FBI: Violent crime continues downward slide

The homicide rate in the United States dropped to the lowest it’s been in 75 years, according to an FBI report on 2025 crime statistics, which also showed overall violent crime dropped 9.3% last year, reported The Associated Press.

Experts note that national violent crime rates have been declining since 2022, and pinpointing an exact reason is difficult. They say multiple factors contribute to decreases in crime rates seen in the FBI report, which is based on data reported voluntarily by many but not all law enforcement agencies across the country.

“The homicide drop is historic and crystal clear. But right now, what’s driving it is about as clear as a glass of milk,” said Adam Gelb, president and CEO of the Council on Criminal Justice, a think tank based in Washington.

“Rates are falling in cities with very different public safety strategies, economic conditions, and political leadership,” Gelb said. “The consistency across the map should make us cautious about handing credit to any one leader, party, policy, or program before the evidence catches up.”

President Donald Trump announced the decreases in the annual crime numbers during a visit to a New York police academy.

Trump proclaimed his role in lowering violent crime rates, taking a swing at his predecessor and at so-called sanctuary cities, while touting what he said was his overwhelming support of law enforcement and his tough-on-crime moves such as deploying the National Guard in Washington and elsewhere.

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FBI fires analyst tied to warning of violent Catholic 'extremist'

Several FBI analysts tied to the creation of a 2023 memo warning of a potential threat from Catholic “violent extremists” were fired, according to their lawyer, the latest wave of terminations under the leadership of its director Kash Patel, reported The Associated Press.

The fired employees included four intelligence analysts and a supervisory analyst. The FBI declined to comment.

“This action is manifestly unjust, completely unsupported by the facts, and subverts standard FBI policy and procedure,” their lawyer, David Laufman, said in a statement. “These individuals deserved far better for the exceptional and faithful public service they rendered to protect our country.”

The January 2023 intelligence product produced by analysts in the FBI’s Richmond, Virginia, field office emerged as a political flashpoint after it was issued, with Republicans in Congress repeatedly citing it as part of their broader contention that the FBI during the Biden administration was targeting conservatives.

The firings are part of a broader personnel purge under Patel, a Trump loyalist who over the last year, has pushed out dozens of employees who either contributed to investigations of the president or who were perceived as not in alignment with the administration’s agenda. The Justice Department has engaged in similarly sweeping firings of prosecutors since Trump took office last year.

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Report: Public perception of crime often diverges from reality

Americans’ views on crime often don’t match reality — and a new report suggests those perceptions are shaped as much by personal experiences and economic conditions as by crime itself, reported the Pennsylvania Capital-Star..

The analysis, released by the nonprofit think tank Council on Criminal Justice, draws on decades of Gallup survey data to examine how people perceive crime and what drives those beliefs. The report’s authors found that, since the 1960s, public perceptions of crime have frequently diverged from actual crime trends.

Even during periods when crime declined, most Americans continued to believe it was rising. From 2005 to 2024, about 69% of survey respondents on average said crime was higher than the year before, despite overall crime rates falling in most of those years, according to the report.

Fear of crime has remained relatively stable over time. In 2024, 35% of Americans said they were afraid to walk alone at night — the same share as in 1968.

The researchers found that public concern tends to track major shifts in homicide rates more closely than broader crime trends. But overall, people’s views about crime and their fear of it have not matched shifts in crime rates for most years, according to the report.

Instead, the analysis points to other factors that shape how Americans think about public safety.

Household victimization — whether someone in the home has been a victim of a crime — was one of the strongest predictors of both fear and the belief that crime is increasing. 

Property crimes, such as theft, and people’s own experiences with crime were more closely tied to concerns about the issue than actual violent crime rates.

Economic sentiment also played a role. People who said it was a good time to find a job or expected to spend the same or more on holiday shopping were less likely to say crime was rising and less likely to report fear of walking alone at night, according to the report.

Political views showed a more limited effect. While people with more conservative ideologies were somewhat more likely to perceive crime as increasing, political party affiliation itself was not a significant factor after accounting for economic conditions and other variables.

Higher presidential and congressional approval ratings were associated with a greater likelihood that respondents said crime was staying the same or declining, according to the report.

Local conditions, meanwhile, were more closely linked to personal fears than to perceptions of crime overall. The researchers found that neighborhood factors, such as poverty and youth population, were associated with whether people said they were afraid, but did not generally influence whether they believed crime was rising locally or nationally.

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Analyst suggests spending "a lot" of money has altered the arch of violence

Jeff Asher, a crime-data analyst who frequently writes about the crime rates and runs the firm AH Datalytics, which powers the Real Time Crime Index, talked to New York Magazine about falling violent crime:

I would say that the thing that resonates strongest with me is that this has all been national in scope. It went up everywhere, and it’s going down pretty much everywhere. It’s happening in an environment where we didn’t see dramatic increases in policing, and we didn’t see huge increases in clearance rates — they plunged in 2020 and 2021 and have recovered since then, but that largely reflects the fact that we’ve just got fewer crimes, which usually means higher clearance rates. So there hasn’t been some massive improvement from law enforcement. A lot of times activists will talk about the root causes of crime — how you’ve got to fix poverty, you’ve got to fix education. We didn’t fix any of that. And the country is still awash in guns.

The trend started in 2023, so the “why” probably has its roots in things that happened in 2021 and 2022, because these things don’t usually change suddenly. So what are the explanations that fit? An article I wrote last summer focused heavily on investing in communities. We spent a lot of money on a lot of things, some of which had direct crime-fighting benefits to it, like the Department of Justice increasing its budget for grants by a billion dollars between 2021 and 2023 and 2024. A lot of those went to programs specifically designed to reduce violence, and a lot went to things that are not specifically directly tied to violence reduction but that we know have crime-fighting benefits: enormous increases in state- and local-government infrastructure, spending on streets and highways, on lighting, on neighborhood and social centers, on public-safety infrastructure. So a lot of money was available. We threw a lot of crap at the wall and we don’t know what stuck, but some of it undoubtedly stuck.

After writing that piece, I’ve been struck by other stuff that’s also plunging at the same rate. You look at drug overdoses, you look at traffic-accident deaths, alcohol deaths, suicides. And you look at something like carjackings, which I have a piece I’m going to run about in the next few weeks. Carjackings are down an insane amount. In Chicago, they’re down like 70 percent between 2021 and 2025. And carjackings are very specific, because they are, even more than murder, a young person’s crime. The average age of an offender is much younger than that of a shoplifting or a home burglary. So to see carjackings go up so much in 2020 and then plunge since 2022, 2023, suggests more of a societal change to me. You combine the drug-overdose deaths and the alcohol-related deaths and the murders and the carjackings, and it points to something that broke in the U.S. in 2020, and which is now healing. When I think about what’s driving this, it’s a combination of spending a lot of money on a lot of stuff, and some of it working, and that the thing that broke and caused all of this to go up is not as broken anymore.

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Guthrie's alleged 'kidnapping' for ransom is a relic from a bygone era

“A true kidnapping for ransom is a throwback to the Lindbergh time,” former FBI agent Katherine Schweit told the USA Today, citing the 1932 kidnapping for ransom of Charles Lindbergh’s son. The “kidnapping” of Nancy Guthrie is unusual.

