Democrats Have Already Fallen for Trump's Big City Crime Trap

I take a little bit of satisfaction in knowing I beat Chris Cillizza to the punch on this one. Yesterday, I talked about how President Trump has an innate ability to drive the Democratic Party to make absolute fools of themselves, and today, Cillizza is warning his fellow Democrats that President Trump is setting a trap for them.

WATCH:

Donald Trump is setting a political trap for Democrats on crime in big cities.

Will they fall into it? pic.twitter.com/hqkRVHlSf1
— Chris Cillizza (@ChrisCillizza) August 12, 2025

And mark your calendars, because I don't say this often: Cillizza is right. This is a trap.

Whether that trap was set intentionally or not, President Trump has decided to make crime in our big cities the next focus of his administration, and -- in doing so -- set the stage for Democrats to, once more, plant themselves firmly on the losing side of the issue.

Cillizza, however, is late to the party. Democrats have already fallen into the trap.

-In 2024, Washington, DC had the fourth-highest homicide rate in the US, with a homicide rate nearly SIX TIMES HIGHER than New York City.
-Just last month, a D.C. police commander was suspended for manipulating crime data to make it seem lower than it actually is. The D.C. police union says this practice is widespread.
-Washington D.C.’s homicide rate also topped Atlanta, Chicago and Compton.
-Washington, D.C. has one of the highest robbery and murder rates among large U.S. cities nationwide with numerous assaults and robberies on Congressional staffers and Members of Congress. In May, two embassy staffers were murdered.
-In June, a Congressional intern was fatally shot just a short distance from the White House.
-Just days ago, a Trump Administration staffer was mercilessly beaten by a violent mob.

And Cillizza himself has fallen into the trap by repeating the debunked 'crime is down' talking point. NBC News -- hardly a bastion of MAGA thought -- reported as such just last month:

The Metropolitan Police Department confirmed Michael Pulliam was placed on paid administrative leave in mid-May. That happened just a week after Pulliam filed an equal employment opportunity complaint against an assistant chief and the police union accused the department of deliberately falsifying crime data, according to three law enforcement sources familiar with the complaint.
The union claims police supervisors in the department manipulate crime data to make it appear violent crime has fallen considerably compared to last year.
Pulliam — the former commander of the 3rd District that patrols Adams Morgan and Columbia Heights — was placed on leave with pay and told he was under investigation for questionable changes to crime data, five law enforcement sources familiar with the investigation told News4.

You can't use falsified data to prove a point. Yet that's what Cillizza and the Democrats did, and they completely ignored the White House's statistics.

Some of the outrage is, at least, performative. Joe Scarborough revealed on his show that his 'very liberal' friends (and some Joe Biden staffers!) privately agree with President Trump's plan.

They can't be seen as publicly supporting anything President Trump does, however, because that would be embracing fascism, authoritarianism, and dictatorship. Or something. The private admission Trump is right doesn't help the Democrats, though, because it shows a) they don't care about their constituents' concerns and b) they'd rather attack Trump than work to fix the crime problem they created.

But there's a not-small segment of the Left who truly believe in the Democrats' soft-on-crime policies, and will defend them to the bitter end.

As I told you earlier, Leftists who live in the nicer parts of the city seem to think crime isn't a problem because it doesn't personally affect them. They think it's perfectly normal to have 'crappy' parts of a city where it's not safe to walk, shop, or live. This doesn't help the Democrats' argument, especially because the neighborhoods most riddled with crime are largely Black and Hispanic, and they make up the majority of victims of uncontrolled crime.

I'm not one to play the race card, but to argue that we just have to tolerate 'crappy' parts (that just happen to be majority-minority neighborhoods) seems pretty darned racist to me. Not only is it racist to say we can't control the criminal behavior of those robbing, assaulting, and murdering in parts of the city, it's also racist to expect the people who live there to just 'tolerate' it so some woke Karen in her affluent neighborhood can virtue signal.

We don't have to live like that. Cleaning up even the worst neighborhoods is possible if we have leaders who are unafraid to do so. Unfortunately, D.C. currently has leadership that doesn't even understand the concept of the 'chain of command' (which explains a lot).

This makes the contrast between the Democrats and the Trump administration as stark as night and day. On one hand, you have the Democrats who are utterly dismissive of Americans' crime concerns, who march for their 'right' to live in crime-ridden hellholes, and who attack anyone who dares agree with President Trump.

On the other hand, you have President Trump, who says he hears our concerns and has actually done something about it -- something few Republicans have had the intestinal fortitude to actually do.

This can-do attitude worked out well at the southern border, where illegal crossings are down and there have been zero illegal immigrants released into the nation in three consecutive months. Americans approve of what Trump is doing with immigration, while Democrats have margaritas with deported criminals.

I also fully expect Democrats to share sob stories of D.C. criminals being arrested and given harsh sentences, just as they pushed sympathetic stories of illegal immigrants. The media will run think pieces on the authoritarian crackdown on drug dealers and carjackers, expecting us to feel bad for the criminals and not their victims.

And Democrats will once again find themselves trapped on the wrong side of the issue.