Ned Resnikoff
Aug 18, 2025
Trump’s claim that he ordered the federal occupation of D.C. in order to “stop violent crime” is, obviously, beneath contempt. As many others have pointed out, violent crime in the District is at its lowest point in 30 years. As he did with the occupation of Los Angeles, Trump is using crime as a pretext. For the armed agents of the federal government dispatched to these cities, the real mission is to menace the regime’s real or perceived enemies. That’s why you have DEA agents milling around the National Mall.
But if crime is just a pretext, there’s a reason why this particular pretext has been so useful for Trump. A large majority of Americans consistently report that crime is on the rise, even though, as in D.C., it is near a 30-year low nationwide. The news media consistently reinforces this misperception, and has continued to do so throughout Trump’s takeover of the District: The Atlantic ran a piece about the “plague of crime” in cities like D.C., and the Washington Post published an editorial insisting “many residents still do not feel safe.” On CNN, Anderson Cooper and The New York Times’s Maggie Haberman commiserated about how “there’s a crime problem everywhere.”
In a sense, Haberman and Cooper aren’t entirely wrong; while America may be dramatically safer than it was a few decades ago, it is still more violent than its wealthy peers. But crime in the United States is not exclusively or even primarily a big city problem. When Haberman confidently asserts that “big cities have traditionally had crime problems,” she’s describing the New York City of her childhood, not the New York City of 2025.
One wonders where Haberman, Cooper, and The Atlantic’s Michael Powell got this idea that cities like New York, Los Angeles, and the District of Columbia are still facing serious urban crime waves. No doubt it has something to do with the fact that all three of them spent their formative years in large cities that genuinely were grappling with violent crime epidemics. Maybe they, like Trump, view the external world through a filter that transmutes everything into a phantasmagoric, permanent 1990s. (That would also help to explain why they seem incapable of taking the Trumpism phenomenon on its own terms, instead of treating it like another manifestation of what came to be considered “normal” politics in the late 20th century.)
But I think there’s something else going on here too. A lot of people — particularly people who live in a cloistered world of privilege — seem to be incapable of distinguishing between actual violent crime and upsetting but non-threatening signs of social disorder. A mentally distressed homeless person is usually not dangerous, but visible poverty and suffering gives a lot of people a sort of crime-y vibe.
This crime-y vibe, more than any actual crime, forms the pretext for Trump’s invasion of D.C. That’s why, shortly began the invasion began, Trump warned the city’s homeless population that they would need to “move out, IMMEDIATELY.” It’s also why, after the invasion began, the right-wing publication The Federalist ran a whole article about how three apparently drunk homeless guys were blocking the door to their offices. (The same article describes U Street as “unsavory,” which I suppose is their way of saying it has fun bars and Black people.)
To The Federalist and company, high rates of unsheltered homelessness are associated with high murder rates because they’re both manifestations of the same underlying problem of crime and disorder. In fact, no such relationship exists: while high-cost coastal states such as New York, Massachusetts, California and Oregon have the highest rates of homelessness, the states of the Deep South have significantly higher murder rates.
Plus, the timing doesn’t make sense. The urban crime wave of the 20th century started in the 1960s and crested in the early 1990s; modern street homelessness didn’t really become a widespread problem until the 1980s, and the current spike in homelessness began around the mid-2010s. If widespread violence was one of the defining features of the urban crisis, then mass homelessness is very much a post-crisis phenomenon.
This may seem counterintuitive until we remember that large-scale homelessness is caused by housing shortages. Around the turn of the century, as violent crime plunged in large American cities, they once again became highly desirable places to live. White flight slowed and then began to move in reverse; affluent, highly-educated professionals flooded into the cities that their parents had abandoned for the suburbs. In the interregnum, those cities had destroyed hundreds of thousands of homes through urban renewal, and then, through a series of aggressive rezonings, made it illegal to rebuild that housing. So the rising class of high-income urban professionals found themselves competing against incumbent residents for a smaller and inelastic pool of housing stock, with predictable results.
