President Donald Trump is so obsessed with punishing Democrats that he’s pretending red states don’t have a crime problem.
While speaking to reporters Monday, the president balked when asked whether he would consider sending National Guard troops to Republican-led cities and states that experience high rates of crime.
“Sure, but there aren’t that many of them,” Trump said. “If you look at the top twenty-five cities for crime, just about every one of those cities is run by Democrats.”
In Newsweek’s recent list of the 30 U.S. cities (with at least 100,000 residents) that had the highest number of violent crimes against people, 16—more than half—of those cities were in certifiably red states. These included Tennessee, Ohio, Arkansas, Texas, South Carolina, Missouri, Utah, Oklahoma, and Louisiana.
Four of those states were among the six to send National Guard troops to Washington D.C., which was notably absent from the recent list of the most crime-ridden cities.
But while a state like Ohio has a whopping four cities on the high-crime list—including Cleveland, Toledo, Dayton, and Akron—Trump has set his sights on another city, in Illinois: Chicago. Illinois Governor JB Pritzker has been a vocal critic of Trump, and hasn’t flinched at the president’s previous attempts to intimidate the city.
Twenty-two out of 30 of the cities on Newsweek’s list were led by Democratic mayors. While mayors are not powerless to contribute to crime prevention, funding for public safety initiatives and other programs, the rates of violent crimes are primarily driven by gun violence, which is a state and federal issue.
Earlier this year, the Trump administration terminated 69 of the 145 community violence intervention grants awarded through the DOJ, cutting a whopping $158 million in grants.
The post Trump Finally Admits the Truth About His Takeover of Blue Cities appeared first on New Republic.
