Crime

President Trump’s initiative to restore law and order to the streets of the nation’s capital is a smart political move. All Americans consider Washington “our city,” and we want it safe. We can see on the nightly news that it is not, and we’re not happy about it. If Trump can turn that around, he will get well-deserved credit, not from the legacy media but from the public.Trump and his party will reap a second major benefit, as well. If he can lessen the muggings, car jackings and armed robberies, if he can move the homeless off downtown streets, he will highlight the difference between his approach and the painful failures in Chicago, New York, Los Angles and other major cities, all of them governed by Democrats. That’s a huge political benefit, if he can secure it.

You can gauge the fragility of an ideology by the blind fury with which it reacts to questioning. So it is with neo-liberalism. Teacher Simon Pearson, for example, was sacked for suggesting that the jailing of Lucy Connolly – who said very nasty things about asylum seekers – was an example of two-tier justice and that, while her words were indefensible, she should not have been sent to prison. One could counter that opinion, but only at the risk of coming into collision with hard facts concerning sentencing – hence the sacking. Best to get shot of your political opponents, especially when he or she is demonstrably correct. Only by doing that can the ideology cling on.

El Salvador’s young and telegenic president, Nayib Bukele, has rewritten the rules. Term limits? Scrapped. Presidential terms? Extended. Runoff elections? Abolished. If all goes according to the script – penned and passed by his party in the legislature – Bukele will remain in power well into the 2030s, if not beyond. A decade ago, such a move might have sparked bipartisan alarm in Washington. Today, reactions are mixed – with many in the growing MAGA wing cheering El Salvador’s constitutional shake-up as a win of their own. This shift is a window into a deeper realignment in conservative foreign policy: one that moves closer to the unapologetic defense of national interest and drifts further from the spread-democracy-everywhere consensus.

When Bubba O’Keefe announced he was running for mayor of Clarksdale this spring, there was a mixed response. This dirt-poor, crumbling Mississippi Delta city is more than 80 percent African American – and Bubba is white. But so poorly had the current mayor, who is African American, been performing that Bubba’s supporters thought he’d be a shoo-in, and that the residents would buy into the mantra that he was Clarksdale’s last hope, white or black. Locals describe Mississippi as the crime state. And Clarksdale is the worst city in Mississippi. There are 20 times more murders per capita in Clarksdale than in New York. As Bubba says: “We only have a population of 13,000 and there are 19 or 20 murders a year.

A lot can change in a year. We have a new president, a new congressional majority, a new season of The White Lotus.  But what about crime in Washington, DC, the subject of my last piece for this magazine back in April 2024? Is our nation’s capital still racked with carjackings and homicides – or have we begun inching our way back to some form of public order? In 2023, Washington saw 274 reported homicides, making it the district’s deadliest year in two decades. There were also 959 carjackings and 3,470 robberies. Overall, violent crime was up 39 percent. We did a lot better in 2024. There were just 187 murders, a 32 percent reduction, while robberies dropped 39 percent.