In terms of its underlying causes, the current homelessness crisis is very nearly the opposite of the 20th century urban crime wave. It is a product of affluence, inequality, and political sclerosis. In the late 20th century, America’s large cities struggled in large part because their major industries and tax bases were getting hollowed out; today, they are struggling because their land use regimes and planning institutions are ill-equipped to manage rapid economic growth.
Which brings us to the real reason why Trump is an enemy of urban America. If cities like D.C. and Los Angeles truly were crime-ridden hellholes, they would pose little threat to the MAGA movement. It is because these are prosperous and dynamic places that they must be occupied.
There’s a reason why Trump’s Department of Homeland Security is posting Thomas Kinkade paintings on X. The MAGA vision for America is fundamentally anti-urban. It is all about an idealized version of small-town America: idyllic, racially homogeneous, and organized along patriarchal lines. To the movement, this vision represents the only reasonable way to live. Anything else is unnatural and doomed to collapse into violence and chaos.
Large cities are a living rebuke to this vision. If dense, multi-ethnic, socially inclusive communities are capable of functioning reasonably well, then the whole MAGA edifice is built on a lie. Trump and his acolytes can’t tolerate the possibility that these communities are not just functional but thriving and highly desirable places to live. They have to be war zones. And if they aren’t war zones now, they need to be turned into them.
I don’t mean to downplay the slow-motion disasters now afflicting D.C., Los Angeles, and other major American cities. The homelessness crisis and the housing shortage that caused it are both humanitarian catastrophes. But the solution to these twin catastrophes is fundamentally urbanist: it necessarily involves making American cities even larger, denser, and more urban. Many state and local Democratic officials have failed to move in this direction because they share some of MAGA’s assumptions about the intrinsic superiority of suburban and exurban living.
Certain journalists at prestigious news outlets appear to also hold those assumptions. But they’re wrong, and we should say they’re wrong. The very things that Trump hates and fears about D.C. are what make it a beautiful — and beautifully American — place.
Source (Archive)
Aug 18, 2025
Trump’s claim that he ordered the federal occupation of D.C. in order to “stop violent crime” is, obviously, beneath contempt. As many others have pointed out, violent crime in the District is at its lowest point in 30 years. As he did with the occupation of Los Angeles, Trump is using crime as a pretext. For the armed agents of the federal government dispatched to these cities, the real mission is to menace the regime’s real or perceived enemies. That’s why you have DEA agents milling around the National Mall.
But if crime is just a pretext, there’s a reason why this particular pretext has been so useful for Trump. A large majority of Americans consistently report that crime is on the rise, even though, as in D.C., it is near a 30-year low nationwide. The news media consistently reinforces this misperception, and has continued to do so throughout Trump’s takeover of the District: The Atlantic ran a piece about the “plague of crime” in cities like D.C., and the Washington Post published an editorial insisting “many residents still do not feel safe.” On CNN, Anderson Cooper and The New York Times’s Maggie Haberman commiserated about how “there’s a crime problem everywhere.”
In a sense, Haberman and Cooper aren’t entirely wrong; while America may be dramatically safer than it was a few decades ago, it is still more violent than its wealthy peers. But crime in the United States is not exclusively or even primarily a big city problem. When Haberman confidently asserts that “big cities have traditionally had crime problems,” she’s describing the New York City of her childhood, not the New York City of 2025.
One wonders where Haberman, Cooper, and The Atlantic’s Michael Powell got this idea that cities like New York, Los Angeles, and the District of Columbia are still facing serious urban crime waves. No doubt it has something to do with the fact that all three of them spent their formative years in large cities that genuinely were grappling with violent crime epidemics. Maybe they, like Trump, view the external world through a filter that transmutes everything into a phantasmagoric, permanent 1990s. (That would also help to explain why they seem incapable of taking the Trumpism phenomenon on its own terms, instead of treating it like another manifestation of what came to be considered “normal” politics in the late 20th century.)
