Donald Trump is Determined For You to Believe that America Sucks

We’ve commented on it here before, but Donald Trump absolutely depends on convincing you that America is a total failure to have any chance to win. So in spite of the fact that, by most objective indicators, the U.S. is doing relatively well, Trump regularly regales Americans (including the insanely wealthy residents of Loudon County, Virginia) with tales of how badly they have it.

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Here, though, he may have outdone himself.

Now look, scaring people is a time honored tradition in politics. It has long been the tactic of the party that’s out of power to try to convince people that things are not as great as they could be. Otherwise, why would America need a change, after all?

What Trump does is an ugly caricature impression of that – just like his ugly caricature impression of being a conservative generally. Saying that American cities are worse than war zones and that you can’t walk down the street in America without getting shot is kind of far beyond the standard fare “the political party opposed to me has really screwed things up” rhetoric. You kind of wonder where Trump will go next – how he could possibly make America sound worse.

It’s also, I should point out, absolute horsecrap. Violent crime is down to its lowest level in decades per FBI statistics, as part of a continuation of downward trends that began in the early 90s. The FBI stats aren’t available for 2015 and 2016 so Trump apologists like to claim that if you look at selected data compiled from large cities, violent crime has been going up, at least in inner cities, in the last 12 months. Even if this data is true and capable of extraction nationwide, it would still essentially mean that crime had reverted to the historically low figures of the early 2000s as opposed to the even more historically low figures of 2014.

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Still, I know it’s probably too much for me to ask Trump to be factually accurate. I have given up on that long ago. I would settle, in the meantime, for him not constantly running this country down, especially in comparison to third world hellholes.

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