Trump Says Murders and Violent Crime Down Under Todd Blanche—What We Know
Newsweek · C · trust 46/100
0 Share Newsweek is a Trust Project member See more of our trusted coverage when you search. Prefer Newsweek on Google to see more of our trusted coverage when you search. President Donald Trump touted widespread drops in violent crime and murders under acting Attorney General Todd Blanche ahead of his confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee this week.
Trump nominated Blanche to lead the Department of Justice (DOJ) after former Attorney General Pam Bondi resigned in April. For his confirmation to advance to the Senate floor, he must garner support from the Judiciary Committee, where he can afford to lose only one Republican after the death of Senator Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican who served on the committee.
Not all Republicans are committed to supporting him, and some Republican members of the committee, such as Texas Senator John Cornyn and North Carolina Senator Thom Tillis, are viewed as potential swing votes. On Tuesday, Trump took to Truth Social to urge members of his party to support his nominee.
He specifically pointed to a decline in violent crime as a reason Republican senators should agree to advance his nomination.
“Under Todd’s incredible leadership at DOJ, Murder is down to the LOWEST level since 1900, and we just saw the biggest one year drop in RECORDED HISTORY. Violent Crime arrests are UP 100%. Robberies, Carjackings, and Assaults, are all CRASHING. More than 500 million deadly doses of Drugs have already been seized, saving countless innocent lives,” Trump wrote.
He added that the decline is “what happens when you unleash LAW AND ORDER on our streets, instead of protecting vicious Criminal Thugs, and releasing dangerous Illegal Aliens into our Communities like the Dumocrats did for four disastrous years under Sleepy Joe Biden.”
Preliminary FBI data supports parts of Trump's claims, and he is correct that violent crime has broadly fallen during his administration, but final 2025 crime figures have not yet been released.
The most recent data available comes from 2025, when Bondi was still serving as the attorney general, but data does show that violent crime sharply decreased in 2025 compared to earlier years, when the U.S. grappled with a spike in crime during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The FBI in May released an early look at its annual crime data, which found that preliminary data shows violent crime decreased 9.3 percent from 2024 to 2025, while property crime decreased 12.4 percent. The FBI noted at the time that the data was “subject to change” prior to the report’s final release.
Angelo Kevin Brown, a criminologist at Arkansas State University, told Newsweek the economy is a central factor shaping crime trends.
“The main factor that seems to be pretty well proven is the economy,” he said in a phone interview Tuesday afternoon. “When we’ve had good economies, we’ve seen the largest decreases in crime.”
Other factors include policies around education, health care and social safety nets to get people out of poverty, he said. Most policies shaping these trends stem from the local or state level, rather than the federal level. Many departments do receive funding from the federal government, which can play a role, but any funding changes under the Trump administration may be too recent for impacts to be felt, he said.
The decrease also predates Trump’s time in office, he said.
Here is a look at four of the claims made by Trump.
The White House has previously touted a Council on Criminal Justice Report stating there is a high likelihood that the homicide rate in 2025 would drop to about 4 per 100,000 residents, which would be the lowest rate since 1900 and the largest single-year percentage drop in the murder rate.
However, the FBI has not released the full dataset on crime in 2025, and no official data has confirmed the possibility, so whether this is true remains tentative pending that report, set to be published later in 2026.
In January, the White House wrote in a release that the report marked a “monumental turnaround", casting it as a major victory for Trump’s DOJ.
An early release found that murder and non-negligent manslaughter decreased “an estimated” 18.1 percent, according to the FBI’s early release.
Trump also pointed to violence crime arrests going “up 100%,” or doubling.
FBI Director Kash Patel told Fox News in December 2025 that across 17 field offices, arrests doubled during Trump’s first year in office. Whether that is true across all 56 field offices was unclear.
Patel told the news outlet the decrease was a “direct result of the FBI prioritizing taking down violent crime and reorienting the Bureau” to get its “focus off of Washington DC and give field personnel more tools they need to be successful in states and localities across the country.”
Patel also said in May 2026 that there were more than 11,500 violent crime arrests in the FBI, up 39 percent.
But that data point is a bit narrow—it doesn’t account for all agencies, just the FBI. Available public data does not establish that violent-crime arrests nationwide doubled. That data may be released with the FBI’s national report this year.
The FBI has released early data from 2025 showing that these three crimes indeed decreased across the nation last year. The preliminary data show that robbery decreased by an estimated 18.5 percent, while aggravated assault decreased by an estimated 7.2 percent.
It also found that motor vehicle theft occurred once every 46.8 seconds, but it did not provide a percent decrease from 2025.
This claim is accurate. According to the United States Drug Enforcement Administration, there have been more than 190 million deadly drug doses seized so far in 2026. In 2025, there were more than 369 million seizures, according to the agency.
In May, the FBI pushed back against a report claiming that Patel implemented policies designed to artificially boost arrest statistics.
The allegations stemmed from an MS Now report citing…
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