By Ryan Cooper
Copyright prospect
Thanks to Donald Trump’s absurd trade war, the prices on just about everything are going up—with one notable exception. According to a Wall Street Journal investigation, the price of cocaine is down by about 50 percent. Who says the president isn’t doing anything about the affordability crisis? Folks, we’re putting good old blow back into the reach of working families! A gram of nose candy on every kitchen table!
The reasons, according to the Journal, are a deal between the Sinaloa and Jalisco cartels, driven in part by both Joe Biden and Trump’s attack on fentanyl production, but also the recent diversion of border agents away from drug interdiction and towards mass deportation. “In Arizona, two Customs and Border Protection checkpoints along a main fentanyl-smuggling corridor from Mexico have been left unstaffed. Officers stationed there were sent to process detained migrants.”
Now, it’s not even clear that cheaper cocaine is all that big of a deal. It’s not good for you, but better that than fentanyl, which is responsible for a massive spike in overdose deaths over the past five years or so (granted, those deaths are down by about a third from 2023). But the influx of cheap coke is an illustrative example of how the most hysterically anti-crime president in decades is actually taking dramatic steps to create more crime.
LET ME FIRST CONSIDER TYPICAL STREET CRIME. For decades now, crime control policy has been dominated by a politics of vindictive punishment. As the violent crime rate surged in the 1960s through the 1990s, a bipartisan consensus was established that the best thing to do was violence: increase funding for police, reduce access to appeals, make prison conditions worse, make sentences longer, etc.
That consensus faded a bit as violent crime fell back in the 2010s to mid-20th-century lows, but there was a brief post-pandemic spike (that still didn’t approach the worst of the early 1990s), which drove Trump’s fearmongering. Sure enough, many Democratic politicians are also flinching away from any kind of police reform, and once again calling for more cops and longer jail terms.
A large body of evidence demonstrates that as far as police and courts are concerned, what matters for reducing crime is the swiftness and certainty of punishment; the length of prison sentence barely matters. What you need above all is quality detective work to solve crimes quickly. That requires durable respect in the community, because—contrary to the fraudulent garbage on forensic investigator TV shows—witness testimony is by far the most important kind of evidence for crime investigation. The whole War on Crime and associated mass incarceration, in other words, was largely pointless.
Detectives will not be respected when police act like invading colonial troops, regularly committing violent atrocities against city residents. It’s one reason why homicide clearance rates are in the toilet. (Another is an ongoing de facto work stoppage among many police departments.) That is why after the murder of George Floyd, the Biden administration entered into consent decrees with many American cities and police departments—to cut down on police brutality, which is both gravely unjust and makes crime worse. Trump, naturally, is pulling out of those consent decrees.
A more aggressive police force will translate into a population less likely to cooperate with them. Combine that with immigrant communities being afraid to leave the house at all, and suddenly a large population who might have information leading to crime prevention and arrest will not be going to the police. As unsolved cases rise, criminals get the message that they can do what they want.
Trump has doubled down on this by sending actual soldiers into cities. Obviously, the real point of this is to intimidate liberals, but it is still worth pointing out there is no chance whatsoever that these brief deployments will durably reduce crime, if at all. National Guard troops are not trained detectives, and even if they were, they won’t be there long enough to build up the required local knowledge.
Moreover, there is more evidence still for an alternative, far less coercive approach. Baltimore, Maryland, has seen its homicide rate plummet to the lowest rate on record thanks to a strategy treating crime as a public-health crisis, centered around social workers, community organizations like violence interrupters, mental health care, job training, youth activities in the summer, and so on. Police are involved, but they aren’t the centerpiece.
But Trump is not remotely interested in this kind of evidence-based approach, despite some vague comments in support from first lady Melania. On the contrary, Trump has slashed $800 million in federal violence-prevention grants to Baltimore, and many other cities. If crime goes up as a result, you can guarantee he will blame it on Democrats and demand fresh occupation troops.
FEDERAL LAW ENFORCEMENT HAS MANY TASKS aside from street crime, like stopping cyber crime, terrorism, hacking and espionage from foreign adversaries, and so on. According to CNN, the agencies have been tasked with redirecting resources from these efforts to immigration enforcement. It is “raising concerns among agents that the shift could hinder important national security investigations, including into terror threats and espionage by China and Russia, according to people familiar with the matter.”
“We would get calls needing 20 people tomorrow, which sounds like nothing for ICE, but that’s like an entire field office,” a former ATF official told NOTUS. “You would need to assign every special agent in a region to cover the ICE stuff. So then, no one is doing gun investigations.”