These days, most kidnappings are typically connected to domestic or family issues, human smugglers or mental illness. Cases targeting wealthy or famous individuals, though uncommon, garner outsized attention, such the 1974 abduction of William Randolph Hearst’s granddaughter. 

“They’re what movies are made of because they're dramatic and scary. You don't see them playing out in real life,” said Lance Leising, a former FBI agent. “Now you are, unfortunately, in a horrible way for the family and the victim.”

Guthrie was first reported missing by her family on Feb. 1, when she didn't show up for church. Her disappearance sparked a large search effort in the Catalina Foothills community, perched north of Tucson, and a criminal investigation by the Pima County Sheriff's Department and FBI. Sheriff Chris Nanos later said Guthrie was believed to be "taken from her home against her will.”

Three days later, on Feb. 2, ransom messages were delivered to several media outlets, demanding payment in Bitcoin. But with no further contact, the family posted social media videos urging anyone holding Guthrie to make contact. On Feb. 5, the FBI arrested Derrick Callella in California, who authorities say sent text messages referencing Bitcoin payments to Guthrie’s family shortly after they publicly pleaded for her safe return. He’s facing charges including with transmitting ransom-related communications, according to a criminal complaint.

On Feb. 6, the FBI announced it was examining a new ransom message without providing further details. Tucson TV station KOLD, which received both the most recent and one of the first potential ransom note, said the new note contains information that seemed intended to prove that the senders were the same. Still no suspects have been identified.

The latest Guthrie family posted a new Instagram video on Feb. 7.

"We received your message and we understand," Savannah Guthrie also said in the video.

Leising, the former FBI agent, said that "the 'understand' comment is obviously referring to something in the note that we are not privy to." He said that could be a nod to the kidnappers grievances or directions on how to deliver money, while the “celebrate” reference could refer to a resolution of some kind.

"I do think investigators are going on the assumption that she is still alive, however, there are indications in the family statement that indicates they are concerned that she is no longer alive," he said.

It marked the latest in a case in which law enforcement has been trying to determine the validity of the demand.

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Philadelphia wants to replicate record drop in shootings

 Mensah M. Dean writing for The Trace:

Last year, Philadelphia’s record-breaking decline in shootings outpaced that of every other large U.S. city. That progress hasn’t slowed down violence prevention groups like Men Who Care of Germantown, Inc., whose volunteers are still making their rounds.

“It hasn’t slowed down for us,” said Executive Director Joe Budd. “We still go to the street corners because the guys are still hanging on the corners. We still go and have conversations with them and bring resources to those guys to get them working and productive.”

Five days a week, volunteers stop by schools. Off campus, they regularly canvass their community, chatting up young people at rec centers and on street corners, Budd said. It’s a long-term approach designed to continue the city’s historic streak of decreasing violent crime. 

“We’re prevention. We’re engaging them where they are, building relationships and bringing resources to prevent them from even thinking about picking up a gun,” said Budd. “I don’t think we can slow down, because you don’t want the numbers to rise.”

Philadelphians, from City Hall to the communities plagued by the most gun violence, concur that even on the heels of a 24.5 percent drop in shootings last year, anti-violence intervention and prevention work must not slow down. Many believe that the drop, which went beyond undoing a COVID-era spike in violence, can be explained by across-the-board collaboration among city government agencies — like the city Police Department and other law enforcement partners — and grassroots community organizations, like Men Who Care of Germantown.

Those on the frontlines of violence reduction interviewed by The Trace said that in addition to continued collaboration, key to driving down shootings this year will be keeping community organizations funded and working on stopping violence before it starts.

Their observations come amid the Trump’s administration’s decision to freeze billions of dollars in grants to local governments and slash more than $800 million in funding to organizations working to combat violence, drug abuse, and other social ills. 

“We definitely need a sustainability plan which means continuous and more funding. The organizations that are doing the work need to be able to sustain these programs,” said Angenique Howard, executive director of Unique Dreams, which runs an evening resource center that attracts an average of 35 to 40 youth a day in the city’s Frankford section. “It’s one thing to have it year-to-year. But we need some sort of concrete contract.”

Fewer shots fired

Mayor Cherelle Parker has ramped up community policing since taking office in January 2024, city officials have noted, which means that more officers are walking beats from the troubled streets of Kensington to east Market Street in the heart of Center City. At the same time, the city spent $25 million last year to fund dozens of grassroots community groups’ crime prevention initiatives.   

Violent crime since then has dropped significantly. Philadelphia ended 2025 with 222 homicides, a 17.5 percent decline compared to 2024 and the fewest since 1966, according to the Philadelphia Police Department. Philly saw 24.5 percent fewer shootings from 2024. There were 13.1 percent fewer shooting victims, 20.24 percent fewer robberies with guns, and 12.85 percent fewer aggravated assaults with guns.

So far, that trend is continuing into 2026. Through January 25, there were fewer homicides than at the same time last year. There were nine homicides, down from 13 at the same time last year. There had been 37 slayings on this date in 2021, the year the city recorded the most killings in its history, the data shows.

While a report from the Pew Charitable Trusts late last year lauded the city’s progress, it also acknowledged that parts of Philadelphia remain persistently violent. An analysis from The Trace’s Gun Violence Data Hub reached the same conclusion. 

“The greatest number of gun violence victimization occurred in North, West, and Southwest Philadelphia, areas which also have the lowest median household income, lowest quality of life indicators, and highest concentration of vacant land and buildings,” the report from Pew Charitable Trusts said. “So, while homicides are down citywide, men of color and residents in disadvantaged neighborhoods continue to face an outsized risk of violence.” 

Budd said such realities drive his organization to foster relationships with young people. 

“Our motto is, ‘Catch ‘em before the streets catch ‘em,’” he said. “If they’re in our path we can follow them, conceivably, from third grade to college. Once we build those relationships we can change their mindsets about gun violence and about how to deal with any type of issues that come up surrounding violence and conflict resolution. Those are the types of things we try to do to keep them from picking up a gun.”

Mark Wainwright, founder and CEO of It Takes a Village to Feed One Child, said addressing basic human needs — including making sure young people in low-income, high-crime areas have enough to eat — is part of the solution. His nonprofit, which he founded in 2017, is funded by the federal and state government. It Takes a Village provided more than 250,000 meals a month at over 100 community centers last year. He projects that it will provide more than 350,000 meals a month at 150 centers this year. 

“When children have proper nutrition their motor skills are better, their social and development stills are better,” Wainright said. “They are more positive in the community, and holistically, they want to do better.”

Word of the year: Collaboration  

During her State of the City address in late December, Parker seized on the Pew report’s findings that the city had the largest drop in homicides compared to 20 other cities.

“None of this is happening by accident,” Parker told an enthusiastic audience at Temple University. “Yes, we’re laser-focused on our comprehensive public safety strategy. … But it’s coupled with close and daily collaboration between our Philadelphia Police Department, our Office of Public Safety, and our community-based partners.”

Police Commissioner Kevin Bethel said in an interview that officers also recognize and appreciate community-driven work toward safety.

“Order maintenance is one of the biggest things that reduces crime. That’s when the community keeps things in order, they make sure things are being done effectively. They make sure that the block is being kept safe,” he said. “Sometimes, we don’t give the community enough credit.”

