FBI Reveals Trump’s Crime Wave Only Existed in His Head
On the campaign trail, Trump claimed that U.S. crime was surging. New FBI data tells a different story.
Andrew Harnik/Getty Images
New FBI data contradicts President Donald Trump’s often-repeated claim that crime is surging in the U.S. and Democrats are to blame.
Violent crime went down 4.5 percent in 2024, while property crime dropped 8.1 percent, according to the freshly released report.
The trend was apparent across the board—every single one of the FBI’s reporting violent crime categories showed a significant drop: murder (-14.9 percent), rape (-5.2 percent), robbery (-8.9 percent), and aggravated assault (-3 percent).
In other words, during the last year of Joe Biden’s presidency, the U.S. became safer.
At the presidential debate in September, Trump claimed that crime in the U.S. was up and blamed immigrants.
Win McNamee/Getty Images
The data strikes a sharp contrast with the way Trump has portrayed America. On the campaign trail, he frequently suggested that the U.S. was facing a crime wave, casting blame onto Democrats for being too soft on crime.
“You can’t walk across the street to get a loaf of bread. You get shot, you get mugged, you get raped,” Trump said at a campaign event in Detroit last year.
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Trump has used the alleged crime wave as a justification for his sweeping mass deportation push—which was one of his key campaign promises and has continued to be a center point of the administration’s efforts.
“Millions of people let in and all over the world, crime is down all over the world, except here,” Trump said at the September presidential debate. “Crime here is up and through the roof, despite their fraudulent statements that they made, crime in this country’s through the roof, and we have a new form of crime. It’s called migrant crime.”
Confronted with FBI national crime data that contradicts his claims in the past, Trump has cast doubt on its reliability, accusing the agency of “fraud.” However, the FBI has been led by a Trump ally, Kash Patel, since February.
FBI Director Kash Patel has reportedly told government officials that Trump's name appears in the files.
Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
The White House did not immediately return the Daily Beast’s request for comment on the FBI’s crime data report.
Last week, the Trump administration fired the chief of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Dr. Erika McEntarfer, after the agency produced a jobs report that showed a slowdown in U.S. hiring.
Trump accused her of perpetrating a “scam” to benefit Democrats, while administration tried to spin the firing as a move intended to restore “trust.”
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