Trump’s targeting of Black communities is not a coincidence
For decades, he’s conflated non-whiteness with danger and crime.
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While announcing his federal takeover of Washington DC last week, Donald Trump spoke as though he’s a proud resident of the District.
“This is Liberation Day in DC, and we're going to take our capital back,” he said.
In reality, however, Trump loathes cities, and his rants about them are often indistinguishable from one of Travis Bickle’s unhinged monologues in “Taxi Driver.”
This was evident during Trump’s first term. In 2019, he called Baltimore a “disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess” and in 2020, he said Detroit was like “living in hell.” He compared the motor city to a “developing nation” during the 2024 campaign and warned that if Kamala Harris won the presidential election, the “whole country will end up being like Detroit.”
During a campaign rally last year in Philadelphia, Trump claimed the city was “ravaged by bloodshed” even as violent crime declined. The 2024 Republican National Convention was held in Milwaukee, and Trump reportedly told House Republican leaders that the city was “horrible” and crime-ridden.
When he attempted to overturn the 2020 election, Trump specifically targeted Black Americans for disenfranchisement and he continues to paint cities as corrupt hives of voter fraud.
Not surprisingly, urban voters have consistently rejected Trump. Kamala Harris carried Washington DC with 92.5 percent of the vote. (A key reason why Republicans oppose DC statehood.) In Los Angeles, where Trump also sent the National Guard this summer, just 26.5 percent of city residents voted for him. Trump only managed 30 percent of the vote in New York City, where his name is on buildings.
Even in swing states Trump flipped (and won’t shut up about), he lost big in cities, winning just 20 percent of the vote in Philadelphia, 33 percent in Wayne County (Detroit), and 30 percent in Milwaukee.
So, no, Trump’s actions aren’t about crime. They’re a further escalation of his war against America’s cities and what they represent. And racism is at the core of it.
The big (crime) lie
It bears repeating that Trump’s occupation of DC is based on lies about the city being beset with “crime, bloodshed, bedlam and squalor and worse.” But as even Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt acknowledged in a moment of accidental candor, crime in DC is at a 30-year low.
A recent Department of Justice report revealed DC's violent crime decreased 35 per cent between 2023 and 2024. Homicides dropped by 32 percent, armed carjackings by 53 percent, and assaults with a dangerous weapon by 27 percent.
Unable to deal with these facts, Trump lies his ass off.
“Sadly, what I guess the mayor did, but whoever it was, they asked the numbers to be fudged so they would show less crime. The fact is, it's worse than it has ever been,” he made up last week.
During the Biden presidency, Trump repeatedly lied about rising crime rates even as they declined from covid peaks that occurred while he was president — an inconvenient reality for MAGA and part of the reason they have so much trouble remembering who was president in 2020.
Trump could just declare “mission accomplished” on ending the imaginary Biden crime wave — it would be the easy (albeit cynical) political move. Instead, he’s terrifying his supporters as a pretext for military occupations. But beneath the surface of his anti-city rants is a more sinister subtext.
Trump didn’t grow up in the wheat fields of Kansas. He moved to Manhattan and began his real estate career in 1973 when overall crime rates, especially homicide, were significantly higher than they are today. The crime rate peaked during the crack epidemic in the late 1980s and early 1990s — a time when Trump was taking out a full-page ad in Newsday demanding the execution of innocent Black teens — and has steadily declined ever since.
But there’s another statistic that’s important to mention: The percentage of non-Hispanic white New Yorkers shrunk from about 63 percent in 1970 to just over 30 percent in 2020. The foreign-born percentage also doubled. The majority of immigrants to the US are Hispanic and Asian rather than Italian or Irish, as online bigots are quick to notice. NYC has gotten safer during Trump’s adulthood, but it’s also gotten significantly less white.
