The emerging Democratic message on crime is dishonest to its very core, and the reaction to President Donald Trump’s decision to deploy the National Guard to the streets of Washington, D.C., shows exactly that.

Democrats have not treated crime as a serious issue, and their new strategy is to paint crime as a GOP issue. The argument is that “red states” have the most crime, and therefore Republicans, not Democrats, should be seen as the bad-on-crime party. California Gov. Gavin Newsom is the most prominent one arguing this point, as he plans to use it to defuse criticism of California as a soft-on-crime haven for criminals during his presidential campaign. Newsom’s team went on a Twitter/X posting spree attacking St. Louis, Missouri; Dallas, Texas; Memphis, Tennessee; Houston, Texas; Tampa, Florida; and the state of Mississippi (after apparently realizing that naming these cities was backfiring).

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The problem with this, of course, is that Republicans do not run any of the cities that Newsom mentioned. For example, Newsom used St. Louis to attack Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley. The last Republican mayor of St. Louis left office in 1949, three decades before Hawley was even born. St. Louis has the highest homicide rate in the country, and it hit record highs as the city became more progressive. The city’s chief prosecutor from 2017-2023 was Kimberly Gardner, a progressive backed by left-wing billionaire George Soros to push the kind of criminal justice “reform” that Newsom supports.

Under Gardner’s tenure, Missouri had its worst homicide rate in 50 years. Her office even released an alleged murderer after no prosecutors were sent to multiple court appearances in the case. In fact, Republicans tried to take over homicide prosecutions in St. Louis due to Gardner’s incompetence (both deliberate through her ideology and unintentional through her lack of ability as a prosecutor). Earlier this year, the Missouri House passed a bill that would give the state control of the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department.

The same can be said of the other cities included in lists such as Newsom’s. In Texas, Houston hasn’t had a Republican mayor since 1982 and sits in a county with a Democratic district attorney. Dallas County has had a Democratic district attorney since 2019, and the city’s Republican mayor only jumped to the GOP four years after taking office as a Democrat, after he had served for a decade in the Texas House of Representatives as a Democrat.

Tampa hasn’t had a Republican mayor since 1986 (he, too, had switched parties), and its top attorney was Democrat Andrew Warren, who was infamously removed from office by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. He was replaced by a DeSantis appointee, and crime in Tampa has decreased over the past two years. The only city that cuts in Democrats’ favor here would be Memphis, which recently replaced its Republican district attorney with a Democrat and has seen its crime numbers start to drop. Newsom is ultimately criticizing him, too, in his anti-GOP screeds.

That would be why Newsom generalized his attacks on Mississippi’s crime numbers. But those numbers can be blamed on the city of Jackson. Jackson has been run by Democrats for roughly 60 years, and has a Democratic district attorney who ran for office on the promise of putting fewer people in jail. (He is also currently under federal indictment for bribery).

Still, Newsom and the other Democrats who argue about “red state” crime blame Republicans for this problem. So, what if Republicans in any of these states decided to go in and take control of the criminal justice system in these cities? What if, say, Texas Republicans decided that they would solve the crime crisis in Houston by taking over the city’s police department and Harris County’s prosecuting decisions?

What Democrats are arguing in Washington D.C.

In the nation’s capital, Trump decided that he would use the federal authority vested in his office to federalize the Metropolitan Police Department and deploy National Guard troops to help police the streets of the city. Violent crime has dropped dramatically during this time period, including an 87% decline in carjackings compared to last year for a city plagued by carjackings.

This sent Democrats into a frenzy. Sen. Chris Van Hollen (MD) called it a “raw authoritarian power grab” and said that Trump is “playing dictator in our nation’s capital as a dress rehearsal as he pushes democracy to the brink.” Democrats on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee called it “dictator-level stuff.” A press release from Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee called it an “outrageous move” to “militarize the streets of D.C.” Democrats are once again demanding that the city of Washington, D.C., be given statehood precisely to avoid this fate in the future.

And, of course, the liberals at the Associated Press determined that Trump’s anti-crime rhetoric about D.C. was racist.

Now, imagine the rhetoric if Texas Republicans undertook similar efforts to get crime in Houston under control. Or if Missouri Republicans did the same in St. Louis. Or if Tennessee Republicans did the same in Memphis. In fact, when DeSantis used his executive power to remove Warren for refusing to enforce the law in Tampa, Florida Democrats said DeSantis was attacking democracy itself.

This is the game that Newsom and other Democrats are playing in this debate. They attack Republicans over crime in St. Louis, for example, knowing that Republicans do not control a single aspect of governance in the city. They label it as “red state” crime, when the issue is entirely localized in a blue city. But, if Republicans take a step to solve that crime crisis (as DeSantis did in Tampa), it would be a subversion of the electoral process, an attack on democracy itself, and a harbinger of fascism as Republicans roll their “shock troops” into the streets of Democratic cities.

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So Democrats get the best of both worlds. They get to run their cities into the ground in red states, and then other Democrats get to turn around and use their colleagues’ failures as a political weapon against Republicans. Newsom is now sending “crime suppression” teams to Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Sacramento to deal with California’s crime crisis. If Republicans point this out, Newsom attacks them for blue city crime in their states. If Republicans decided to send in the National Guard and take prosecutions and policing out of the hands of Democrats in those cities, Newsom would be the first to call it an attack on democracy and proof of MAGA fascism.

All of this is so that Democrats such as Newsom or the Democrats who run those aforementioned cities don’t have to reckon with their pro-criminal policies or their failing justice systems. It is a deflection, because Democrats don’t actually want Republicans to take over blue cities in red states, as they know the GOP administrations that would be leading that charge would take crime seriously. This is all just cynical electioneering and, if it continues, Republicans should consider taking Newsom up on his offer.