Fear, Fiction, and the Trump Crime Machine
Has Crime Really Gone Down During the Trump Reign?
📢🔥⚙️ Fear, Fiction, and the Trump Crime Machine
A Kimberly Twain Investigation
A field guide for bewildered citizens wandering the great American funhouse, where the crime statistics are real, the panic is manufactured, and the National Guard keeps getting deployed to fix problems you can usually find at Thanksgiving dinner.
My fellow citizens,
Every few years, America rediscovers crime.
Not the actual kind — which follows painfully predictable patterns — but the cinematic hallucination of it. And no one stokes this hallucination with more gusto than Donald J. Trump, a man who talks about crime the way an auctioneer talks about a stolen piano.
At rallies, he announces — loudly and repeatedly — that crime has plummeted under his watch. A miracle! A triumph! A statistical event so extraordinary that the FBI, the Bureau of Justice Statistics, and several centuries of criminology apparently forgot to notice it.
But as with all Trumpian narratives, a quick glance at the actual numbers causes the story to collapse faster than a foam-core set in a high-school production of Les Misérables.
Let us take a closer look.
📉🎺 I. Crime Trends: The Part Where the Facts Stage a Coup
Crime in America — contrary to legend, lore, and late-night cable news — has been falling since the 1990s. This long downward slope began when pagers were considered cutting-edge and nobody knew what gluten was.
What happened during Trump’s term?
2017–2018: Violent crime dipped slightly. This dip had already begun under Obama and was essentially a continuation of a trend old enough to vote.
2019: Crime plateaued.
2020: Homicides spiked dramatically — a historic 30% surge, the largest in modern U.S. history.
A spike so big it would require a climbing harness.
Property crime? It continued its 20-year slide, thanks mainly to technology, tracking devices, and the American public losing interest in stealing televisions weighing more than a small child.
So the big, honest headline is:
Trump did not cause the crime decline — and he presided over its worst modern homicide spike.
🪖📍II. The Cities Trump Sends the National Guard To (and Why the Pattern Isn’t Random)
In his second coming on the campaign trail, Trump has developed a political hobby: sending the National Guard into cities he deems “crime-infested,” and threatening to send them into others like a disappointed father vowing to “turn this country around.”
Let’s look at the two case studies he loves most.
Washington, D.C.
A short 19-day slice of August 2025 showed a temporary drop in violent crime when the Guard appeared. Sounds impressive — until you notice the city was already trending downwards before troops arrived.
This is not heroism.
This is showing up after the work is done and demanding a medal.
Memphis, Tennessee
Memphis has a high baseline violent crime rate — no debate there.
But its homicide numbers were already dropping in early 2025 by as much as 21% from prior peaks.
Which raises a question:
If the city was improving before the troops showed up, why the theatrics?
The Political Geography
Cities Trump targets share certain characteristics:
majority-Black populations
Democratic leadership
symbolic value
media visibility
Notably, they don’t align with the highest crime rates nationwide.
Deployments appear to follow politics, not data.
📍🔍 III. Where Crime Actually Happens (and Why It’s Almost Never the Way Trump Says)
One of the great American misunderstandings — promoted heavily by politicians, pundits, and residents of gated communities — is the belief that violent crime is a random phenomenon.
In reality, crime is about as random as airport delays: unpredictable in timing but absolutely predictable in structure.
Homicide Reality
According to the FBI:
75–80% of murder victims know their killers.
Most murders occur between:
relatives
partners
acquaintances
neighbors
people in ongoing disputes
Your biggest threat is not a stranger in a ski mask —
It’s your cousin Larry at a barbecue.
Assault
Assaults tend to involve:
exes
coworkers
neighbors
the guy you told to “turn that down”
relatives you can’t legally return to the manufacturer
Not mysterious strangers.
Property Crime
Property crime follows:
shopping districts
parking lots
transit hubs
apartment complexes
commercial corridors
As reliable as gravity, zoning maps, and late-in-the-day Target despair.
Crime = Geography
In every major city:
1–5% of blocks generate over half the crime.
Crime is a micro-geography, not a citywide fog drifting from neighborhood to neighborhood like rogue smoke from a haunted chimney.
🪖🤦 IV. Why Deploying the National Guard Doesn’t Fix This
If crime is:
interpersonal,
relational,
clustered,
economic,
and structurally predictable,
…then sending the National Guard into a city to stop it is like hiring a marching band to fix your plumbing.
It makes a lot of noise.
It doesn’t solve the leak.
Troops cannot prevent:
domestic violence
interpersonal rivalries
retaliatory conflicts
apartment-complex feuds
economic desperation
multi-generational trauma
You cannot militarize your way out of human relationships.
But you can militarize your way into an election narrative.
📢🔥 V. The Trump Crime Machine: Fear as Fuel
So did crime go down under Trump?
At times, yes — in the same way rain occasionally stops during hurricane season.
But the real story is not about whether crime wiggled up or down.
It’s about how crime is described.
Trump sells crime as:
random,
explosive,
everywhere,
uncontrollable,
prowling at your doorstep.
But crime is overwhelmingly:
personal,
predictable,
structurally rooted,
localized,
relational,
confined.
What he’s selling is not reality.
It’s fear — a product with perfect profit margins.
⚖️📉 VI. Final Verdict: Crime Didn’t Fall. The Truth Did.
The Trump Crime Narrative requires only one thing:
your willingness to believe that violence is random, cities are war zones, and only a strongman can save you.
But the actual history of crime during his reign paints a different picture:
Crime is structural,
Crime is patterned,
Crime is human,
And crime is not impressed by campaign speeches.
If anything fell during the Trump years, it wasn’t crime.
It was the standard for telling the truth about it.
— Kimberly Twain
Special Correspondent for Structural Integrity & Structural Nonsense
Twain’s Gazette of the Absurd
TwainsGazette.com
🥃 Help fund the next installment of “Trump and His Trumpets.” I’ll need whiskey.
Thanks Craig! It is soooo silly. See you soon. Luv, k.
Nice work. It’s just getting silly now.