MAGA doesn’t hide its cultural resentment. After the horrific midtown Manhattan shooting last month, right-wing agitator Charlie Kirk posted on social media, “Was just in NYC all weekend with our family. Never felt safe. So many people in the city who don’t belong. Praying for all involved.” Kirk directly linked his sense of “safety” to the ethnic background of New Yorkers he seemingly could tell on sight “don’t belong.” His racist screed was especially appalling because the police officer who died at the scene, Didarul Islam, was a Muslim immigrant from Bangladesh.
Trump’s Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller howled last week that DC is “more violent than Baghdad, it is more violent than parts of Ethiopia, and parts of many of the most dangerous places in the world.” Miller might have ghostwritten Trump’s social media post claiming that DC has a murder rate greater than “Mexico City, Bogota, Islamabad, and Addis Ababa — Almost ten times higher than Fallujah, Iraq.”
This is all obvious nonsense, but note that Trump is comparing the nation’s capital to places where white people are not the ruling majority.
It’s a fact-free conflation of non-whiteness with “danger” that offers no constructive solutions and just functions as a justification for hatred and cruelty.
Propaganda for the base
Trump’s refusal to concede that crime is in fact falling recalls the Bush administration’s insistence — with an enabling media — that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. The only “facts” that matter are those that support the president sending in troops.
Trump’s stooges have openly rejected reality about urban crime rates going down. Jeanine Pirro, the US attorney for the District of Columbia, raged on Fox News last week that “I’m tired of hearing that crime is down.”
The former Fox News host remains more of a propagandist than a prosecutor. Meanwhile, Republican members of Congress are also lying freely on TV about observable reality.
Oklahoma Sen. Markwayne Mullin told the ever-gullible Fox News audience that he doesn’t wear a seatbelt when driving through DC in case he needs to quickly flee a carjacking.
Meanwhile, Rep. Tim Burchett says he’s too scared to leave his office when he’s in DC.
“You don’t want to go out on the streets at night in Washington DC,” Burchett claimed on CNN. “That’s one of the reasons I live in my office at night. It’s too dadgum dangerous, brother.”
MAGA commentator Benny Johnson insisted during a White House press briefing that reporters were the ones lying about DC’s crime rates. His only proof was anecdotal hysteria.
"As a DC resident of 15 years, I lived on Capitol Hill, I witnessed so many muggings and so much theft, I've lost track," Johnson claimed. "I was carjacked. I have murders on my ring camera and mass shootings. I witnessed a woman on my block get held up at gunpoint for $20, and my house was set ablaze in an arson with my infant child inside."
In a lengthier rant on social media, Johnson let the mask slip. He claimed he lived in a “Black neighborhood” where his family was “threatened on a near daily basis” because of their race. He said the city had “turned into a deadly war zone. Every resident was terrorized.”
When Trumpers like Johnson liken DC to Fallujah, they’re counting on their audience having limited knowledge of either location, and experiences that don’t go beyond what they see on right-wing channels that tell them cities are lawless hellscapes. Cities are overrun with people who, as Charlie Kirk suggested, “don’t belong” here.
Trump has never even pretended he’s the president for the entire United States. He’s the ruler of an overwhelmingly white sub-nation that seeks to subdue the country’s racially diverse urban centers. He made his intentions clear last Monday when he mentioned “far gone” metropolises like NYC, Baltimore, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Oakland, and said, “This will go further. We’re starting very strongly with DC.”
This fear-mongering isn’t intended to reach anyone who actually lives in the cities he’s threatening. Trump’s audience are his supporters mostly living in suburbs, exurbs, and rural areas. He’s priming them to accept outright war against US cities. In this case, it might be as simple as “they hate us for our freedoms.”
That’s it for this week
We’ll be back with more Monday. If you appreciate this edition, please do your part to keep Public Notice free by signing up for a paid subscription.
Thanks for reading.
RE: The White House posting unflattering images of Blacks who were arrested, could a good lawyer point out potential jury tampering? Those posts are also racist and disgusting.
They stopped even pretending that they aren't racists. Some are genuinely to-the-core racists, and some employ it because it is a useful tool in the authoritarian toolbox (and Project 2025 manual: how to dismantle a functioning democracy).