Facts About Crime Don’t Care About Trump’s Feelings

“Facts don’t care about your feelings” is a maxim popularized by the conservative commentator Ben Shapiro. As I don’t expect rigorous fact-checking from Shapiro and his far-right content factory Daily Wire, I was not shocked to hear a Daily Wire podcaster Michael Knowles defend Donald Trump’s militaristic federal takeover of the Washington, D.C. police as being “in response to skyrocketing crime,” despite the fact that the rate of violent crime in D.C in 2024 is down by more than a third since 2023, and more than half since 2010. Crime data analyst Jeff Asher examined various data points from the current year and concluded we have “tons of evidence pointing to declining violent crime in DC in 2025, especially gun violence” even though “we don’t really confidently know exactly how much[.]”

I was more surprised to hear some media personalities outside of MAGA-world wave off the facts and declare the feelings to be more important.

“I don’t care what the crime statistics say. Crime has been a problem in this city for the 32 years I’ve been living inside and outside of the city,” said MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough yesterday, “I think Congress and the President should have stepped in 30 years ago.” (Though he also said, in response to a unsettling suggestion by Trump, “don’t bring in the military.”)

The day before on CNN, Alex Thompson of Axios seemingly laundered his view through unnamed Democratic strategists. “What’s striking is that National Democrats are not following [D.C] Mayor [Muriel] Bowser’s lead on this,” said Thompson, “and that national Democrats have been insisting, just look at the statistics. We have 30-year, you know, 30-year low, you know, violent crime, whereas Mayor Bowser is talking about, hey, we need to get 500 more police officers on the streets. We’d like the federal government to help us rebuild our jail. … I’ve talked to Democrat strategists today that think that, you know, national Democrats saying, look at the statistics, is sort of a tone deaf way to react.”

Thompson skipped past Mayor Bowser’s description of Trump’s intervention as “unsettling and unprecedented,” her noting that “we’re seeing decreases” in crime, and her reminder that while she was legally obligated to cooperate, “I don’t want to minimize the intrusion on our autonomy.”

Thompson was followed by pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson, who concurred:

“Isn’t this the exact same problem that Democrats had last year? ‘Look at the statistics. We promise you the economy is great,’ while people are going, ‘it doesn’t feel great to me.’ That feels like a lot of this conversation around crime that you can point to statistics all day long that say, hey, D.C. is safer this year than it was last year. But do people feel safe? Bottom line, if they don’t, they may be more okay with something that would otherwise be considered extraordinary.”

All this hypothesizing about feelings ignores both the facts about crime, and the facts about feelings about crime.

We should look at the statistics, not to argue that crime is no longer a problem in D.C. or anywhere else—crime, like many endemic social problems, can never be low enough. We should look at the statistics because when you do you will see that the President of the United States is brazenly lying about crime in D.C. to falsely claim there is an “emergency” and exploit the law that allows the federal government to temporarily take over the D.C. police force in emergencies.

Some argue Trump has the “right” under federal law to take over D.C’s Metropolitan Police Force. The relevant law states, “whenever the President of the United States determines that special conditions of an emergency nature exist which require the use of the Metropolitan Police force for Federal purposes, he may direct the Mayor to provide him, and the Mayor shall provide, such services of the Metropolitan Police force as the President may deem necessary and appropriate.” The president has the power to declare an emergency. But to assert an emergency when there is none is a clear abuse of that power. And abuses of executive power are the stuff of authoritarians. This particular instance may not technically rise to the level of illegal or unconstitutional behavior, but in my book, no official has the “right” to abuse power. And it’s not tone deafness to point that out.

But even if we are to consider “feelings,” what is the evidence that there is a panic about crime—either in Washington or across the country—that would support Trump deploying the National Guard and the Federal Bureau of Investigation to take over local policing?

A YouGov poll taken on August 11 asking “Do you approve or disapprove of putting Washington, D.C. police under federal control and deploying National Guard troops in the city?” had a plurality of 47 percent disapproving and only 34 percent approving. That wouldn’t have surprised you if knew that a separate poll sampled by The Economist/YouGov from August 9 to 11 asked respondents which of 15 different issues is most important to you, “Crime” ranked 12th with only two percent. This is not a national electorate worked up about crime.

Nor is the local electorate. Within Washington, D.C, The Washington Post reported, “In interviews across several D.C. neighborhoods Monday and Tuesday, most residents expressed strong disapproval of President Donald Trump’s decision to take over policing in their city and deploy the National Guard. Some acknowledged crime as an issue—but said the city they knew was a far cry from the dystopian scene laid out by the president.”

While I am highlighting examples of mush-brained punditry, I suspect the reason why the public is not buying Trump’s demagoguery is because most of the media is doing a good job reporting on the facts of Washington, D.C. crime rate. Moreover, throughout the rest of the country, most Americans don’t see rampant crime in their neighborhoods and are not so easily manipulated by Trump’s attempts to turn the media spotlight away from less favorable topics such as his administration’s high tariffs and broken promises to release the Epstein files.

But distraction is probably not Trump’s sole motivation. As an authoritarian at heart, he needs foils. He needs hellscapes to rail against. He needs excuses to justify power grabs. He needs problems, and he needs Democratic scapegoats for those problems.

Rationalizing Trump’s actions as technically legal only sets the stage for more abuses in other cities, as Trump is openly threatening federal intervention in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Baltimore, and Oakland. The only thing tone deaf in this dialogue is the downplaying of authoritarian encroachment into our daily lives.

The post Facts About Crime Don’t Care About Trump’s Feelings appeared first on Washington Monthly.

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