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Crime is down. But Trump's authoritarian power grabs are escalating.
Random street crimes are being used as pretexts for repression.
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The White House has seized on two unrelated incidents of street crime as a pretext for a federal government power grab at a time when violent crime has in fact dropped across the country.
The attempted carjacking of Edward “Big Balls” Coristine in Washington DC and a street brawl in Cincinnati are the latest cause célebrè on the American right, which has long supported Donald Trump’s plans for military and law enforcement crackdowns in largely Democratic cities. Both incidents are being used as anecdotal evidence of out-of-control crime across the country — a narrative that is necessary for Trump and Republicans to maintain their grip of fear on their MAGA base.
And it’s worked: a Gallup poll in October found that 64 percent of Americans believed crime had gone up in 2024, but new data from the FBI shows that is not the case. In fact, 2024 saw the lowest levels of violent crime since 1969, with violent crime down 4.5 percent across the country, including a 14.9 percent drop in murders.
The events being seized upon by the White House and Republicans as evidence of surging crime have little to do with one another save for the fact that the victims are white. In the case of the brawl in Cincinnati, those “victims” may not be entirely innocent: two white men faced off against a largely Black crowd on July 26, with one of the men spewing a racial slur. The other white man involved may have been a willing combatant in the melee, slapping a Black man in the face and squaring off to fight, as seen in videos circulating online. (Police have disputed that the slap was the impetus of the brawl.)
While the exact cause of the brawl isn’t entirely clear, videos of the incident have gone viral, framed by right-wing media as a “Black mob” beating innocent whites. On her show last Thursday night, Fox News’s Laura Ingraham asked a victim in the attack whether it was “racially motivated in any direction.” Neither Ingraham or the guest noted the use of the racial slur.
Vice President JD Vance and other prominent Republicans have politicized the incident, using it as an opportunity to call for everything from replacing judges to increasing funding for police.
At the same time, Trump, Elon Musk, and others have used the alleged carjacking of Coristine as justification for a federal takeover of Washington DC. Last week, Trump threatened to “FEDERALIZE” Washington, sharing a photo of a bloodied Coristine on Truth Social. Later, Trump reiterated the threat and called for juveniles to be charged as adults. He’s holding a news conference this morning to announce some sort of takeover of DC amid reports that hundreds of National Guard troops will be deployed to the city this week.
"Somebody from DOGE was very badly hurt last night. A young man who was beat up by a bunch of thugs in DC,” Trump said last Tuesday. “And either they're gonna straighten their act out in terms of government and in terms of protection or we're gonna have to federalize."
Within minutes of Trump’s Truth Social post, Elon Musk repeated the president’s call to “federalize” Washington DC, adding details about the Coristine carjacking that, like a conservative social media version of a game of telephone, don’t quite add up.
“A few days ago, a gang of about a dozen young men tried to assault a woman in her car at night in DC,” Musk wrote on X, adding that Coristine “saw what was happening, ran to defend her and was severely beaten to the point of concussion, but he saved her.”
“It is time to federalize DC,” Musk added.
Police have said that the woman was Coristine’s girlfriend, and that Coristine got her into his vehicle as a crowd of about 10 juveniles were discussing stealing the car. The juveniles then allegedly beat Coristine. Two juveniles have been arrested, the Washington Post reports.
The two events — a chaotic, drunken brawl in Cincinnati that escalated thanks to a white man’s use of the n-word, and an attempted carjacking that appears to have randomly been carried out on a DOGE staffer — are just the latest incidents to be weaponized by the Trump administration. But despite the constant claims of rising crime and racist fear mongering about attacks on white Americans from people like Trump and Musk, FBI data released last week shows that all forms of crime dropped in 2024.
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None of that has stopped Trump, Musk, and MAGA influencers from using the incidents to call for the heads of Democrats, Black Americans, and liberals. Even the more mainstream Wall Street Journal has joined the online racial melee, with the newspaper’s editorial board blaming other media outlets for ignoring the Cincinnati brawl because it “didn’t fit the mainstream media’s narrative about racial violence in America.”
What the Journal and many others on the American right conveniently leave out is that one of the “victims” in the Cincinnati incident was hurling the n-word at the crowd, and that another white man looks to have been engaged in mutual combat. Further, none of the breathless right-wing outrage over Cincinnati makes use of the facts about racially-motivated crime in the United States, which, of course, disproportionately affects Black Americans. That’s according to Trump’s own FBI, which released data on crime across the country last week, showing drops in everything from property crimes to murders.