To hear former U.S. former president Donald Trump tell it, the U.S. has fallen apart under U.S. President Joe Biden: the economy is failing, countries are emptying their prisons and mental institutions across the southern border and crime has skyrocketed.Biden, on the other hand, has claimed he confronted an inflation rate of nine per cent and US$5 gas prices when he took office, and boasts about his administration's job creation without telling the full story.
Trump also likes to talk about how low inflation was under him. Gasoline fell as low as US$1.77 a gallon. But, of course, that price dip happened during pandemic lockdowns when few people were driving. The low prices were due to a global health crisis, not Trump’s policies. His standard message has been that prices fell from their 2022 peaks without the mass layoffs and recession that many economists had predicted.
There have been recent high-profile and heinous crimes allegedly committed by people in the country illegally. But FBI statistics do not separate out crimes by the immigration status of the assailant, nor is there any evidence of a spike in crime perpetrated by migrants, either along the U.S.-Mexico border or in cities seeing the greatest influx of migrants, like New York.
A quarterly FBI crime report released June 11 showed the downward trend continuing, with sharp drops in violent crime in January-March compared with the same period in 2023. According to the report, overall violent crime was down 15 per cent, with murder and rape both down 26 per cent, robbery down 18 per cent and 13 per cent fewer aggravated assaults.
While it’s true that some law enforcement agencies didn’t provide data to the FBI, a change in collection methods helped close the gap. The FBI said the 2022 report is based on data from 83.3 per cent of all agencies covering 93.5 per cent of the population. By contrast, the 2021 report contained data from 62.7 per cent of agencies, representing 64.8 per cent of Americans. For agencies that didn’t provide data, the FBI estimates the numbers based on comparably sized cities.
“The radical left Democrats rigged the presidential election in 2020, and we’re not going to let them rig the presidential election in 2024,” he said at a recent campaign rally in Wisconsin. It’s a felony for non-U.S. citizens to vote in presidential elections — one that states have mechanisms to catch. Election administration experts say the number of noncitizens illegally voting in federal elections is extremely small, and audits of voter rolls in several states confirm that.Foreign affairs are likely to loom large in the debate as both Trump and Biden look to tout their leadership while criticizing the other’s handling of world affairs.