Like nobody’s ever seen
Shitposting is a way of life for the former president. He has been doing it since long before the internet, PCs and cell phones. As Maureen Dowd noted (not in so many words), everything’s a dick-measuring contest for Donald Trump. He never loses.
To hear him tell it, as Cole Porter might put it in lyrics: He’s the top | He’s the Colosseum | He’s the top | He’s the Louvre Museum
Everything and everyone else is crap. Trump’s first speech as president trashed the country as American carnage, a wasteland of rusted out factories and a depleted military, a nation awash in drugs and gangs and crime. Long before Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota applied the term weird to MAGA Republicans, former president George W. Bush on the platform that day described Trump’s inauguration speech as “some weird shit.”
Trump and Republicans still trash the country as awash in crime, victimized by Democratic permissiveness. They’re really not going to like the latest crime data describing the Biden era (Axios):
New preliminary data from major U.S. cities shows a sharp drop in violent crime in the first half of the year — more than 25% in some communities — as the COVID-era crime wave recedes.
Why it matters: The drop in violent crime puts a serious dent in one of the most frequently used lines of attack by former President Trump and his allies, who have sought to tie Democrats to the issue since 2020.
- It also gives Vice President Kamala Harris, a former prosecutor in San Francisco and California attorney general, a potent defense against attacks from the right on crime.
By the numbers: An Axios analysis of data from the Major Cities Chiefs Association found an overall 6% decline in violent crime among 69 cities during the first six months of 2024 compared to the same period last year.
- 54 of the 69 major cities in the report saw drops in violent crime — defined as homicide, rape, robbery and aggravated assault — in the first half of 2024, according to the Axios review.
“Americans are safer today than when Vice President Harris and I took office,” Biden said in a statement.
Axios has more positive data Trump will ignore or smear as fake news. The world Trump inhabits in his own mind bears little resemblance to the real one. He claims falsely that countries south of the border are emptying prisons and mental institutions to send migrants to the U.S., bringing violent crimes and drugs and diseases of unspecified nature with them.
Axios continues:
Reality check: An Axios review of crime data along the U.S.-Mexico border found that those cities have some of the nation’s lowest violent crime rates.
The bottom line: Facts and data about crime are important, but history shows political campaigns can ignore the facts to exploit people’s fears about crime to change the narrative.
If there’s one thing Trump is superlative at, it’s that.
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