A five-year strategic plan, which is scheduled to be revealed in several weeks, will provide further guidance on community partnerships, he said. The last time the department had a similar report was in 1986, he added. “We’re at a great place right now, we have the wind at our back, and we’re going to keep pushing.”

Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner had a similar theory about the cause of Philly’s progress.

“It’s because of good coaches, it’s because of good clergy, it’s because of good neighbors, it’s because of good mentors, it is because of good community-based organizations, and it is because of people in government who actually invest in human beings,” he said at a recent news conference.

Krasner noted that police are making more arrests, thanks in part to technological advances including cameras, license plate readers, and cellphone geolocation. The falling number of open shooting cases has allowed police detectives to spend more time on fewer cases, resulting in stronger cases, he said.

Budd, whose group has worked with Krasner’s office over the years, said he’s set a goal to spend more time this year helping other violence prevention groups establish themselves.

“If they want to mirror our program, we’re open to showing people how to do what we do,” he said. “There’s about 22 schools in the Northwest, and there’s no way we can service all of those schools.”

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Violent crime touches college football team

 A UAB football player stabbed two teammates Saturday morning, hours before the team's game against USF, the university said in a statement, reported ESPN.

The two wounded players were in stable condition, interim coach Alex Mortensen said at the postgame news conference. He added that the team decided to play to honor graduating seniors in the last home game of the season, though several players understandably sat out due to the incident.

The teammate suspected in the stabbing was in custody, the university said. The school did not release the names of the players involved.

Daniel Mincey, an offensive lineman who transferred to the school in May, was arrested and booked on charges of aggravated assault and attempted murder in the afternoon, according to Jefferson County Jail records. He was in custody in Birmingham and appeared to be the only UAB player arrested Saturday.

It was not immediately clear if Mincey had legal representation. Attempts to reach family members for comment were not immediately successful.

UAB officials would not confirm that Mincey was involved.

The team's online roster lists Mincey as a 6-foot-4 redshirt freshman from Pompano Beach, Florida, who was previously at the University of Kentucky.

Mortensen said that once the team decided to play, the Blazers focused on their normal game-day routines. He also said counseling was being made available for players who want it.

The coach declined to share further details about the incident, citing the ongoing investigation.

The stabbing occurred on campus at the Football Operations Building.

The Blazers lost 48-18 to USF to fall to 3-8 this season and 1-6 in the American Conference. Their last game is Nov. 29 at Tulsa.

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Replace violence 'with an effort to understand'

 Elizabeth Bumiller writing for The New York Times:

On the night in April 1968 that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, Senator Robert F. Kennedy, then a candidate for president, told a shocked and largely Black crowd in Indianapolis that “it is perhaps well to ask what kind of a nation we are and what direction we want to move in.”

“Those of you who are Black,” he said, could be filled with “a desire for revenge.” Or, he said, the nation could try to replace violence “with an effort to understand.” It was considered one of the finest speeches of his life. But in the wake of Dr. King’s death, riots, looting and arson erupted in more than 100 American cities, and Kennedy himself was assassinated that June in California.

Fifty-seven years later, the nation is at another polarized moment after the assassination of Charlie Kirk, the 31-year-old conservative activist gunned down on a college campus in Utah. Beyond an ability to inspire passion in others, Dr. King and Mr. Kirk had almost nothing in common. But their murders both occurred in a country already awash in violent political rhetoric and partisan anger.

Americans are now grappling with the brutal killing of a young leader who is viewed through radically different lenses. On the right, Mr. Kirk has been lionized as an inspiration to a new generation of Republicans. On the left, he has been pilloried as a divider who attacked civil rights, transgender rights, feminism and Islam.

As people wrestle over Mr. Kirk’s legacy, historians and scholars say the lessons of this particular time will depend on Americans themselves. It is another test, they say, of the American experiment.

“Does a reprehensible crime against a political figure lead to more reprehensible acts, or does it remind us that we have to be able to live with people whose opinions we despise without resorting to violence?” asked the presidential biographer Jon Meacham. “If this is open season on everybody who expresses an opinion, then the American covenant is broken.”

In the immediate aftermath of Mr. Kirk’s murder, anger has pulsed loudly. President Trump blamed the left for what he said was savage rhetoric that had led to Mr. Kirk’s death and vowed to go after “those who contributed to this atrocity.” Democrats and Republicans in Congress lashed out at each other and are ever more fearful for their own safety. People who castigated Mr. Kirk and his views have been targeted and exposed by right-wing influencers. Mentions of the term “civil war” skyrocketed on social media platforms.

Gov. Spencer Cox of Utah, a Republican, has stood out for trying to turn down the heat. “This is certainly about the tragic death, assassination, political assassination, of Charlie Kirk,” he said at a news conference on Friday. “But it is also much bigger than an attack on an individual. It is an attack on all of us.” Mr. Kirk, he said, championed free speech, and “in having his life taken in that very act makes it more difficult for people to feel like they can share their ideas, that they can speak freely.”

Mr. Kirk did speak freely. He called Dr. King “awful” and “not a good person.” He described the Civil Rights Act as a “huge mistake” and George Floyd as a “scumbag.” He said that Islam “is not compatible with Western civilization,” and accused “Jewish donors” of fueling radicalism by financing “not just colleges — it’s the nonprofits, it’s the movies, it’s Hollywood, it’s all of it.” Democratic women, he said, “want to die alone without children.”

But among thousands of young conservatives on American college campuses he was a rock star, a gifted speaker who relished debating with more liberal students. At the 2024 Republican convention, he reached out directly to his generation. “Democrats have given hundreds of billions of dollars to illegals and foreign nations, while Gen Z has to pinch pennies just so that they can never own a home, never marry, and work until they die, childless,” he said.

To Brad Parscale, Mr. Trump’s first campaign manager in 2020, Mr. Kirk “loved America and was truly remarkable.” Mr. Parscale recalled that Mr. Kirk, the founder of Turning Point USA, the nation’s pre-eminent right-wing youth activist group, had come to him in 2018 to offer his help for the campaign. “But I told him, ‘Go do your own thing and you’ll help the president 100 times more. The campaign will hold you back. You’re bigger than this.’ And he was,” Mr. Parscale said.

To Dan T. Carter, the author of “The Politics of Rage: George Wallace, the Origins of the New Conservatism and the Transformation of American Politics,” Mr. Kirk was a dark force. His assassination, he said, “is a terrible thing for America, but I don’t think we gain anything by embracing him as some kind of open-minded individual who strengthened democracy.”

Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington, who angered Mr. Trump when she asked him the day after his second inauguration to “have mercy” on immigrants and L.G.B.T.Q. people, said rage from those anguished over Mr. Kirk’s death was to be expected.

“Public grief is necessary and this is a time for those who loved and admired Charlie Kirk to grieve and to grieve publicly,” she said. “For those who were hurt or aggrieved by his positions, I think this is a time for us to be gracious, and allow grief to be expressed. And at the same time, not to be surprised that other emotions are also communicated.”