It’s not clear yet what effect this diversion of resources is having, or Trump’s political purge of top FBI leadership, or his appointment of, let’s say, oddly behaved loyalists like Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence. “It’s just going to take some time to see how that evolves,” Javed Ali, associate professor at the Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan, told the Prospect. “But make no mistake. Foreign adversaries are either launching or thinking about launching cyber attacks against the U.S. every day, either from an intelligence perspective or perhaps prepositioning malware in the event of hostilities with the U.S.”
At a minimum, the Trump administration has failed to stop an avalanche of criminal scams plaguing every corner of this country. The lead agency protecting people from financial scams, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, has been effectively mothballed, leading to a significant uptick in fraud and theft.
In the area of cryptocurrencies, Trump has gotten into scams personally—celebrating his inauguration by executing a flagrant meme coin rug pull on his own followers, and starting his own deeply sketchy stablecoin, which he is using to collect massive payments from foreign government–linked sources. And he signed the GENIUS Act, the worst piece of financial deregulation in American history, which not only allows severely panic-prone stablecoins into the regulated financial system, but also those not in compliance with American court orders involving human trafficking, terrorism, and other crimes.
According to Forbes, crypto is the main reason that Trump has earned $3 billion this year, at least on paper, for a net worth of $7.3 billion. It bears mentioning as well that Trump’s previous business empire was found in court to be a vast network of scams and shut down.
TRUMP HAS ALSO DISBANDED OR DEFUNDED various law enforcement programs dedicated to preventing hostile powers from compromising American elections, as well as general information security. Tom Warrick, director at the Future of DHS Project at the Atlantic Council, told the Prospect he’s concerned about “cutbacks we’ve heard of at CISA, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency,” particularly “whether they are cutting back in the dot-gov domain cybersecurity efforts.” Several previous administrations, including Trump’s first one, spent heavily to secure government websites with lots of nonclassified yet still sensitive information. “All of us who’ve been in this world know that you can take a trove of unclassified information and come up with enormously damaging capabilities against our adversaries. We don’t want that being done to Americans.”
Trump has also shut down several programs countering “influence operations” from foreign adversaries. Likely part of the reason is Trump’s resentment about the Russiagate story (which did indeed happen), and in part because he is obviously in great sympathy with foreign right-wing dictators.
Back in 2016, I was relatively skeptical of these influence operations—what effect could a bunch of Russian trolls and bots posting on social media really have? But after watching people boil their brains on Twitter/X after Elon Musk bought it—especially Musk himself—I am not so skeptical.
Studies demonstrate that these operations have “limited effectiveness,” said Warrick, but they do stoke polarization and distrust. “What they will do typically is take some truthful kernel or nugget and then then try to amplify itself so it gets in front of people who will react strongly to it … governments like Russia are pushing both sides of the narrative, and it seems that their goal is simply to make Americans angry at each other.”
As a report from the Center for European Policy Analysis details, both Russia and China “propagate narratives that depict the United States as a declining power plagued by internal divisions, racial injustice, and political corruption.” Why those countries would want that to happen speaks for itself—as well as why Americans should not. We have quite enough political hatred in this country already.
Then there is more traditional espionage. This administration has the worst information security in American history, with the secretary of defense discussing war plans on sketchy off-label messaging apps on his private phone, and then-National Security Adviser Mike Waltz accidentally inviting the editor in chief of The Atlantic to the chat. There has been no investigation or accountability for that scandal; in fact, Waltz was just confirmed as U.N. ambassador. I would be quite surprised if every halfway competent intelligence agency on the planet doesn’t have eyes on every high-level Trump official’s devices.
Worse still, Elon Musk’s neo-Nazi teens at DOGE have violated every principle of information security—and arguably several laws—in their efforts to tear the government to shreds, up to and including uploading a copy of the entire Social Security database to an unsecured cloud server. Thus far, there has been no accountability whatsoever for that scandal either, or a thorough investigation of what else they might have uploaded. “The potential for foreign adversaries gaining access to enormous troves of American personal data will expose government officials, intelligence assets, law enforcement assets, power, utility, water, and other infrastructure networks,” Warrick said. The potential disasters are incalculable.
All told, it would be hard to imagine a greater gift to criminals and hostile foreign governments alike. Top administration officials are putting themselves—the people who control the world’s largest military—and the American people at greatly increased risk of attack from criminals and spies alike. It’s as if the FBI, instead of arresting Al Capone for the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, sent him some chocolate and flowers.
