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Donald Trump rattled off a series of statistics about crime in the United States, but none of the things that Trump stated as fact were true.

Here is what the fact checkers at Politico found about Trump’s claims about growing crime:



Crime: “Decades of progress made in bringing down crime are now being reversed by [the Obama] Administration’s rollback of criminal enforcement. Homicides last year increased by 17% in America’s fifty largest cities.”

Trump’s picture of a nation beset by violent crime is drawn almost entirely by a spike in murders and shooting in many big cities, but the official, national numbers still show such violence below where it was when President Barack Obama took office.

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Trump cites a 17% increase in homicide in America’s 50 largest cities in 2015, a figure that appears to come from a Washington Post analysis of data the paper gathered earlier this year. The FBI’s annual report for 2015 is still not out, but a half-year report out in January had murders up 6.2% nationally. Still, according to the official, full-year national tallies, murder rates have declined nationally under Obama from 5.4 per 100,000 in 2008 to 4.5 in 2014.

Trump’s claim that the blame lies with Obama is also a dubious assertion since the vast majority of policing is done at a municipal or county level. It’s possible Obama’s pronouncements on police-involved violence have contributed to some pull-back on the part of local cops, but it’s difficult to believe that the federal government is the key actor in whatever is behind the surge.



Donald Trump is spinning a tale of an America that exists in his imagination. Trump wants America to fall apart because that is his path to the White House. Trump blamed Obama for making the country more dangerous when the statistics and facts reveal that America is safer under Obama.

Trump can’t admit the reality that America is on the upswing under Obama. The Republican nominee is going to the negative extreme by proclaiming that everything is horrible. Donald Trump isn’t just lying. He is exploiting the reality gap between the Republican Party and the rest of the country.

Republicans were launched into orbit tonight on a rocket powered by Trump lies.