But I think there’s something else going on here too. A lot of people — particularly people who live in a cloistered world of privilege — seem to be incapable of distinguishing between actual violent crime and upsetting but non-threatening signs of social disorder. A mentally distressed homeless person is usually not dangerous, but visible poverty and suffering gives a lot of people a sort of crime-y vibe.
This crime-y vibe, more than any actual crime, forms the pretext for Trump’s invasion of D.C. That’s why, shortly began the invasion began, Trump warned the city’s homeless population that they would need to “move out, IMMEDIATELY.” It’s also why, after the invasion began, the right-wing publication The Federalist ran a whole article about how three apparently drunk homeless guys were blocking the door to their offices. (The same article describes U Street as “unsavory,” which I suppose is their way of saying it has fun bars and Black people.)
To The Federalist and company, high rates of unsheltered homelessness are associated with high murder rates because they’re both manifestations of the same underlying problem of crime and disorder. In fact, no such relationship exists: while high-cost coastal states such as New York, Massachusetts, California and Oregon have the highest rates of homelessness, the states of the Deep South have significantly higher murder rates.
Plus, the timing doesn’t make sense. The urban crime wave of the 20th century started in the 1960s and crested in the early 1990s; modern street homelessness didn’t really become a widespread problem until the 1980s, and the current spike in homelessness began around the mid-2010s. If widespread violence was one of the defining features of the urban crisis, then mass homelessness is very much a post-crisis phenomenon.
This may seem counterintuitive until we remember that large-scale homelessness is caused by housing shortages. Around the turn of the century, as violent crime plunged in large American cities, they once again became highly desirable places to live. White flight slowed and then began to move in reverse; affluent, highly-educated professionals flooded into the cities that their parents had abandoned for the suburbs. In the interregnum, those cities had destroyed hundreds of thousands of homes through urban renewal, and then, through a series of aggressive rezonings, made it illegal to rebuild that housing. So the rising class of high-income urban professionals found themselves competing against incumbent residents for a smaller and inelastic pool of housing stock, with predictable results.
In terms of its underlying causes, the current homelessness crisis is very nearly the opposite of the 20th century urban crime wave. It is a product of affluence, inequality, and political sclerosis. In the late 20th century, America’s large cities struggled in large part because their major industries and tax bases were getting hollowed out; today, they are struggling because their land use regimes and planning institutions are ill-equipped to manage rapid economic growth.
Which brings us to the real reason why Trump is an enemy of urban America. If cities like D.C. and Los Angeles truly were crime-ridden hellholes, they would pose little threat to the MAGA movement. It is because these are prosperous and dynamic places that they must be occupied.
There’s a reason why Trump’s Department of Homeland Security is posting Thomas Kinkade paintings on X. The MAGA vision for America is fundamentally anti-urban. It is all about an idealized version of small-town America: idyllic, racially homogeneous, and organized along patriarchal lines. To the movement, this vision represents the only reasonable way to live. Anything else is unnatural and doomed to collapse into violence and chaos.
Large cities are a living rebuke to this vision. If dense, multi-ethnic, socially inclusive communities are capable of functioning reasonably well, then the whole MAGA edifice is built on a lie. Trump and his acolytes can’t tolerate the possibility that these communities are not just functional but thriving and highly desirable places to live. They have to be war zones. And if they aren’t war zones now, they need to be turned into them.
I don’t mean to downplay the slow-motion disasters now afflicting D.C., Los Angeles, and other major American cities. The homelessness crisis and the housing shortage that caused it are both humanitarian catastrophes. But the solution to these twin catastrophes is fundamentally urbanist: it necessarily involves making American cities even larger, denser, and more urban. Many state and local Democratic officials have failed to move in this direction because they share some of MAGA’s assumptions about the intrinsic superiority of suburban and exurban living.
Certain journalists at prestigious news outlets appear to also hold those assumptions. But they’re wrong, and we should say they’re wrong. The very things that Trump hates and fears about D.C. are what make it a beautiful — and beautifully American — place.
Source (Archive)
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