'Lies are exposed': Analyst slams Trump over crime doublespeak

President Donald Trump ran as a law and order candidate who would crack down on crime — but that was always a farce from the start, Amanda Marcotte wrote for Salon Tuesday.

And she added his first week in office suggests he will in fact make crime significantly worse.

In a sense, she argued, this is only to be expected from a man who was facing four criminal indictments and got most of the key charges against him to go away as a consequence of running for office.

"Trump's lies are exposed, first of all, by the fact that crime rates fell steeply under Joe Biden," wrote Marcotte. "And now, Trump just spent his first week back in the White House doing everything he possibly could to increase the levels of street crime ordinary Americans may face. His most overt pro-crime move, of course, was literally springing a bunch of violent criminals from federal prisons with the Jan. 6 pardons."

Some of those pardoned defendants have already been re-arrested on other issues, and one was even shot dead this week while resisting arrest.

"Family members ofother rioters have expressedfear that their pardoned relatives could come after them, since many of those convicted had prior histories of domestic violence," Marcotte noted. And that's before even talking about Trump's mass deportation plans, which will both make nonwhite crime witnesses fearful of assisting police, and divert police resources away from violent crime, she wrote.

But it goes further than that, she continued. "Trump lies about everything, so we shouldn't assume he's sincere about wanting to reduce crime. Quite the contrary: He has every reason to think that he will benefit from more crime and chaos. Street fighting and other crimes create images that right-wing media use to terrify their largely elderly, exurban audiences, shoring up even more support for 'tough' measures and 'crackdowns' on people they don't like."

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A big chunk of the public, wrote Marcotte, will "never see the clear research that shows Trump's policies lead to more crime," and will only "see scary images on TVs and nod vigorously along as Trump claims that this proves we need more round-ups, more support for far-right militias and more abuse of innocent people who have nothing to do with such crimes."

Precisely this happened with the Black Lives Matter protests, she wrote — most were peaceful, but Trump and Fox News whipped up panic over them to justify a crackdown on political opponents.

The ultimate upshot is that "Donald Trump needs crime, so he can pretend to save us from it," Marcotte concluded. "He will clearly invent imaginary crime if he needs to, but even he understands that lies are more persuasive if you have pictures that seem to back them up."