Biden Ended the Trump Crime Wave

Schedules being what they are, this column was written before the first Biden-Trump debate. So if you’re looking for savvy takes on the effectiveness of various strategies and tactics, you’re in the wrong place.

It seems safe to predict, however, that Donald Trump — a felon who has been found civilly liable for sexual abuse and defamation — will try to make a good bit of the debate about crime. It also seems safe to predict that almost everything he says about crime (and other subjects, like the economy) will be deeply misleading, if not outright lies, despite the prospect of real-time and post hoc fact-checking.

After all, Trump and his allies have spent months falsely portraying America as a nation terrorized by a wave of violent crime, pointing the finger at migrants and claiming that President Biden is responsible.

Here’s what actually happened: We experienced a substantial rise in homicides in 2020 during the Covid-19 pandemic, when Trump was in the White House. After Biden took his place, the homicide rate first plateaued, then began a steep decline that seems to be continuing. Murders, in particular, dropped rapidly in 2023 and seem to have plunged further this year. It seems quite likely that the homicide rate in 2024 will turn out to be lower than it was in any year of the Trump presidency.

Or to put it another way, if you want to play this by MAGA rules, under which the president is held responsible for national crime rates on his watch, then you’d have to say that Biden ended the Trump crime wave.

Prominent Trump supporters are, of course, insisting that the good news on crime is fake. But while there is some room for debate in defining what constitutes a violent crime, a murder is a murder, which is why I focus on homicide numbers. And national crime data is assembled from reports by many police departments; are they all involved in a deep-state conspiracy?