Krugman makes the point that trying to tell people the economy is good when it’s actually bad doesn’t work. So good luck to Trump on that one.
However:
[T]elling people things are bad even when they’re actually good can work. 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.
He forgot to mention deranged bums. Anyway, 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. The invaluable Jeff Asher has a chart [above]
As I understand it, there are some technical data issues for 2022. But the basic picture is that DC is safer than it has been since the 1960s. The same is true for the nation as a whole:
He wonders if Trump will get away with this and isn’t sure he won’t. As wrote in the post below, I’m not sure either. He writes:
As you can see from the chart above, there was a truly epic decline in crime from the early 1990s to the mid-2010s. Yet throughout that period, according to Gallup, a large majority of Americans said that crime was getting worse. What’s going on?
[…]
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.
But I don’t buy that explanation, among other things because I’m a New Yorker. Much of the nation sees the Big Apple as a dystopian hellhole, but anyone who actually lives there can tell you that the city feels quite safe — certainly safer than at any earlier point in my adult life.
He notes that the subway ridership numbers bear this out despite the fact that all the Trumpers insist that the NY subways are highways to hell. He continues:
Part of the answer is the old line “if it bleeds it leads.” There are occasional acts of violence on the New York subway, and they make the news. The system’s overall safety — taking the subway is much, much safer than driving — doesn’t.
But I’d also argue that a large 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.”
Krugman points out that this tracks with what happened with the economy during the Biden years when people all said they were doing fine but thought the rest of the country was in a recession. It’s apparently a common phenomenon and I personally hold the media as responsible as Trump.
Krugman notes that we can’t take it for granted that the people who don’t live in DC will understand that Trump is just lying when he says it’s a dystopian nightmare:
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.
Yep. Stop talking about the vibes and report the facts. And the fact is that he’s lying.