When someone dies, she said, “we try to focus on the good, to the point that some people say, ‘I don’t recognize the man who is being eulogized.’ But I hear that from a son speaking about his father. I’ve been in those rooms. If that happens in family life, why would we be surprised if it happens in our national life with a public figure? Can’t we be gracious about that too?”

Dannagal Goldthwaite Young, a professor of communications at the University of Delaware who researches media psychology and public opinion, said she had noticed a restraint in mainstream media reporting about Mr. Kirk’s death.

“I think there is a recognition that this moment is so important, and this country is such a tinderbox, that people who are in media and journalism, especially those on the left, are aware that they have a responsibility to take the temperature down. And I think that’s a very good thing in terms of democratic health.”

But she said she thought some things had gotten lost, notably that people who praised Mr. Kirk for civility were confusing the term with politeness. “Charlie Kirk was polite, which is about your mode of discourse,” she said. In her opinion, he was not civil because, she said, he excluded certain groups from the public sphere.

Despite the vitriol of the moment, Professor Young said she was an optimist, thanks in part to what she has learned from public opinion research. “I know what people really want. Americans are sickened by these moments. By and large, Americans reject political violence.”

On Friday, after announcing the arrest of the man suspected of killing Mr. Kirk, Mr. Cox made an appeal to young people. Some of them loved the young activist, he said, and some of them hated him.

For his part, Mr. Kirk would say, “Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much,” the governor recalled.

“To my young friends out there, you are inheriting a country where politics feels like rage,” Mr. Cox said. “It feels like rage is the only option, but, through those words, we have a reminder that we can choose a different path.”

“Your generation,” he added, “has an opportunity to build a culture that is very different than what we are suffering through right now.”

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Budget cuts cause chaos for criminal justice practitioners

 From The Marshall Project:

The cuts have caused chaos in criminal justice grantmaking, creating a perception that the process is increasingly aligned with President Donald Trump and the Project 2025 agenda — even as some decisions contradict the administration’s own stated goals.

“We have seen the Department of Justice weaponized to be in service of President Trump's political agenda and weaponized to go after his opponents and critics and enemies,” Insha Rahman, vice president of advocacy and partnerships at the Vera Institute of Justice, said.

DOJ funding under the second Trump administration now serves the president’s agenda of mass deportation and a “law and order” approach to reducing crime, Rahman said. The DOJ terminated $5 million in outstanding funds to Vera, who, for 64 years, has run on a platform of criminal justice reform achieved by research. Rahman said the nonprofit had unwavering support from the federal government in the past. Now, Vera is among those organizations that sued to reinstate the funding.

In addition to grassroots anti-violence nonprofits, local police departments, prosecutors and courts, state departments of corrections, national criminal justice nonprofits and researchers had to pause or scale back programs, find other sources of funding, leave positions open or lay off staff. Equal Justice USA (EJUSA), a national nonprofit whose work included funding grassroots organizations supporting victims of violent crime or working to prevent violence also shut down.

“The opportunity to support a President’s agenda may be greater through OJP grant funding than it is through any of the federal government’s other grant-making components,” Gene Hamilton, a DOJ official during Trump’s first administration, wrote in the chapter about the department in Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership.

Since its creation in 1984, OJP has aimed to make the federal government a major supporter of state and local governments’ efforts to reduce crime, often through research, evaluation and development — and grants to encourage new programs, or to support promising models. The office is responsible for grants that transfer billions of federal dollars to state and local agencies making up the criminal justice system, as well as research and nonprofit organizations.

OJP provides site-based grants, which fund local governments or nonprofits to implement programs in particular places, research grants to study the effectiveness of programs, as well as training and technical assistance grants that share expertise to help local programs best use their funding. Training and technical assistance grants, often to national nonprofits like EJUSA or Vera, were the hardest hit in the April cuts. They accounted for more than $578 million in original funds, the Council on Criminal Justice found.

The Justice Department told grant recipients that were terminated that their work “no longer effectuates the program goals or agency priorities.” A termination letter reviewed by The Marshall Project said the department was focusing on direct support and coordination for law enforcement, “combatting violent crime”, “protecting American children,” and supporting victims of trafficking and sexual assault.

However, many of the grant cuts were in these areas. While police departments were not the primary recipients of terminated grants, the Justice Department ended grants aimed at supporting police. The department ended a grant that expanded police officer safety wellness training as part of a broader police mental health and wellness initiative. It also terminated a training and technical assistance grant to help rural law enforcement agencies implement plans to reduce violence. Beyond technical assistance, that grant also funded a few small, focused agency programs to confront violent crime problems.

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Gun industry found 'positive feelings' among gun owners to reform

 In 2019, with the horrors of the Parkland mass shooting still fresh in most Americans’ minds, the gun industry funded a study to “determine the most effective ways of communicating with the American public about the benefits of firearm ownership,” reported The Trace/Rolling Stone.                                  

Its findings, which were not shared with the public, indicated that Americans who support gun ownership could be persuaded by the value of reforms that are vigorously opposed by the gun industry, gun rights groups, and Republican lawmakers. Those reforms include universal background checks, red flag laws, and even a gun registry, which vocal gun rights advocates have falsely claimed made the Holocaust possible.

The study, titled “Communicating With The American Public About Firearm Ownership,” was commissioned by the National Shooting Sports Foundation, a nonprofit that serves as the gun industry’s trade group, founded to ensure the survival of its dues-paying members, which include firearms manufacturers, retailers, and ranges. An online survey administered to more than 4,000 Americans tested the power of 24 pro-gun and 24 anti-gun messages. The respondents were divided into multiple categories, including those who had a “positive feeling” about gun ownership.

While the study does not cite Parkland or any mass shooting as a reason for its undertaking, it was conducted at a moment when substantial reforms seemed possible. The indiscriminate killing of students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School had galvanized the nation in a manner not seen since Newtown, and the pressure for regulation and accountability was high. Many young Americans, in particular, who had come of age as mass shootings became commonplace, held a negative view of firearms, according to industry research, and that posed a problem for future business. There was a need, it seemed, to find the most resonant ways to convey the value of gun ownership.  

“While the sports shooting industry devotes substantial funding and effort to communications initiatives to boost participation in and support for sport shooting and firearms,” the study notes, “little reliable data exists indicating which messages and communications themes work best.” 

The Trace and Rolling Stone obtained a copy of the study for an ongoing series that seeks to unearth what the gun industry conceals about its customers and practices from public view. The NSSF declined to provide a comment for this story.

On Wednesday, August 27, a 23-year-old shooter, who legally purchased three firearms recovered by law enforcement, opened fire at a Catholic school in Minneapolis, murdering two children and injuring 14 more before taking their own life. The setting and the ages of the victims evoked the 2022 massacre in Uvalde, Texas. That year, President Joe Biden signed the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act into law, a gun bill that contained politically safe reforms, such as the allocation of funds for mental health resources and school safety. 

After decades of congressional gridlock on the issue, the package was hailed as an epic breakthrough, a valiant example of bipartisan compromise that still mostly relied on Democrats for passage. The NSSF study, then, raises a key question: Why have Republican lawmakers largely stood against more significant reforms, let alone any reform at all? As the study indicates, many people with a favorable view of gun ownership appear open to going further than the lawmakers and special interests who represent them.

