Lack of credit is a crime in itself. When it comes to the plummeting national crime rate, Mr. Trump is a victim of his own success.
On Mr. Trump’s watch, violent crime has plunged to some of its lowest levels in modern history, allowing voters and candidates to move on to other problems. As a result, Mr. Trump is not getting credit for tackling what had been one of the country’s biggest concerns.
Murders, robberies and other violent offenses have fallen sharply, while arrests of violent offenders, gang members and fugitives have surged.
FBI data shared with The Washington Times shows a dramatic shift during Mr. Trump’s first 20 months in office compared to the end of 2024, which was President Biden’s final year in the Oval Office:
The homicide rate has dropped roughly 20%, and violent crime fell 9.3% in 2025, the largest one-year decline since the bureau began estimating national crime trends in 1936. Robberies fell 18.5%, and aggravated assaults declined 7.2%
Even in Chicago, a city Mr. Trump uses to paint Democrats as soft on crime, violence is down. Chicago recorded 416 murders last year, a 29% decrease from 2024 and its fewest since 1965, according to the data the city’s police department provides to the FBI.
Shootings in Chicago dropped to 1,471 incidents, a 35% decrease from 2024.
As the numbers recede, so does crime’s place in the political spotlight. When the Pew Research Center asked voters to identify their most important issue for the midterm elections, less than 4% said crime, keeping it out of the top 10.
Oklahoma City-based pollster Pat McFerron said he’s not even polling on the issue of crime because it has dropped from voters’ consciousness.
“Crime has been replaced with affordability,” he said. “Crime got solved, and we’re a society that worries more about what our problems are than applauding the good things that have happened. No politician ever gets credit for the issue they solve. A new issue just takes its place.”
Mr. Trump is still promising to send a $5,000 “dividend” to every U.S. adult citizen if Republicans win the midterms, saying he will pay for the checks by tapping into surging investment in U.S. manufacturing.
Speaking of numbers, a number approaching zero is how many people outside 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue believe the checks will arrive.
The idea, which would cost the federal government roughly $1.22 trillion based on $5,000 checks for 245 million adults, is drawing scrutiny. Trump has described the cost as “approximately $1 trillion.”
Mr. Trump’s claim of foreign investment is nearly double the $11.2 trillion listed on the White House website and appears to conflate private-industry commitments with Treasury revenue that can be redistributed as government checks to Americans.
“Those are private-sector investments that will generate private-sector income, which could be taxed and used to pay bills. But there’s no direct flow of cash to the Treasury,” said Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a former director of the Congressional Budget Office and the current president of the American Action Forum, a center-right nonprofit.
The Department of Homeland Security wants to impose a $70,000 initial fee on foreign students seeking work in the U.S. to discourage companies from relying on them for cheap labor.
The department said the Optional Practical Training program has become so rife with fraud that investigators can’t police it anymore. The announcement came as the Labor Department announced sweeping new punishments against tech companies and other employers for laying off American workers and replacing them with lower-paid foreign guest workers.
Without the additional money, Homeland Security said it might shut down the OPT program altogether.
“Optional Practical Training was never meant to be a back door into the American workforce, a subsidy for cheap labor, or a prize for those who game the system,” the department said in announcing the proposal.
OPT has exploded in popularity after changes made by the Obama administration, to the point that Homeland Security says it has become a threat to U.S. workers, particularly in science, technology and engineering jobs.
In 2024, more than 165,000 foreign students were working in those fields under OPT, or nearly double the number of foreigners admitted under the more traditional H-1B guest-worker visa.
Three more noncitizen voting cases in Louisiana were brought to light by the Justice Department.
They include a Cuban man, a Mexican woman and a Nicaraguan man, all legal permanent residents whom authorities said registered to vote and cast ballots in 2024. Under federal law, only citizens are eligible to vote in national elections.
The cases are part of a new focus by the Justice Department to expose and charge noncitizen voting.
In addition to the three Louisiana cases, the Justice Department highlighted 10 other cases in Minnesota, two in Florida and one in Wisconsin, which had been previously announced by U.S. attorneys in those states.
All of those charged are described as legal permanent residents, meaning they have legal status but did not reach full citizenship, which is a requirement under federal law for voting in a congressional or presidential election.
Fifteen were charged with illegally voting in the 2024 presidential election, and one was charged with voting in 2022, the last midterm congressional election.
The Justice Department under the Biden administration brought 13 such cases over its four-year term.
