MIKEY SMITH: 10 unhinged Donald Trump moments - and why his crime stats are even more dodgy
Donald Trump's last night announced plans to take over the police in Washington DC, and send in troops to fight crime.
It was one of the most provocatively authoritarian moves by a US President since the post-911 era. Or at least since the Covid Pandemic.
And it was all based on fudged figures.
We'll go through some of those fudges and some of the immediate fallout.
Meanwhile, Trump had a pop at Zelensky and made people translate TACO into Chinese.
Oh, and Liz Truss is back, and more desperate than ever to seem relevant in the US.
Here's everything that happened in Trump world in the last 24 hours that you need to know about.
1. Send in the Clowns. No, hang on - Troops. Send in the TROOPS.
Donald Trump last night announced plans to "federalise" the Washington DC Police Department and deploy the National Guard, and maybe other members of the military, on the streets of the capital, to tackle a "crime emergency" and "rising violence" in the capital.
Except that there is neither a crime emergency nor rising violence in the capital.
There are two measures of violent crime in DC. One is by the Metropolitan Police department - which for some reason doesn't include aggravated offences or felony assaults, the other is by the FBI, which does - and which counts crimes differently.
(MPDC is incident based - so one reported crime is one entry. The FBI pulls from the National Incident-Based Reporting System, which can mean an incident with multiple crimes can be recorded as just one crime.)
The MPD's figures put violent crime down 26% year on year since 2024, building on the previous year which saw a 35% reduction year on year since 2023. That's a 30 year low.
Even the FBI's method of counting shows a 10% reduction year on year 2023-2024 across all violent crimes.
2. Let's talk about Bogota
Then Trump held up a bunch of graphs on paper that show DC's murder rate plotted against other capital cities from around the world.
And on that graph, DC's 2024 murder rate (27.54 per 100,000) is shown as dramatically higher than other capital cities - including some surprising ones like Bogota, the capital of Colombia (15.1 per 100k) and Mexico City (10 per 100k).
Note: The actual figure for Bogota is 15.2, according to the "Bogotá, Cómo Vamos" quality-of-life report. But we'll let that slide.
For comparison, the national US murder rate is around 5 per 100k, the equivalent for Colombia is 25.4 per 100k, and for Mexico it's 24.9 per 100k.
So why does Washington DC have such a dramatically higher murder rate than places like Bogota and Mexico City - and why is it so much higher than the US national average?
Well, as with many things, it depends on how - and who - you count.
Washington DC's murder rate is counted from the city of Washington DC only.
The city itself is relatively small - with about 700,000 people. And the suburbs around it that make up the DC Metro area all have their own police forces, who publish their own crime stats.
Bogota's numbers are for the whole metro area - 8m+ people - most of them living in areas where not a lot of murders happen. Same for Mexico City's figure, which is based on an area covering 22 million people.
In 2024 there were more than 1,200 murders in Bogota - while there were just 187 in Washington DC.
The murder rate in DC is higher because it only counts the inner city, where murders are more likely to happen.
If you run the MPDC's numbers for DC, plus the suburbs of Arlington, Alexandria, Fairfax County, Montgomery County, and Prince George's County - you get to a murder rate of 7.72 per 100,000.
That's still a shade higher than the national average, but much lower than Trump's scaremongering would have you believe. And much lower than both Bogota and Mexico City.
Here's what the graph should look like.
3. Don't take my word for it...
CNN helpfully clipped together a bunch of people noting crime was down in DC. Including Kash Patel, literally during Trump's press conference.
4. DC's mayor kinda shrugs
Mayor Muriel Bowser just doesn't have the kind of fight that we saw from local officials when Trump sent the troops to LA.
In fairness, there's not a lot she can do. The law Trump is using is kind of legit. He's only supposed to use it to federalise the police for 48 hours at a time, up to a maximum of 30 days. But he's allowed to do it.
She said Trump's action was "unsettling and unprecedented."
But she also kinda suggested that if people were worried about him being able to do it, they shoulda made DC a state like they've been asking for for decades...
5. This is just the warm up...
Trump hinted that DC wasn't the only city he had his eye on for a provocative, authoritarian takeover.
Mentioning New York, Baltimore and Oakland as being "so far gone", he said: "this will go further. We'll starting very strongly with DC."
If you think this isn't a dry run, you're dramatically underreacating.
Or, as Tim Walz put it:
6. Alaska is Russia now
Many people learned for the first time this week that for a handful of people in Russia, Alaska is contested territory. The great bear sold the state to the US in 1867, but people still joke about it being theirs really.
Which is why it's pretty funny that Putin got Trump to agree to meet him there, because he can joke that it's home soil.
Anyway, Trump made that joke even funnier last night by saying he was "going to Russia" to meet Putin.
If Biden had done that...etc..etc...
7. It's what I do
Trump reckons he'll know whether a "deal" can be made to end the war in Ukraine within "the first two minutes" of meeting Putin.
Asked how he'll know that, he replied that that's just what he does.
8. He had another pop at Zelensky
Trump had another pop at Volodymyr Zelensky, saying he was "a little bothered" by Ukraine's leader saying over the weekend that he needed constitutional approval to cede to Russia the territory that it captured in its unprovoked invasion.
'I mean, he's got approval to go into a war and kill everybody, but he needs approval to do a land swap?' Trump added.
"Because there'll be some land swapping going on. I know that through Russia and through conversations with everybody.'
Zelensky has consistently dismissed the idea of "giving their land to the occupier."
9. What's Chinese for taco?
Trump extended his trade truce with China for another 90 days. Again.
He posted on Truth Social that he signed the executive order for the extension, and that "all other elements of the Agreement will remain the same."
Beijing at the same time also announced the extension of the tariff pause, according to the Ministry of Commerce.
The previous deadline was set to expire at 12:01 a.m. Tuesday.
Had that happened the U.S. could have ratcheted up taxes on Chinese imports from an already high 30%, and Beijing could have responded by raising retaliatory levies on U.S. exports to China.
10 Liz Truss has done an interview with (another) far right US podcast provocateur
Liz Truss sat down for a chat with the supremely awful Ben Shapiro in Hungary a few weeks ago.
And today, Shapiro has finally got round to editing and releasing this meeting of minds.
During the chat she managed to slag off the NHS, Isembard Kingdom Brunel, Shakespeare, Peter Pan, Jerusalem, Mary Poppins, Elgar, Pink Floyd, The Clash, James Bond and the Queen.
All in once sentence.
"The views expressed in the Olympic ceremony are not those of the average Briton," she said, lured into it by Shapiro having a dig at the NHS' prominence in the event.
Truss went on: "The problem is we have an elite that hates Britain, and they have done for some time. And that is the history of Jeremy Corbyn, Keir Starmer. They want to help the human rights of anybody who doesn't live in Britain but they're very reticent to defend our own interests."
There you go then. If you liked the opening ceremony, you hate Britain, says Liz Truss.
Oh hang on, what did Liz say about the 2012 Olympic opening ceremony back in 2013?
"Last summer's Olympics opening ceremony seamlessly combined Isambard Kingdom Brunel and William Shakespeare, Tim Berners-Lee and Mary Poppins."
Right. But there's no quotes from her since then where she properly gets behind the vibe of 2012, are there? Like, nothing where she says we need to harness the spirit of it?
Right you are, Liz.
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