For people who the study says have a “positive feeling” about gun ownership, the study ranks the top five arguments for and against it. The top arguments in favor almost all revolve around rights, beginning with “Self-defense is a basic right,” followed by “Americans have the right to own a gun,” “It’s people’s right as Americans to own a gun,” and “Gun ownership is protected by the Constitution.” The remaining argument, which came in at No. 3, states, “Owning and training with a firearm teaches important skills, including responsibility, accuracy, safe gun handling, self-defense, and strategies to avoid dangerous situations.”

When told to rank the “most effective arguments against firearm ownership,” these same respondents chose policies that the gun industry and Republican lawmakers actively oppose. The argument the group found to be most effective is: “Universal background checks for gun sales and transactions are supported by approximately 85 percent of Americans.” 

Other statements deemed highly effective by these respondents included “Guns should be licensed just like cars,” “State red flag laws to remove guns from those who show warning signs of violence keep guns out of the hands of those who would harm themselves or others,” “Gun violence is an epidemic in the U.S.,” and “Common sense gun laws to close loopholes in current gun laws will save lives and prevent gun violence.”

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Autocracy 101: 'Mortal danger and unbridled chaos'

 Moustafa Bayoumi of The Guardian writes:

A key chapter in the fascist playbook has always been to convince the public that it is living in such a state of mortal danger and unbridled chaos that the only chance of survival is to cede individual rights to the determined will of the Dear Leader. That’s why fascist leaders have constantly demanded that their populations venerate all violence performed in the service of the state and revere the apparatuses of state violence, such as police forces and the military. In this scenario, state violence is not only necessary for the nation’s survival. State violence is understood as even beautiful, something the public can and must believe in.

Buying into state violence this way produces something historian Robert Paxton has called a “mobilizing passion”. In his book The Anatomy of Fascism, Paxton described how “the beauty of violence and the efficacy of will” is produced and then mobilized by fascists by creating “a sense of overwhelming crisis beyond the reach of traditional solutions”. In other words, there’s always a grave, existential threat lurking around every corner, and only fascist violence can restore order to a lawless world. To the fascist, as Umberto Eco once put it, “life is a permanent war”.

Enter Donald Trump. Whether it’s an existential threat of “wokeness” run amok in American universities, or the extraordinary danger of unauthorized immigrants picking our vegetables, Trump is prepared to battle everyone and everything, including his own windmills, to restore the country to some illusory past glory that we are all supposed to believe in, and be willing to sacrifice ourselves for.

But the sad truth is that many, if not most, of Trump’s justifications for his policies, are unsurprisingly based on bald-faced lies or gross exaggerations simply to further his pursuit of absolute power. Yet it doesn’t seem to matter. With each new announcement, Trump continues to prove how excellent he is at crafting the illusion of problems where there basically are none and leading his followers down an often-violent path of retribution. (Remember January 6, DC’s most violent day in recent history?) By doing so, he seeks to constantly expand his authority while also deflecting from all the substantial problems that are staring him in the face. And these problems are not insignificant. Think of the Jeffrey Epstein scandal or the continuation of global conflicts that he promised months ago he would uniquely be able to end.

The federal takeover of the Washington DC police department, announced with loud fanfare by Trump on Monday, is the latest example of this phenomenon. About 800 national guard troops will be deployed in the nation’s capital because, according to the president, “our capital city has been overtaken by violent gangs and bloodthirsty criminals, roving mobs of wild youth, drugged-out maniacs, and homeless people.”

This does sound rather frightening. Fortunately, it’s not true. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to matter.

First, the facts. Crime in DC is at historic lows. “Total violent crime for 2024 in the District of Columbia is down 35% from 2023 and is the lowest it has been in over 30 years,” the justice department announced earlier this year. And crime numbers for 2025 are even better, substantially lower than 2024. Violent crime in 2025 is down 26% compared with 2024.

The DC council understands this. The council responded to Trump’s announcement with an angry joint statement: “This is a manufactured intrusion on local authority. Violent crime in the District is at the lowest rates we’ve seen in 30 years. Federalizing the DC police is unwarranted because there is no Federal emergency. Further, the National Guard has no public safety training or knowledge of local laws. The Guard’s role does not include investigating or solving crimes in the District. Calling out the National Guard is an unnecessary deployment with no real mission.”

Such facts ought to matter. So why don’t they to Trump?

Facts don’t matter for Trump because facts have always operated as nothing more than an inconvenience for him. Just ask Erika McEntarfer, former commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics. She was recently fired by Trump after accurately reporting employment statistics, and those specific numbers contradicted Trump and his policies. But with every new policy enacted by this administration, Trump’s fact-free worldview becomes a lot more worrisome.

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FBI: Violent crime fell 4.5% in 2024--Homicide alone down 15%

Violent crime in the United States fell 4.5% in 2024, according to a new FBI report, while property crime dropped 8.1% from the previous year, reported Pennsylvania Capital-Star.

The declines continue a trend seen since crime surged during the COVID-19 pandemic, when homicides jumped nearly 30% in 2020 — one of the largest one-year increases since the FBI began keeping records in 1930. By 2022, violent crime had fallen close to pre-pandemic levels.

Homicides, which the FBI classifies as murder and nonnegligent manslaughter, dropped nearly 15% in 2024. Reports of other violent offenses also decreased, including rape by 5.2%, robbery by 8.9% and aggravated assault by 3%.

Property crime also fell across all major categories, with motor vehicle theft down 18.6%, burglary down 8.6% and larceny-theft down 5.5%. Reported hate crimes decreased 1.5% from the previous year.

The 2024 report draws on submissions from 16,675 law enforcement agencies — 2.1% more than last year — representing more than 95% of the U.S. population. Every city agency serving a population of 1 million or more people provided a full year of data. Participation in the FBI’s crime data collection is voluntary, and the data is based on crimes reported to police.

About 75% of participating agencies submitted information through the FBI’s new, more detailed National Incident-Based Reporting System, or NIBRS, which covered 87% of the population.

The data release marks a shift from recent years when participation lagged following the FBI’s 2021 transition to the new system, which required many law enforcement agencies to invest in training and technology upgrades. In 2021, national reporting rates fell below 70% for the first time in two decades, forcing the FBI to estimate results for many jurisdictions.

The FBI’s crime trends report also includes new law enforcement safety data. Sixty-four officers were feloniously killed in the line of duty in 2024, 43 officers were accidentally killed and 85,730 officers were assaulted.

Although the FBI’s 2024 report is a year behind, it aligns with other crime trend reports. The Council on Criminal Justice, a nonpartisan think tank, recently found that homicides and other serious offenses, including gun assaults and carjackings, fell in the first half of 2025 across 42 major cities compared to the same period in 2024.

To read more CLICK HERE

Crime rates fell considerably in the first six months of 2025

Crime almost certainly fell considerably in the United States in the first six months of 2025, reported Jeff-alytics. The decline in crime that began in 2023 and picked up steam in 2024 has accelerated even faster so far in 2025. Both violent and property crime likely fell with large drops in both murder and motor vehicle theft leading the way.

