In 2024, Trump Rejected Numbers Showing a Homicide Drop As a 'Lie.' Now He Is Bragging About Them.
While running against Kamala Harris, Trump claimed homicides were "skyrocketing," disregarding the data contradicting that assertion.
The Trump administration wants to take credit for what looks like the biggest annual drop in U.S. homicides ever recorded. As Reason's Alexandra Stinson notes, that boast is dubious for a couple of reasons: Many factors outside the control of any given president affect crime rates, and the recent drop continues a trend that began before Trump took office.
Another historical point further undermines Trump's credibility on this subject. During the 2024 presidential race, he was keen to deny the numbers he is now citing with pride.
"Homicides Are Skyrocketing in American Cities Under Kamala Harris," the Trump campaign averred in August 2024. The claim that "violent crime is falling under Kamala Harris" was "ridiculous" and "a lie," it added.
According to the Real-Time Crime Index, the number of murders fell by 11 percent in 2023 and by 14 percent in 2024. When Trump claimed homicides were "skyrocketing," preliminary FBI estimates indicated that the rate fell by about 13 percent in 2023 and suggested a bigger drop in 2024.
Based on data from the Major Cities Chiefs Association, Axios described "an overall 6% decline in violent crime among 69 cities during the first six months of 2024 compared to the same period last year." Axios "also found that the number of homicides in the 69 reported cities fell by more than 17% during the first half of 2024 compared to the [same] period last year."
The homicide rate was still higher in 2023 than it was in 2019. But based on data from 39 cities for the first half of 2024, the Council on Criminal Justice (CCJ) reported that "most violent crimes," including homicide, were "at or below levels seen in 2019." And the biggest spike in homicides, by far, happened in 2020. Remind me: Who was president then?
After contradicting the CCJ's numbers in 2024, Trump is bragging about them now. "A study from the Council on Criminal Justice shows that the murder rate across America's largest cities plummeted in 2025 to its lowest level since at least 1900," White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters last Thursday. "This marks the largest single-year drop in murders in recorded history."
Leavitt thought the cause was obvious. "This dramatic decline is what happens when a president secures the border, fully mobilizes federal law enforcement to arrest violent criminals and aggressively deports the worst of the worst illegal aliens from our country," she said. "The numbers don't lie."
Unlike Eric Trump's puzzling claim that his father's murderous military campaign against suspected drug boats, which began on September 2 and targets cocaine smugglers, somehow reduced fentanyl-related deaths in 2024, Leavitt's theory is at least chronologically consistent. But it implausibly assumes that, despite the federal government's limited role in fighting crime and all the other factors that might be at play, whoever happens to be in the White House when homicides go down must be responsible for that welcome development. By the same logic, Trump should be blamed for the record 2020 jump in homicides.
Causal explanations aside, Leavitt is now telling us that the CCJ's numbers "don't lie." A couple of years ago, by contrast, Trump was insisting that they did.
