Bad news for the liberal crime-industrial complex – Americans have stopped murdering each other. In fact, the U.S. murder rate has just fallen to its lowest level since 1900.
In other words, the last time America was this safe was more than 125 years ago, when Teddy Roosevelt was busting trusts, and the Wright brothers were still repairing bicycles.
According to new data, murders fell a jaw-dropping 21 percent across 40 major cities in 2025—the largest one-year drop ever recorded. Robbery plunged 23 percent. Gun assaults decreased 22 percent. Carjackings declined 61 percent. Even shoplifting was down by 10 percent. Nearly every category of violent crime collapsed.
Naturally, the liberal media is pretending to be utterly baffled about the mysterious force driving this historic drop in crime across the country.
Axios reports that the decline signals a complete reversal of the “COVID-era crime wave” (i.e., the left-wing crime spree that occurred when rioters went on a killing rampage and razed American cities to the ground). CBS has likewise credited a “return to normal after the pandemic.” The New York Times, meanwhile, has declared that “no one knows for sure” what’s behind the “staggering” drop in the murder rate.
If the improvement in crime that this data shows had happened under Barack Obama, rest assured that the Times already would have published a 12-part Pulitzer-bait series titled “How One Man Healed America.” If it had happened under Joe Biden, we’d be told the decline was a result of the beauty and unity brought into the world by Hunter Biden’s majestic paintings.
But it happened under President Donald Trump—so the official media response is a collective shoulder shrug; it’s impossible for anyone to know what the cause might be, we’re told.
The fact that Trump deployed National Guard troops into lawless Democrat-run cities, sealed the border shut, deported an army of violent criminal illegal aliens, backed law enforcement, and unapologetically punished violent offenders—that’s all just a coincidence, according to the liberal journalist class.
Let’s recall where we were just a few years ago. During the Biden administration, Democrat jurisdictions emptied their jails, defunded police, legalized shoplifting and petty theft, and imported hordes of hardened, bloodthirsty criminals from the world’s most dangerous countries. Prosecutors declined to prosecute. Judges declined to sentence. Mayors declined to notice.
The result? The worst violent-crime spike in the modern era.
Then Trump returned, did exactly what he promised—enforce the law—and crime collapsed so swiftly that the media couldn’t spin a fake narrative fast enough to cover it up.
In other words, he did the one thing Democrats and the media insist never works: punishment. It turns out that when you lock criminals behind bars, crime goes down. Who could have possibly seen that coming?
If liberals still think this is just a theory, they should check out the country that already ran the experiment.
Nayib Bukele ran for president of El Salvador on the radical, controversial, supposedly “authoritarian” idea that arresting criminals by the boatload and keeping them in prison would reduce crime. The international left howled. Human rights NGOs fainted. Editorial boards declared democracy dead. And then something extraordinary happened—crime vanished.
El Salvador had been the murder capital of the world, ruled by gangs that extorted shopkeepers, terrorized families, and killed with impunity. Bukele declared war on them. He suspended the criminal-friendly rules that made arrests impossible, flooded the streets with police and soldiers, and locked up tens of thousands of face-tattooed gang members. Today, homicide rates have plummeted by more than 90 percent. Tourists are back. Businesses are reopening. Foreign investment is returning. Ordinary Salvadorans—especially the poor—can finally walk outside without fear.
The left’s response? Seething hatred bordering on obsession.
Why? Because Bukele exposed the liberal lies that mass violence is inevitable, that the root causes of crime are “complex,” and that enforcing the law is somehow worse than letting innocent people be butchered. Bukele proved what progressives never want voters to realize: living with crime is a choice.
That’s exactly why they hate Donald Trump, too.
Trump didn’t invent law-and-order. He simply restored it. And just like in El Salvador, the results have been night and day. Americans who had been living in fear are getting their neighborhoods and cities back.
Trump’s great unpardonable sin in the eyes of the progressive left is that he proved how simple it really is to stop the crime.
Bukele and Trump are despised for the same reason. They demonstrate that crime is not an unsolvable mystery or an uncontrollable force of nature. It is a policy outcome. And when the government chooses order over excuses, criminals notice—fast.
That was true in New York under Mayor Rudy Giuliani. It was true nationwide in the 1990s. It’s true now in El Salvador, and in cities across the country under the Trump administration.
The media spent years insisting that Trump’s law-and-order rhetoric was dangerous, that enforcing immigration law was racist, that backing police was authoritarian, and that deploying the National Guard was fascist.
Now that murder has collapsed to its lowest level since the horse-and-buggy era, they’re hoping you won’t connect the dots.
Sorry. We already noticed.
And so did the criminals—which is why they stopped killing people.
Mike Marlowe is the pen name of a writer based in Texas.