The national decline in murder stands out due to extraordinary drops in many cities. New Orleans recorded fewer murders through June 2025 than any year since 1970 even in spite of the January 1st terrorist attack. New York City has only recorded fewer murders once through June since 1960 (136 in 2017). Philadelphia recorded the fewest murders since 1969, Los Angeles since 1966, Baltimore since 1965, Detroit since 1964, and San Francisco had the fewest ever recorded (monthly data available to 1960).

As a reminder, murder rose at the fastest rate ever recorded in 2020 and it stayed at that consistently higher level in 2021 and 2022. Murder began dropping in 2023 and ended up falling at the fastest rate ever recorded that year. Then murder likely fell even faster in 2024 though we won’t have official FBI data on that for a few months. Now, just five years after the largest one-year increase ever, the US is on track to have the largest one-year drop in murder ever recorded for the third straight year in 2025.

The assessment of national crime trends can be made thanks to a variety of independent data sources which have historically closely aligned with FBI national estimates. These alternative sources are needed because the FBI has reported no data on national crime trends since reporting Q2 2024 data last year.

Relying on sampling is a workaround to the traditional slowness of FBI data, but there is always a risk in interpreting the results of 18,000 agencies from a sample of 400+ agencies. That said, the size of the crime declines articulated by independent sources and the historical accuracy of those sources suggests that large declines will hold up even if the unofficial sources are off by more than usual.

The most recent formal FBI data is 18 months old now while the CDC is just finishing up its provisional 2024 count. Fortunately, both the Gun Violence Archive (GVA) and Real-Time Crime Index (RTCI) tend to mimic the annual changes seen in the official sources. As such, these unofficial tallies can tell us what is happening without having to wait 9 or more months for the official word.

Both the GVA and RTCI point to massive declines in fatal shootings and murders occurring in 2025, the third straight year of large declines. The RTCI is now available through May 2025, and that reporting can be supplemented by sampling large cities with publicly available data to see that the trend continued through midyear.

The bottom line is that crime is falling in the United States led by the largest one-year percentage point decline in murder ever recorded. If that sentence sounds familiar it’s because it’s basically identical to what I wrote last year about our crime trends.

It is late enough in the year and the declines are large enough to feel confident that these trends will generally hold through the rest of the year. The exact degree of downward motion in the nation’s crime stats will still take some months to tease out, but a large decline is almost certainly inevitable at this point.

Real-Time Crime Index

The Real-Time Crime index was updated last week through May 2025. The new RTCI sample has data from 421 agencies representing more than 102 million people. This sample makes up around half of all the murders that occur in the US in a given year, so it’s a reliable bellwether of the nation’s murder trend. (As an aside, this is our biggest sample yet in terms of agencies and population covered).

The RTCI through May 2025 shows murder down 20 percent relative to the first 5 months of 2024, down 37 percent relative to the first 5 months of 2021 (at the height of the murder surge), and down 9 percent relative to the first 5 months of 2019 (pre-surge). Murder rolling over the last 12 months in this sample has fallen below 2019’s level

Violent crime is down roughly 11 percent in the RTCI while property crime is down 12 percent. There is undoubtedly some underreporting occurring as agencies still have 9 or so months to correct missing reports. But that issue does not impact the finding of large scale declines in every crime category even if the degree of the decline is likely slightly overstated by the collection methodology.

The decline is fairly uniform across cities/counties and population sizes. In 13 agencies covering 1 million people or more, murder is down 20.1 percent, violent crime is down 11 percent and property crime is down 12 percent. In 192 agencies covering under 100,000 people, murder is down 36 percent, violent crime is down 9 percent and property crime is down 14 percent.

Aside from murder, the motor vehicle theft decline stands out. Motor vehicle thefts surged in 2022 but have been plunging ever since. The decline in motor vehicle thefts started at the very end of 2023 and has been steady ever since. The surge in auto thefts that kicked off in 2020 has not been falling as long so it is still higher than pre-COVID levels, but we aren’t yet seeing signs of a slowdown.

Gun Violence Archive

The Gun Violence Archive data through June paints a similarly rosy picture of our nation’s gun violence trend (though even a large decline leaves gun violence far too prevalent). If a picture is worth 1,000 words then the next three graphs tell the story in 3,000 words.

The GVA isn't exact but it's another strong indicator that the historic drop in gun violence is continuing through June 2025.

Sampling Cities

The RTCI is updated through May which obviously isn’t quite midyear (though it's close!). I grabbed publicly available murder data from the 30 cities with the most murders in 2023 plus Jacksonville (which didn’t report in 2023 but would have been on this list if they had) to clearly see that the RTCI trend carried through midyear.

And…yep. That’s a huge decline through midyear in a decently large sample of cities. Violent and property crime are harder to sample because fewer agencies publish aggregated counts, but there’s no reason to suspect any change from the available May data once June is counted.

The Midyear Final Word

The final word on crime through midyear is that there is a sizable decline in every category of Uniform Crime Report Part I crime. The declines in crime shown by the RTCI data through May suggests crime may decline at or near record levels in every crime type we have measured since 1960. It’s also plausible that multiple crime types will feature the largest drop ever recorded moniker in 2025.

Not every crime is reported to police, there are still six months left in the year for these trends to moderate, and not every city or county is seeing historic declines (or declines at all). Yet the data so far this year paints the picture of declines that began in 2023 and 2024 continuing (and accelerating) through the first half of 2025.

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More American children and teens die from firearms than any other cause

More American children and teens die from firearms than any other cause, but there are more deaths — and wider racial disparities — in states with more permissive gun policies, according to a new study, reported by Nada Hassanein of Stateline.

The study, published in the medical journal JAMA Pediatrics last week, analyzes trends in state firearm policies and kids’ deaths since 2010, after the landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision in McDonald v. City of Chicago. The ruling struck down the city’s handgun ban, clearing the way for many states to make it easier for people to buy and carry guns.

The study authors split states into three groups: “most permissive,” “permissive” and “strict,” based on the stringency of their firearm policies. Those policies include safe storage laws, background checks and so-called Stand Your Ground laws. The researchers analyzed homicide and suicide rates and the children’s race.

Using statistical methods, the researchers calculated 6,029 excess deaths in the most permissive states between 2011 and 2023, compared with the number of deaths that would have been expected under the states’ pre-McDonald rules. There were 1,424 excess deaths in the states in the middle category.

In total, about 17,000 deaths were expected in the post-decision period, but 23,000 occurred, said lead author Dr. Jeremy Faust, an emergency physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, in an interview.

Among the eight states with the strictest laws, four — California, Maryland, New York and Rhode Island — saw statistically significant decreases in their pediatric firearm death rates. Illinois, which was directly affected by the court’s decision in the McDonald case, and Connecticut saw increases in their rates. In Massachusetts and New Jersey, the changes were not statistically significant.

The rate increased in all but four (Alaska, Arizona, Nebraska and South Dakota) of the 41 states in the two permissive categories. (Hawaii was not included in the study due its low rates of firearm deaths.)

Non-Hispanic Black children and teens saw the largest increase in firearm deaths in the 41 states with looser gun laws. Those youths’ mortality rates increased, but by a much smaller amount, in the states with strict laws.

