Americans Back Trump on Crime Crackdown, Poll Shows

President Donald Trump’s recent moves to address crime in the District of Columbia and around the country is not just good for public safety, it’s popular.

An AP-NORC poll released on Wednesday showed that Trump has received a sizable bump in approval in the last month, especially on the crime issue.

“As armed National Guard troops patrol the nation’s capital as part of an unprecedented federal takeover of Washington’s police department, handling crime is now a relative strength for President Donald Trump, according to the latest AP-NORC poll,” the Associated Press reported.

Across the board it seems like Americans are both concerned about crime in big cities and are happy with Trump’s actions to alleviate it.

“The vast majority of Americans, 81%, see crime as a ‘major problem’ in large cities—a concern Trump has seized on as he has deployed the National Guard to the District of Columbia and threatened to expand that model to cities across the country,” AP reported.

Oh, that Trump. Always seizing on popular issues that make Democrats look bad. The nerve of our president doing that.

Unsurprisingly, there was a wide gap between how Republicans and Democrats see the issue. A whopping 96% of Republicans see high crime in big cities as a major problem. That’s opposed to 68% of Democrats and 72% of independents, still very high numbers.

In addition, “53%, say they approve of Trump’s handling of crime,” AP noted. This seems to have given Trump an overall boost in favorability.

This popularity boost doesn’t surprise me at all. Most Americans simply aren’t buying the idea that crime is now marginal and of no concern. Crime and disorder in major cities seemed to run parallel with the negligence and malaise of the Biden years.

So Trump is turning this into his Rudy Guiliani moment, taking the example of New York City’s revival in the 1990s and attempting to reproduce that in Washington and other cities. That’s proving to be a winner with Americans who are fed up with the idea that high crime is just endemic, something we just have to live with.

And Democrats simply have no answer to the crime problem other than to make excuses, tell people that it’s is not a big deal (or can be handled by a laughable surge in social workers), or they go into kneejerk anti-Trump mode.

Here’s Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., hitting all three of those talking points on CNN.

First, Raskin claims that Trump cracking down on homelessness and graffiti in the nation’s capital is problematic because it’s a local matter. Of all the locations in the United States, the federal district is without a doubt the worst example for arguing that the federal government doesn’t have some kind of responsibility to maintain it.

And let’s say this is a “local matter.” Why aren’t the people in charge of the city doing everything they can to address it?

Then Raskin continued to dig deeper, saying that while crime was at a 30-year low in Washington, it has “always has been part of our history.”

Given the accusations that the District of Columbia’s Metropolitan Police Department was manipulating crime data, it’s hard to actually buy into the “30-year low” narrative as genuine “good” news.

Even in the best-case scenario, crime in the district is as bad as it was in New York City at its worst in the early 1990s. And anyone who has lived or operated in Washington for any length of time has either been victimized or knows someone who was.

Just a few years ago, a member of the House of Representatives was carjacked, making him one of the countless victims of this particular scourge in the district. Since Trump’s calling up of the National Guard, carjackings and other crimes have plummeted. Maybe that isn’t a long-term fix, but it’s a good start, right?

Oh, no, no don’t take the bait and talk about the carjackings, Democrats. Don’t even acknowledge them. Go back to talking about social welfare programs. That’s the advice the Vera Institute of Justice’s Insha Rahman gave at a recent DNC meeting.

Carjackings and violent crimes committed by illegal aliens are really icky, and by the way, these things don’t “matter to most Americans.”

I’d almost say that Rahman had to be a Republican plant, but the Left’s elite activist class really is this out of touch. And it’s fine that they remain so as their influence fades. They can’t just write off the problem, shrug at the latest video of a shooting or mugging and say, “What difference does it make!? Crime is down!” That may have worked a few years ago, but no longer.

To deny that there’s a crime problem in most of America’s big cities is to give oneself an ideological lobotomy; it’s like being mugged by reality and carrying on as if nothing happened. Some leftists can do this. Most normal people can’t.

So, Trump should keep the momentum going. Call out the unacceptable level of crime in our big cities. Put the bad guys on notice. And make crime pay. Show Americans, even in the bluest parts of the country, that high crime is a choice. 

The post Americans Back Trump on Crime Crackdown, Poll Shows appeared first on The Daily Signal.