Donald Trump has been in office for just over one year at this point, which is long enough for there to be at least preliminary data about the state of American society under his leadership. Trump made bold promises upon coming into office, some of which weren’t based in reality, such as his claim that foreign oriented terrorism poses a threat to the U.S. large enough to warrant a racially charged ban on Muslims entering the U.S.
Unsurprisingly, Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ public stance is that Trump has proven remarkably effective in making his promises to make America more secure a reality. He communicated this stance in an article published this week in USA Today — a news media organization that is, notably, not among the ones continually attacked by the president for supposedly peddling “fake news.”
Sessions cast his comments in the context of Trump’s promise, made during his inaugural address, to end the “American carnage” supposedly wracking our cities. Trump’s inaugural address, it’s worth noting, was viewed suspiciously by an array of interests for its dark, ultra-nationalist undertones.
Sessions began his piece published in the USA Today:
‘When President Trump was inaugurated, he made the American people a promise: “This American carnage stops right here and stops right now.” It is a promise that he has kept.’
This sounds great, but there’s an almost strikingly obvious hole in both Sessions’ and Trump’s arguments.
Sessions issued his piece in the USA Today on the occasion of the release of preliminary data from the FBI about violent crime rates in the first half of 2017, which showed a decrease relative to the year before.
As he notes, rates of violent crime plummeted throughout the decades of the modern era, including in most the years of the Obama administration, excluding the last two. There is a very good explanation for the uptick in crime in the final years of the Obama administration, with the murder rate going up starkly in a few locales, such as Chicago, a trend that’s slowly but surely being turned around by city leaders.
The rate of overall crime continued its overall decline in the final years of the Obama administration.
Sessions’ argument, though, is that Trump is responsible for the violent crime rate decrease, even though that leaves out the fact that it decreased under most of the years of the Obama administration as well. Without a more detailed analysis, you might as well say that the decrease in violent crime in 2017 had nothing to do with Trump at all, seeing as it parallels the decreases in violent crime recorded in other years.
Sessions wasn’t finished, though.
He went on to write:
‘Trump ran for office on a message of law and order, and he won. When he took office, he ordered the Department of Justice to stop and reverse these trends — and that is what we have been doing every day for the past year. We have placed trust in our prosecutors again, and we’re restoring respect for law enforcement. We have invested in new resources and put in place smarter policies based on sound research.’
Claiming that Trump ran for office on a message of law and order is short-sighted at best. Trump’s platform could better be described as brute force, with him seeking to impose his will on the nation’s security systems, through such means as a Muslim ban and a wall in between us and Mexico, no matter what the cost.
In spite of these facts, the Trump administration continues to push on with the narrative that there was a massively out of control crime rate and that the president has proven to be some kind of pseudo-messianic savior, with administration officials using this narrative as an excuse to push their draconian policies.
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