Experts say the study underscores the power of policy to help prevent firearm deaths among children and teens. The analysis comes less than a month after the release of a federal report on children’s health that purported to highlight the drivers of poor health in America’s children but failed to include anything on firearm injuries — the leading cause of death for children and teens in 2020 and 2021, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Trauma surgeon Dr. Marie Crandall, chair of surgery at MetroHealth medical center and a professor at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine in Cleveland, researches gun violence. She previously practiced at a Jacksonville, Florida, urban trauma unit, where she frequently saw children and teens caught in gun violence.

“When I see children come in with 10 holes in them that I can’t save — that is a loss. That is a completely preventable death, and it is deeply emotionally scarring to have to have those conversations with families when we know, as a society, there are things we could do to de-escalate,” said Crandall, who wasn’t involved in the new study.

When I see children come in with 10 holes in them that I can't save — that is a loss. That is a completely preventable death.

– Dr. Marie Crandall, chair of surgery, MetroHealth medical center, Cleveland

In her state of Ohio, firearm death rates among children and teens increased from 1.6 per 100,000 kids in the decade before the McDonald decision to 2.8 after it, according to the study. Ohio was categorized in the group with the most permissive laws.

The study adds to previous research that shows state laws around child access to firearms, such as safe storage and background checks, tend to be associated with fewer child firearm deaths.

“We know that child access prevention decreases unintentional injuries and suicides of children. So having your firearms locked, unloaded, stored separately from ammunition, decreases the likelihood of childhood injuries,” Crandall said. “More stringent regulation of those things also decreases childhood injuries.”

But she said it’s hard to be optimistic about more stringent regulation when the current administration dismisses gun violence as a public health emergency. The Trump administration earlier this year took down an advisory from the former U.S. surgeon general, issued last year, that emphasized gun violence as a public health crisis.

Faust, the lead author of the new study, stressed that firearm injuries and deaths were notably missing from the Make America Healthy Again Commission report on children’s health. He said the failure to include them illustrates the politicization of a major public health emergency for America’s kids.

“It’s hard to take them seriously if they’re omitting the leading cause of death,” Faust said. “They’re whiffing, they’re shanking. They’re deciding on a political basis not to do it. I would say by omitting it, they’re politicizing it.”

Faust and pediatric trauma surgeon Dr. Chethan Sathya, who directs the Center for Gun Violence Prevention at the Northwell Health system in New York, each pointed to the development of car seat laws and public health education, as examples of preventive strategies that helped reduce childhood fatalities. They support a similar approach to curbing youth gun deaths.

“We really have to apply a public health framework to this issue, not a political one, and we’ve done that with other issues in the past,” said Sathya, who wasn’t involved in the study and oversees his hospital’s firearm injury prevention programs. “There’s no question that this is a public health issue.”

In Louisiana, which the study categorized as one of the 30 most permissive states, the child firearm mortality rate increased from 4.1 per 100,000 kids in the pre-McDonald period to 5.7 after it — the nation’s highest rate. The study period only goes to 2023, but the state last year enacted a permitless carry law, allowing people to carry guns in public without undergoing background checks. And just last month, Louisiana legislators defeated a bill that would have created the crime of improper firearm storage.

Louisiana Democratic state Rep. Matthew Willard, who sponsored the safe storage legislation, said during the floor debate that its purpose was to protect children. Louisiana had the highest rate of unintentional shootings by children between 2015 to 2022, according to the research arm of Everytown for Gun Safety, which advocates for stricter gun access. Willard cited that statistic on the floor.

But Republican opponents said Willard’s proposal would infringe on residents’ gun rights and make it more difficult for them to use guns in self-defense.

“Nobody needs to come in our houses and tell us what to do with our guns. I think this is ridiculous,” Republican Rep. R. Dewith Carrier said during the debate.

Another Republican opponent, state Rep. Troy Romero, said he was concerned that having a firearm locked away would make it harder for an adult to quickly access it.

“If it’s behind a locked drawer, how in the world are you going, at 2 or 3 in the morning, going to be able to protect your family if somebody intrudes or comes into your home?” Romero said.

Gun violence researcher Julia Fleckman, an assistant professor, and her team at Tulane University in New Orleans have started to collect data on the impact of the state’s permitless carry law.

“It places a disproportionate impact on really vulnerable people, really, our most vulnerable people,” Fleckman said, noting kids bear the brunt of legislators’ decisions. “They don’t have a lot of control over this or the decisions we’re making.”

In South Carolina, another one of the most permissive states, the mortality rate increased from 2.3 to 3.9 per 100,000 kids in the time before and after the McDonald decision. South Carolina Democratic state Rep. JA Moore, who lost his adult sister 10 years ago today in the 2015 racist shooting that killed nine at a Charleston church, said state policy alone isn’t enough. He implored his colleagues to also examine their perception of guns.

“We have a culture here in South Carolina that doesn’t lend itself to a more safe South Carolina,” said Moore, who added he’s been advocating for background checks and stricter carry laws. “There is a need for a culture change in our state, in our country, when it comes to guns and our relationships with guns as Americans, realizing that these are deadly weapons.”

And investing in safer neighborhoods is crucial, he said.

“People are hurt by guns in places that they’re more comfortable, like their homes in their own neighborhoods,” he said.

Community-based interventions are important to stemming violence, experts said. Crandall, the Cleveland surgeon, said there’s emerging evidence that hospital-based and community-based violence prevention programs decrease the likelihood of violent and firearm-related injury.

Such programs aim to break cycles of violence by connecting injured patients with community engagement services. After New York City implemented its hospital-based violence interruption program, two-thirds of 3,500 violent trauma patients treated at five hospitals received community prevention services.

After her 33-year-old son was killed in her neighborhood in 2019, Michelle Bell started M-PAC Cleveland — “More Prayer, Activity & Conversation” — a nonprofit collaborative of people who’ve lost loved ones to violent crime. She’s encountered many grieving parents who lost their children to gunfire. The group advocates and educates for safe storage laws and holds peer grief support groups.

She also partners with the school district in a program that shares stories of gun violence’s long-lasting impact on surviving children, families and communities and non-violent interpersonal conflict resolution.

“Oftentimes, the family that has lost the child, the child’s life has been taken by gun violence, there are other children in the home,” she said.

“It’s so devastating. It’s just so tragic that the No. 1 cause of death for children 18 and under is gun violence,” Bell continued.

The decision to “pull a trigger,” she said, changes a “lifetime of not only yours, but so many other people.”

To read more CLICK HERE

Bunch: 'Trump has chosen radicalization and polarization'

 Will Bunch of the Philadelphia Inquirer wrote: 

One can’t help but wonder if Braxton Bragg — the infamous and incompetent Confederate general who owned 105 enslaved African Americans, waged war on Mexicans, and was so awful his own troops tried to assassinate him ... twice — was looking up from his fiery eternity and smiling.

Nearly 149 years after Bragg’s death — and four months after a U-turn that involved a juvenile ploy to reattach this traitor’s name to the sprawling U.S. Army base in his native North Carolina — here came the 47th president of the nation that trounced Bragg up and down the Civil War battlefield. Yet, on Tuesday, Donald Trump all but promised a sea of beret-wearing soldiers a return to Confederate values, under a large banner that read, “THIS WE’LL DEFEND.”

