Trump’s GOP’s Reverse Perception of Crime in America

“Everything is bad in New York and the whole world is watching,” Trump insisted to reporters. In his case, he added, “there is no crime.” Do you know where the crime is? In the bodegas, where they come to steal them every week. As is his recent habit, he included a separate excoriation of recently arrived immigrants, who, he insisted, held all the jobs and who were “prisoners and people from mental institutions, largely “.

Seen from a sympathetic perspective, you see what Trump is saying: they are coming after me when there is a real crime? However, take a step back from this sympathetic view and you arrive at a more useful position: rather than being assessed on a sliding scale, crimes should generally be subject to accountability.

For years, Trump has offered his base a divided view of law enforcement. Local policing is revered, both as a declaration of allegiance and as a thin blue line protecting America from the salivating hordes of left-wing rioters, urban criminals, and wildcat immigrants. Federal law enforcement, however, is suspect and corrupt, a position closely tied to long-running investigations into Trump at the federal level. With his local indictments in Georgia and Manhattan, Trump has simply tied local prosecutors to his federal political opponents. (“By the way, this lawsuit I have now?” he said at the bodega. “It’s a Biden lawsuit.”)

For now, however, this divergent view of crime — Trump and his allies are innocent political targets while liberal prosecutors let other criminals slide — is further from reality than usual.

Crime, according to most available indicators, has been declining in recent years. That includes homicides, which, as the Wall Street Journal reported this week, have declined sharply in several cities. In New York, violent crime is down 3% since the start of the year. Major thefts are also down 3 percent, although the number of robberies is up 4 percent.

But this is an election year and, as was the case in 2020 and 2022, the warnings from Trump and his allies about criminal activity are omnipresent and breathless.

“The next six months are going to be intense,” Arizona Republican Senate candidate Kari Lake said at a rally this weekend, as reported by the New York Times. She told listeners to prepare: “We are going to put on the armor of God. And maybe strap a Glock to the side of us just in case.

The New York Post – a perpetual engine of alarmism about crime – reported that “Californians are buying guns after Border Patrol begins dumping thousands of migrants onto the streets.” In March, about 131,000 background checks were conducted in California, a process that typically precedes a gun sale. Last March, there were 128,000; the previous month of March, 129,000. In March 2021, there were 144,000.

None of this is to say that there are no violent crimes; they do. Rather, it is to highlight that exaggerated talk about the dangers of crime does not match the reality of crime data trends.

This rhetoric is accompanied by a desire to let Trump and his allies through. An Associated Press poll conducted by NORC this month shows that only a small fraction of Republicans think Trump did anything illegal regarding the four indictments he faces. Only 6 percent of Republicans think he did anything illegal in the New York case.

This idea that Trump is being unfairly targeted for scrutiny and sanctions — an idea that Trump has relentlessly promoted for obvious reasons — extends to his allies. On Tuesday evening, Newsmax host Greg Kelly (son of the former New York Police Commissioner) encouraged viewers to write to former Trump adviser Peter Navarro, who is imprisoned in Florida.

“He is in JAIL and this is a TOTAL CRIME,” Kelly wrote on social media Wednesday morning. The reality is that Navarro ignored a congressional subpoena and was found in contempt of Congress.

But Navarro was only blocking the House Select Committee from investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, which isn’t really something a Trump supporter would be overly concerned about. Likewise Trump’s actions: Oh, he tried to block Joe Biden’s presidency? Why not focus on real the criminals?

It all depends on how criminal acts are perceived. Trump guarding classified documents elicits a shrug, but the specter of tattooed immigrants waiting on the dark streets of New York is indelible. That the former happened and the latter was extremely overheated is neither here nor there. They They’re the bad guys, not us. They deserve to be repressed, constrained or punished. Not us. They are the ones we should be worried about.

In Kari Lake’s world, it’s advisable to walk down the street armed and with your head swiveling before arriving at the courthouse to support Donald Trump during his criminal trial.