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Trump keeps decrying rampant crime. Here’s how his misleading claim has shifted.
By former President Donald J. Trump’s account, the country is awash in crime. But in fact, under President Biden, the rate of violent crime has fallen.
It is a refrain that dates to Mr. Trump’s first presidential campaign in 2016, when he often cited false statistics to claim historically high murder rates and record-breaking urban crime. After he was elected, those warnings waned, even though the country had its biggest one-year increase in murder in 2020, when he was in office.
Once he lost that election, though, Mr. Trump wasted no time in falsely claiming crime records, saying in a 2022 address that “our country is now a cesspool of crime.”
In making the case for a second term, Mr. Trump has stuck to that message, though his argument has evolved this election cycle from false claims on crime rates to an attack on the credibility of any evidence that refutes him. Here’s how.
March 2, 2024
Mr. Trump selectively homes in on crime in cities, including at a rally in Greensboro, N.C.
Mr. Trump had a point that violent crime in Washington had increased in 2023. But it was one of few outliers. Violent crime overall decreased across the country by 3 percent, and the number of homicides declined on average by 10 percent across 32 cities tracked by the nonpartisan Council on Criminal Justice. In Washington and seven other cities, though, the number of homicides increased.
April 13, 2024
Mr. Trump, at a rally in Pennsylvania, falsely balloons the level of crime in New York.
Crime, in fact, decreased in the year before March 2024 by 5 percent, and murders by 19.4 percent, the city reported just days before Mr. Trump’s remarks. And in 2023, overall crime declined by 0.3 percent and murders by 11.9 percent, to 386 in 2023 from 438 in 2022.
Those numbers also pale in comparison to the height of crime in New York in the 1980s and 1990s, when Mr. Trump was a mainstay of the city and when it regularly recorded more than 1,500 murders annually. Homicides peaked in 1990 at 2,245.
May 18, 2024
As the general election nears, his claims grow more hyperbolic.
“There’s too much crime in the country. We’ve never seen crime like this before.”
Mr. Trump, in an interview with a Dallas news station, warns more broadly of a nationwide crime wave. That is false. Violent crime and property crime are near the lowest level in decades, despite public perception to the contrary. And while there was an increase in crime during the pandemic, violent crime was higher in 2020 under Mr. Trump than under Mr. Biden so far.
May 18, 2024
That same day, he attributes the increase to Democratic policies.
Speaking to the National Rifle Association, Mr. Trump vividly and baselessly casts blame on his political opponents.
June 15, 2024
Mr. Trump wrongly blames methodological changes for obscuring crime trends.
The claim, made at a conservative gathering in Detroit, is misleading. Days earlier, the F.B.I. released a preliminary assessment estimating that crime had fallen in the first three months of 2024. But Mr. Trump insisted the data was fraudulent.
In 2021, the F.B.I. started relying on a new data collection system, aggregating crime data from local and state police departments. Many agencies had yet to fully transition, resulting in reporting from only 68 percent of agencies, which covered about 66 percent of the population. So Mr. Trump has a point that data collection in 2021 was unusually incomplete, but the reported national crime rate that year did not simply omit a third of the country, as he said. Rather, the F.B.I. used a standard statistical process to fill in the blanks and estimate crime for the missing jurisdictions to generate a national rate.
The F.B.I.’s national estimates included data from more agencies in subsequent years: 93.5 percent of the population in 2022 and 94.3 percent in 2023. Both years continued to show a decline in crime compared with 2020.
June 22, 2024
At a rally in Philadelphia, Mr. Trump insists that the official statistics are “fake.”
“The F.B.I. crime statistics Biden is pushing are fake.”
Minutes later, he points to a different data set, also from the Justice Department.
Mr. Trump was cherry-picking those statistics and referring to the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ National Crime Victimization Survey, which showed a 43 percent increase in the violent crime rate, from 16.4 per 1,000 people in 2020 to 23.5 in 2022. (Unlike the F.B.I.’s crime rate, which relies on crimes reported to the police, this rate relies on responses to a survey.)
Left unsaid: The 2022 rate was comparable to rates under the Trump administration (23.2 in 2018 and 21.0 in 2019) and still lower than rates in the 1990s and 2000s. Moreover, in 2023, that rate declined to 22.5 per 1,000 people.
Aug. 3, 2024
He repeats those percentages during a rally in Atlanta.
“Nationwide, there’s been a 43 percent increase in violent crimes since I left office, including a 58 percent increase in rape, 89 percent increase in aggravated assault and a 56 percent increase in stone-cold robbery.”
Sept. 6, 2024
Addressing the Fraternal Order of Police union in Charlotte, N.C., he again cites those figures.
“Since Kamala Harris took office, she has presided over a 43 percent increase in violent crime, including a 58 percent increase in rape and an 89 percent increase in aggravated assault.”
Sept. 10, 2024
Mr. Trump reprises his claims during the presidential debate.
Sept. 18, 2024
In a Fox News interview, Mr. Trump inaccurately cites an analysis to claim a huge increase in crime.
“I was right. The following day, D.O.J. announced numbers — I don’t know who it was in D.O.J., but somebody over there likes me — that crime is up 45 percent, murders up, numbers like you wouldn’t even believe.”
Since the debate, Mr. Trump has seized upon and further inflated an analysis repeated in conservative news outlets of revised F.B.I. statistics.
In its September report estimating that violent crime had declined by 3 percent in 2023, the F.B.I. released revised figures for 2022, as it does every year. The revisions, according to an analysis published by Fox News, show a 4.5 percent increase in violent crime from 2021 to 2022.