The insurrectionist Bragg surely would have been heartened when Trump used his powerful platform to rally an entire army against democratically elected public officials like California Gov. Gavin Newsom and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass — and when the uniformed troops of a once proudly apolitical U.S. Army answered with thunderous applause.

Like everything else about Trump’s strongman regime, the cheers had been manufactured. Military.com later reported that the chiseled forces of the storied 82nd Airborne Division behind Trump’s podium had been picked, in part, for their right-wing political views and also — according to one email obtained by the news site — to satisfy our allegedly 224-pound (lol) president with “no fat soldiers.” (Yes, Trump’s Tinder ad for his dream-date U.S. soldier essentially read, “No fatties.”)

“If soldiers have political views that are in opposition to the current administration and they don’t want to be in the audience then they need to speak with their leadership and get swapped out,” read another email. No wonder Trump’s audience not only laughed and cheered at ugly diatribes against their prior commander in chief, Joe Biden, and a free press, but also lined up for a vendor who was somehow allowed into Fort Bragg to sell items such as “Make America Great Again” chain necklaces and phony credit cards labeled “White Privilege Card: Trumps Everything.”

This we’ll defend?

It’s not an exaggeration to say that June 10, 2025, will go down in American history as a day of infamy, when an authoritarian president made clear that the world’s largest and most lethal fighting force now exists to enforce his personalist political agenda, and not to defend the nation’s people.

And it’s no surprise that Trump’s harshest critics came from the outraged ranks of patriotic veterans like Hurricane Katrina relief hero and retired Lt. Gen. Russel Honore, who called the “damn” speech “inappropriate” in a tweet, adding that “I never witnessed that S..t [sic] like this in 37 years in Uniform.”

But while Trump’s blatant politicizing of the U.S. military was a horrific crime against democracy in its own right, this fateful moment did not occur in a vacuum.

Although the ostensible purpose of the Fort Bragg speech was to kick off the 250th birthday party for a U.S. Army launched in 1775 to oppose (irony alert) a cruel and arbitrary monarch, the real mission seemed to celebrate the two-day anniversary of Trump’s crossing-the-Rubicon decision to federalize the National Guard and call out Marines on the American soil of Los Angeles.

Under legal justifications that seemed invented from whole cloth, the California National Guard operation that Trump now commands against the will of Newsom — whose state is suing the regime — to quell protests against federal immigration raids that the White House falsely calls “an insurrection” is already seeing heavily armed troops detaining LA residents.

The added call-up of 700 Marines — troops trained not to enforce public safety but to kill people — is making clear that an increasingly botched American Experiment is entering a terrifying new phase in which the might of our grossly oversized military is deployed to silence domestic dissent.

The shocking video this week of a train carrying scores of Army M1-A1 Abrams tanks past the Washington Monument and into the center of Washington, D.C., where a 250th Army anniversary parade on Saturday night coincidentally falls on Trump’s 79th birthday, makes clear the real point: Trump has been planning a military junta style of undemocratic government from Day One.

This week, Rolling Stone reported that the military is likely to remain on the streets of LA for weeks, accompanying agents from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) as they increase raids on Home Depots, car washes, and farms to meet the regime’s arbitrary mass deportation goal of one million migrant arrests this year. A source told the magazine that “it is hard to imagine that protesters would stay home for this, and that escalation in such a scenario is all but inevitable.”

And yet, it’s disturbing the extent to which even smart and good pro-democracy politicians and pundits still aren’t seeing this. Wednesday night, I heard Wisconsin Democratic Sen. Tammy Baldwin — fresh off a well-deserved grilling of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Capitol Hill — go on MSNBC and still insist that Trump sending in the Marines in Southern California is “a distraction” from his failed economic policies.

No.

This is not a distraction from the essence of the 47th presidency. This is rather what Trump’s MAGA movement was always all about, imposing his will on the divided nation that just barely elected him in November as the kind of “red Caesar” dictator that extreme-right “thought leaders” have been pleading for, and using brute force to get there.

A president whose disastrous first term ended with a violent attempted coup to block the peaceful transfer of power is now moving quickly in his second term to consolidate power, to accomplish the form of autocracy he sought on Jan. 6, 2021.

What we are watching this week, from the chaos in downtown LA to the Mussolini-like strutting at Fort Bragg to the soon-to-be-pothole-ravaged streets of D.C., is nothing less than Trump’s second attempted self-coup against the United States. And this one offers a much greater chance of success, unless the resistance mobilizes quickly.

It’s true that — as the brilliant New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie and others have noted — Trump and his henchmen, like anti-immigrant guru Stephen Miller, are making their move now less because he is a strongman, and more because his nearly five months in office have revealed him as a weak man.

His “Big Beautiful Bill” that would devastate U.S. healthcare and other public goods is not surprisingly foundering in Congress. Scores of judges — some appointed by Trump in his first term — are striking down his worst dictatorial moves. Most importantly, the president’s public support is plunging rapidly toward Nixonian levels, with a new Quinnipiac Poll showing 56% of Americans oppose his mass deportation, while his overall approval has sunk to 38%.

What would Chairman Mao or Comrade Lenin do? The Atlantic’s Anne Applebaum, an expert on authoritarianism, nailed it in her latest essay: “Now Trump faces the same choice as his revolutionary predecessors. Give up — or radicalize. Find compromise — or polarize society further. Slow down — or use violence. Like his revolutionary predecessors, Trump has chosen radicalization and polarization, and he is openly seeking to promote violence.”

What’s happening in Los Angeles is bad, but it’s only the beginning. It was reported this week that ICE is planning to send militarized “tactical units” into Democratic-run cities, including Philadelphia — as well as Chicago, New York, Seattle, and northern Virginia. It’s noteworthy that the Trump regime’s open-ended orders federalizing National Guard members in California weren’t limited to the Golden State, suggesting that we could see armed troops patrolling past Independence Hall sooner rather than later.

With all the scary stuff that’s happening right now, arguably the most alarming is the Trump regime’s efforts — amplified by the predictable Fox News tape reels of the few cars that burned last weekend in LA — to claim that any form of dissent is now a terrorist threat against “the homeland.” From the Oval Office, the president said of the D.C. tank parade: “If there’s any protester that wants to come out, they will be met with very big force.”

Not rioters. Not looters. Protesters. American citizens exercising their First Amendment right to air their grievances with the government and voice dissent would be greeted in the nation’s capital with tanks, just as happened in Tiananmen Square 36 years ago this month.

This is a 10-alarm fire for American democracy that screams out for action.

As it happens, there is a protest slated for Saturday — a huge one. It’s called, beyond fittingly, No Kings, and marches and rallies are now planned for more than 1,800 cities, state capitals, and small towns in all 50 states. Everywhere except Trump’s childish D.C. birthday party in Washington. If you are able to attend No Kings and rekindle the spirit that threw off one monarchy here in Philly in 1776, I’d urge you to do so.

A general who once fought to defend a tyrannical regime of slavery predicted in 1861, “We shall show you that we are stronger than you, and that we will beat you in the long run.” That was, of course, Braxton Bragg, on his buffoonish journey toward the dustbin of history. The most important thing about reactionary movements and the dictators who lead them is that they fail.

Donald Trump’s second coup will fail, too — but only after we the people make clear that this will not stand.

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