears in the op-ed columns.
Law enforcement expert Karl W. Bickel wrote in a Baltimore Sun opinion piece:
Don’t let disingenuous politicians with their exaggerated, if not downright false, explanation of the “crime problem” and what should be done in response mislead you. What you are currently witnessing in Washington, D.C., and threatened for Baltimore and other major cities, the marshaling of federal law enforcement and national guard troops to “fight crime,” is performative politics based on a lie.”
Arne Duncan, who runs a community-based anti-gun violence organization, wrote in a New York Times opinion piece last week that Trump’s crackdown will make crime worse:
In just a few months, President Trump has managed to put at risk years of hard work underway in cities across America to bring down crime, restore trust in the police and expand proven approaches to public safety that can save lives and money.
Duncan continued:
If Mr. Trump were serious about reducing crime, he would restore C.V.I. [community violence intervention] grants and maintain consent decrees driving needed police reforms. He would support common-sense gun safety laws that even gun owners support. Maybe he’d even try to address the economic inequality at the root of so much crime and disorder.
Crime shouldn’t be a central issue in the coming elections – not when it’s actually down, and there are so many more important issues facing the country, starting with the fact that we’ve become an authoritarian state.
But to the extent that Trump’s rhetoric and actions will make it an unavoidable topic of reporting, that reporting must be accurate. It must not be stenographic and credulous. It must expose the lies.