But even that 4.5 percent figure is misleading, as FactCheck.org has noted. That is because crime data from 2021 was incomplete, as police departments across the country transitioned to a different reporting system. Moreover, the revised data still show that violent crime had declined overall since 2020.
This dark assessment of soaring violence and lawlessness under Mr. Biden and Ms. Harris has been central to Mr. Trump’s re-election campaign — even though the facts show otherwise.
Dr. Tracy Beth Hoeg, the Food and Drug Administration’s top drug regulator, said she was fired from the agency Friday after she declined to resign.
She said she did not know who had ordered her firing or why, nor whether Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. knew of her fate. The Department of Health and Human Services did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The departure reflected the upheaval at the F.D.A., days after the resignation of Dr. Marty Makary, the agency commissioner. Dr. Makary had become a lightning rod for critics of the agency’s decisions to reject applications for rare disease drugs and to delay a report meant to supply damaging evidence about the abortion drug mifepristone. He also spent months before his departure pushing back on the White House’s requests for him to approve more flavored vapes, the reason he ultimately cited for leaving.
Dr. Hoeg’s hiring had startled public health leaders who were familiar with her track record as a vaccine skeptic, and she played a leading role in some of the agency’s most divisive efforts during her tenure. She worked on a report that purportedly linked the deaths of children and young adults to Covid vaccines, a dossier the agency has not released publicly. She was also the co-author of a document describing Mr. Kennedy’s decision to pare the recommendations for 17 childhood vaccines down to 11.
But in an interview on Friday, Dr. Hoeg said she “stuck with the science.”
“I am incredibly proud of the work we were doing,” Dr. Hoeg said, adding, “I’m glad that we didn’t give in to any pressures to approve drugs when it wasn’t appropriate.”
As the director of the agency’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, she was a political appointee in a role that had been previously occupied by career officials. An epidemiologist who was trained in the United States and Denmark, she worked on efforts to analyze drug safety and on a panel to discuss the use of serotonin reuptake inhibitors, the most widely prescribed class of antidepressants, during pregnancy. She also worked on efforts to reduce animal testing and was the agency’s liaison to an influential vaccine committee.
She made sure that her teams approved drugs only when the risk-benefit balance was favorable, she said.
The firing worsens the leadership vacuum at the F.D.A. and other agencies, with temporary leaders filling the role of commissioner, food chief and the head of the biologics center, which oversees vaccines and gene therapies. The roles of surgeon general and director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are also unfilled.
The U.S. Supreme Court
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The U.S. Supreme Court refused Friday to allow Virginia to use a new congressional map that favored Democrats in all but one of the state’s U.S. House seats. The map was a key part of Democrats’ effort to counter the Republican redistricting wave set off by President Trump.
The new map was drawn by Democrats and approved by Virginia voters in an April referendum. But on May 8, the Supreme Court of Virginia in a 4-to-3 vote declared the referendum, and by extension the new map, null and void because lawmakers failed to follow the proper procedures to get the issue on the ballot, violating the state constitution.
Virginia Democrats and the state’s attorney general then appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, seeking to put into effect the map approved by the voters, which yields four more likely Democratic congressional seats. In their emergency application, they argued the Virginia Supreme Court was “deeply mistaken” in its decision on “critical issues of federal law with profound practical importance to the Nation.” Further, they asserted the decision “overrode the will of the people” by ordering Virginia to “conduct its election with the congressional districts that the people rejected.”
Republican legislators countered that it would be improper for the U.S. Supreme Court to wade into a purely state law controversy — especially since the Democrats had not raised any federal claims in the lower court.
Ultimately, the U.S. Supreme Court sided with Republicans without explanation leaving in place the state court ruling that voided the Democratic-friendly maps.
The court’s decision not to intervene was its latest in emergency requests for intervention on redistricting issues. In December, the high court OK’d Texas using a gerrymandered map that could help the GOP win five more seats in the U.S. House. In February, the court allowed California to use a voter-approved, Democratic-friendly map, adopted to offset Texas’s map. Then in March, the U.S. Supreme Court blocked the redrawing of a New York map expected to flip a Republican congressional district Democratic.
And perhaps most importantly, in April, the high court ruled that a Louisiana congressional map was a racial gerrymander and must be redrawn. That decision immediately set off a flurry of redistricting efforts, particularly in the South, where Republican legislators immediately began redrawing congressional maps to eliminate long established majority Black and Hispanic districts.
An explosion and fire drew a large emergency response on Friday to a lumber mill in the Midcoast region of Maine, officials said.
The State Police and fire marshal’s investigators responded to Robbins Lumber in Searsmont, about 72 miles northeast of Portland, said Shannon Moss, a spokeswoman for the Maine Department of Public Safety.
Mike Larrivee, the director of the Waldo County Regional Communications Center, said the number of victims was unknown, cautioning that “the information we’re getting from the scene is very vague.”
“We’ve sent every resource in the county to that area, plus surrounding counties,” he said.
Footage from the scene shared by WABI-TV showed flames burning through the roof of a large structure as heavy, dark smoke billowed skyward.
The Associated Press reported that at least five people were injured, and that county officials were considering the incident a “mass casualty event.”
Catherine Robbins-Halsted, an owner and vice president at Robbins Lumber, told reporters at the scene that all of the company’s employees had been accounted for.
Gov. Janet T. Mills of Maine said on social media that she had been briefed on the situation and urged people to avoid the area.
“I ask Maine people to join me in keeping all those affected in their thoughts,” she said.
Representative Jared Golden, Democrat of Maine, said on social media that he was aware of the fire and explosion.
“As my team and I seek out more information, I am praying for the safety and well-being of first responders and everyone else on-site,” he said.
This is a developing story. Check back for updates.
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