House Speaker Mike Johnson flailed Friday when reporters called attention to his state’s distressing murder rate.
While appearing on Fox News, Johnson was confronted with a clip of California Governor Gavin Newsom name-dropping the Louisiana Republican, while mocking President Donald Trump’s federal takeover of Democratic-led cities.
“If he is to invest in crime suppression, I hope the president of the United States will look at the facts. Just consider Speaker Johnson’s state, and district,” Newsom said during a press conference on Thursday. “Just look at the murder rate, which is nearly four times higher than California, in Louisiana.”
Louisiana’s homicide rate in 2023 was 19.3 per 100,000 people, 380 percent higher than California’s homicide rate of 5.1 per 100,000 people, according to the Centers for Disease Control.
Johnson didn’t even try to account for the dismal crime stats.
“Again, Gavin Newsom will do anything for attention, he can name drop me all that he wants, he needs to go and govern his state and not be engaging in all of this,” Johnson said.
“Look, we have crime in cities all across America and we’re against that everywhere and we need to bring policies to bear,” Johnson said. “My hometown of Shreveport has done a great job of reducing crime gradually, but we’ve got to address it everywhere it rears its ugly head.”
While Johnson isn’t stupid enough to get on board with Trump’s tactic of simply pretending Republican-led cities don’t have bad crime rates, he seems content to completely ignore the situation in his own district.
In fact, Shreveport, which is part of Johnson’s district, landed at #25 on 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. Newsom has claimed that Shreveport’s murder rate is six times higher than the rate in San Fransisco, a city regularly criticized by Trump and other Republicans.
No city in California made the list.
The rest of Louisiana isn’t in the clear, either. In 2024, Baton Rouge had a murder rate of 36 people per 100,000, and New Orleans had a murder rate of 31 per 100,000. Baton Rouge’s murder rate is twice the rate in Washington, D.C., where the president has deployed thousands of National Guard troops, some of which were sent by Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry.
Newsom responded to Johnson’s Fox News appearance Friday by copying Trump’s social media cadence. “Mike ‘Little Man’ Johnson can’t even answer a basic question: why is Louisiana’s homicide rate nearly 4X HIGHER than California’s????? LOUISIANA IS A FAILED STATE!” he wrote in a post on X.
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