On Monday, former President Trump used an interview with internet personality Adin Ross to reach a large and mostly male audience. Much of what he had to say was familiar.
But one part went off the rails. It happened when Ross asked Trump what he thought about what happened in the July 28 Venezuelan election. Instead of answering that question, he used it as the occasion to describe what Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro has done to make his country safe and strangely holding up Caracas, its capital city, as a model of a very safe place to live.
Caracas is many things, but safe is not one of them. And as a political ploy, Trump’s claim likely didn’t register with most Americans who couldn’t find either Venezuela or Caracas on a map.
The former president seemed determined to return to a familiar political playbook in which crime plays an outsized role. And, as he has done all year, he linked crime to the problem of illegal immigration and a Southern border allegedly out of control.
Trump harps on crime and immigration because he hopes Americans will be motivated by anger and fear when they cast their ballots in November. That offers a stark and unappealing contrast to the politics of hope and joy offered by Kamala Harris and Tim Walz.
As Vox’s Abdallah Fayyad notes, “In each of his three presidential campaigns, former president Donald Trump has spent a considerable amount of time on the trail talking about crime, lawlessness, and public disorder, vowing to put tough policies in place to bring an end to the supposed chaos.” Fayyad writes that “[M]uch of his rhetoric focuses on cities, which he has claimed are ‘crime infested,’ ‘hellholes,’ and ‘cesspools of bloodshed and crime’ that are ‘falling apart.’”
Trump, Fayyed argues, “followed the mold of the quintessential ‘law and order’ campaign, drumming up fear about supposed crime, leaning on racist tropes and dog whistles, and conjuring a picture of cities that residents wouldn’t recognize.”
He offered another of those unrecognizable pictures when he talked about Caracas during the Ross interview. As Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz would say, it was just plain weird.
While complaining that Maduro has “released tremendous amounts of criminals” into this country, Trump said, “If you look at Caracas, it was known for being a very dangerous city, and now it’s very safe. In fact, the next interview we do we’ll do it in Caracas, Venezuela, because it’s safer than many of our cities.”
This was not the first time he had seemed fixated on Venezuela.
In an April speech in Green Bay, Wis., the former president said, “Crime is down in Venezuela by 67 percent because they’re taking their gangs and the criminals and depositing them very nicely into the United States.” That same day he observed, “‘Wouldn’t we love to have a statistic where crime is down 67 percent? Ours is only going in one direction,’ he said, pointing upward.”
The facts belie both of those claims.
As Politifact explains, “There hasn’t been a 67 percent drop in the past few years…. The Venezuelan Observatory of Violence’s numbers show a 25 percent drop in violent deaths from 2022 to 2023…..Despite that drop,… the national rate is still high compared with other countries in the region.”
In 2023, “Venezuela had a rate of 26.8 violent deaths per 100,000 people…. Mexico had a rate of 12 homicides per 100,000 people in the first half of 2023…The U.S. had a rate of 6.8 homicides per 100,000 people.”
Caracas itself is far from a paragon of law and order. According to Newsweek, it is “the third most dangerous city in the world, with 99.98 murders per 100,000 people. It’s behind only Tijuana and Acapulco de Juarez, both in Mexico. The first U.S. city on the list is St. Louis…which came 15th, with 60.59 homicides per 100,000 people. The only other U.S. cities in the top 50 were Baltimore…at number 23 and Detroit…at number 46.”
As to Trump’s claim about Venezuela depositing its criminals here, there is no evidence to suggest that it is true either.
Politifact reports that Venezuela’s prisons are not emptying out. Venezuela’s government, it continues, “also has no known policy of selecting particular migrants to send them to any specific country, including the United States.”
As to the crime rate in this country, Trump’s claims fare no better.
An April 2024 Pew study reports that violent and property crime rates fell by 49 percent between 1993 and 2022, “with large decreases in the rates of robbery (-74 percent), aggravated assault (-39 percent) and murder/nonnegligent manslaughter (-34 percent).”
“The FBI data,” Pew notes, “also shows a 59 percent reduction in the U.S. property crime rate between 1993 and 2022… Using the BJS (Bureau of Justice Statistics), the declines in the violent and property crime rates are even steeper than those captured in the FBI data. Per BJS, the U.S. violent and property crime rates each fell 71 percent between 1993 and 2022.”
Just looking at what has happened since President Biden took office shows a similar pattern. “The overall violent crime rate — which includes homicide, rape, robbery and aggravated assault per 100,000 population — fell by about 2.9 [percentage points] between 2020 (Donald Trump’s last year as president) and 2021 (Biden’s first year in office). It fell further, by about 1.6 [percentage points], between 2021 and 2022.”
FBI data show that trend continuing into this year, with “steep drops in every category of violent crime in every region in the first three months of 2024 compared to a year earlier.” Property crime also decreased by 15 percent in that same period.
And as Walz rightly noted this week, crime rates went up while Trump was in the White House.
Today, crime is nowhere near the top of the list of what voters identify as the most important issues. In fact, it is tied for 12th place on that list.
Only 2 percent of voters say crime is the most important issue. That is why Trump always links crime and immigration, which is much higher on that list, in second place.
But Trump knows that perceptions of crime don’t track facts about crime and that his voters are much more likely than Independents or Democrats to say reducing crime should be a top priority for the president and Congress.
So, the former president will use every opportunity to talk about crime, even if it means drawing unfavorable and inaccurate contrasts between what life is like in Venezuela’s largest city and our large cities.
That he would do so during the Ross interview was odd. While the former president insists, “They’re the weird ones. I am a lot of things, but nobody’s ever called me weird,” what he said about Venezuela didn’t help his cause.
The more Trump talks like he did in his rant about that country, the more that Americans will be persuaded that Walz and the Democrats are onto something and that they should turn away from what he has to offer.
Austin Sarat is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science at Amherst College.
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