After Donald Trump announced that he’s deploying National Guard troops to D.C. streets and placing local police officers under federal control, the president justified the dramatic power grab by pointing to conditions in the nation’s capital. There’s a “public safety crisis” and “public safety emergency” in the District of Columbia, the Republican claimed, which is reflected in crime in the nation’s capital that is “rising” and “out of control.”
As is often the case with this White House, reality quickly got in the way of the partisan talking points. Crime rates are down across the board in Washington, D.C., and violent crime rates have reached a 30-year low. The New York Times highlighted a list of false and misleading claims that Trump made during the rollout of his policy, and the list was not short.
Given these circumstances, White House officials basically have three options. The first is relatively straightforward: acknowledge the statistical evidence, but explain that the president and his team have decided to militarize the nation’s capital anyway.
The second option would be for the White House to present alternative data that paints a different picture that the administration considers more compelling.
The third option would be to pretend the statistical evidence the White House doesn’t like is “fake.”
Take a wild guess which one Team Trump prefers.
The morning after the president launched his D.C. initiative, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller — who recently made headlines for peddling weird claims about immigrant crime in Minneapolis — published an item to social media that read:
Crime stats in big blue cities are fake. The real rates of crime, chaos [and] dysfunction are orders of magnitude higher. Everyone who lives in these areas knows this. They program their entire lives around it. Democrats are trying to unravel civilization. Pres Trump will save it.
The falsehood-per-sentence ratio in this little missive was, in a rather literal sense, 1:1, though it is interesting to see Team Trump add crime statistics to its list of “fake” things, joining U.S. job numbers, census data, the president’s approval rating, and news organizations and reports the president doesn’t like.
But more specifically, I’m curious who, exactly, Miller is accusing of generating “fake” crime statistics. The official data comes by way of police departments, who send crime statistics to the FBI, which compiles and releases the official numbers. So who is the White House accusing of deceiving the public? Is Miller accusing police officers of lying, or does he think Kash Patel’s FBI is peddling false information? What’s more, let’s not forget that the FBI’s controversial director appeared at the president’s press conference on Monday, when Patel boasted from the White House podium, “The murder rates are plummeting. We are now able to report that the murder rate is on track to be the lowest in U.S. history.” That was true, though if Miller correct, the boast from Trump’s FBI director should be discarded — because crime stats in cities led by Democratic officials are “fake,” which necessarily throws off the bureau’s figures. The White House’s war on data and government statistics was already a mess. It’s apparently getting worse.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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