Takeover Of D.C. Police Is Political Theater (To Distract From Economy And Epstein)

Paul Krugman on Trump's latest bit of political theater:

Ever since that latest weak jobs report, Trump has been frantically trying to convince the American public that the economy is doing great. He is failing, and predictably so. Experience shows that trying to talk up the economy when people don’t perceive it as good never works, even if the data are favorable. It’s even less likely to work when the data actually aren’t good.

On the other hand, telling people things are bad even when they’re actually good canwork. This is sometimes true when it comes to the economy. It’s definitely true when we’re talking about crime.

In his press conference announcing that he was seizing power in the District of Columbia, Trump declared that

"Our capital city has been overtaken by violent gangs and bloodthirsty criminals, roving mobs of wild youth, drugged out maniacs and homeless people."

The media were in general pretty good at pointing out that crime in DC has in fact been falling rapidly. According to the U.S. attorney’s office, violent crime is at a 30-year low.

But will Trump be universally ridiculed for his absurd claims? Will people understand that what we’re seeing, aside from an attempt to seize even more power, is an attempt to change the subject from the weakening economy and the Epstein affair?

I’m not sure.

Residents of DC will surely notice that Trump’s description of a violence-ridden dystopia bears no resemblance to the city they actually inhabit. But we know that crime is an issue on which people tend to believe that things are getting worse even when they are getting markedly better.

One possible answer is that there are lies, damned lies and statistics. Maybe official crime numbers are, as Trump would say, RIGGED — although that would be really hard to do with murders, which are kind of hard either to fabricate or to conceal, and have fallen even more than overall crime. Or maybe people’s lived experience just doesn’t match what the crime data say.

part of the answer is that many Americans believe that crime is running rampant — just not where they happen to live. Fox News tells suburban and small-town Americans that New York and Los Angeles are crime-ridden hellscapes, and they believe it.

According to Gallup, last year 56 percent of Americans believed that crime in the United States was an extremely or very serious problem — but only 14 percent said it was an extremely or very serious problem “in the area where you live.”

Anyone who either lives there are looks at crime data knows that this is malicious nonsense. But we can’t take it for granted that the rest of the country will understand that that he’s lying.

And if I may say, it’s the responsibility of the news media to make that clear. Don’t say “Trump makes contentious claims about DC crime.” Don’t say that there’s “dispute over DC crime data.” Just say that he’s lying.