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There were two crime-related pieces of news coming out of Washington, DC, this week. One was that the violent crime rate in the US dropped again in 2024, including in the nation’s capital, and is reaching the lowest levels seen in more than 20 years. The other is that “Big Balls,” a former DOGE staffer who is now working for the Social Security Administration, was assaulted by some teenagers.

Esteemed reader, would you like to venture a guess as to which of these two stories caused the president to weigh in with something that could charitably be described as a policy position?

Was it the good news that crime dropped across the country under the Biden administration and that aggravated assault is down significantly in Washington compared to where it had been when Donald Trump was first president?

Or was it the beating that Edward Coristine — the real name of “Big Balls” — took?

Maybe it would help to know that the attack on the 19-year-old former DOGE staffer was broken up by cops who were on the scene at 3:00 am and promptly arrested a couple of the assailants. In other words, the capital’s law enforcement officers did their job right away.

Of course, in order to answer the question correctly, what you really need to know is that the assault of Coristine was big news on right-wing social media, with both Trump and Elon Musk amplifying it, and on Fox News, which ran multiple segments on it.

Conversely, the plummeting crime rate under Biden wasn’t much of a story at all (which is hardly surprising since it runs counter to the narrative that Trump and Fox have conditioned conservatives to believe).

And that really gives away the answer to our question.

“Crime in Washington, D.C., is totally out of control,” Trump wrote in a social media post.

He added that teenagers are “randomly attacking, mugging, maiming, and shooting innocent Citizens,” and that they are not afraid of law enforcement because “they know nothing ever happens to them.”

It bears repeating that two of the people who attacked Coristine, a couple of 15-year-olds, were arrested and charged with unarmed carjacking. The police also published a photo of a person of interest in the case and offered a $10,000 reward for information leading to additional arrests.

So, basically, nothing that Trump said is supported by statistics in general or the details in this particular case.

And yet…

“If DC doesn’t get its act together, and quickly, we will have no choice but to take Federal control of the City, and run this City how it should be run, and put criminals on notice that they’re not going to get away with it anymore,” the president said.

Since making that initial statement, Trump has directed federal law enforcement agencies to increase their presence in the nation’s capital.

To anybody who lives in reality, that seems unnecessary. After all, violent crime is down and, in this case, the cops did their job, so what exactly is the deployment of federal officers supposed to achieve?

At best, this is a misallocation of resources. At worst, as Trump did in Los Angeles two months ago, he is trying to subjugate a liberal stronghold.

To his supporters, however, it will make perfect sense.

That’s because they do not operate in reality. To them, facts don’t matter. Science doesn’t matter. Hard data doesn’t matter. Expertise doesn’t matter. Truth doesn’t matter.

Instead, it’s all about sentiments that are backed up by anecdotal “evidence.”

And that is why this one incident, instead of statistics proving otherwise, is causing takes like these from Vice President JD Vance.

Our nation's capital has become ridden with out-of-control violent crime thanks to misguided local leadership.

President Trump is putting a stop to this lawlessness. pic.twitter.com/yMktdgpTnj

— JD Vance (@JDVance) August 9, 2025

But there is no “out-of-control” violent crime.

While, admittedly, assaults on former DOGE staffers with the moniker “Big Balls” are up, everybody else is safer now in Washington than in previous years (when violent crime was already in decline).

From 2023 to 2024, violent crime was down 35 percent, according to the Metropolitan Police Department, and it keeps dropping. To date, violent crime is down another 26 percent in the year-to-year comparison.

But the numbers don’t fit the narrative, which is why they are being disregarded.

We saw this at the beginning of the month when Trump fired the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics because he didn’t like the lackluster job creation under his watch.

It’s shocking that the White House didn’t bring out individuals who recently  got a job in order to prove the numbers wrong, or that Fox didn’t add a new segment on “Americans who found work this week” so conservatives are convinced that the statistics are lying.

Trump’s entire presidential campaign was predicated on his voters rejecting facts in favor of feelings.

To Fox News viewers, its central themes of rampant immigrant crime, an economy at the precipice of a depression, and wokeness run amok sounded right.

That’s because they were inundated with stories that reinforced Trump’s rhetoric.

As the “Big Balls” example shows, manipulating public opinion works especially well with crime.

Fox ran countless segments on “illegals” committing heinous crimes against Americans. In light of that “evidence,” who would believe that undocumented migrants are much less likely to engage in criminal activity than native-born Americans?

Certainly not Trump voters, who aren’t going to trust the results of studies conducted by some fancy-pants pinko researchers when Sean Hannity just told them about a Venezuelan who killed a blond woman or a Haitian who ate a dog.

Here is the thing: In a country of 340 million, crimes will be committed.

For example, if there were a news network dedicated to showing that Trump voters are child molesters, it could find examples every single day of registered Republicans being accused or convicted of related charges.

That is essentially the role Fox fills in the MAGAverse, only the target is “illegals,” even though reality tells a different story.

But it’s not just crime that receives this treatment. Anecdotal “evidence” is used to explain away many other uncomfortable truths.

Global warming is a hoax because some days are cold.

Protests in Los Angeles were “violent” because someone took pictures of a car burning.

“Liberals” are outraged by a jeans ad because there were a couple of social media accounts that complained about it.

People on Medicaid are lazy because unspecified able-bodied men are sitting in their parents’ basements and playing video games.

There must be extensive voter fraud because the aunt of my friend’s cousin thought her vote was switched.

None of these things are backed up by facts, but they are accepted as truth by Trump and his supporters because they fit neatly into their view of the world.

Of course, in the case of the president (and his VP), those anecdotes are often not even true.

Trump routinely makes up stories to “prove” some point or another.

As for Vance, when he was called out last year for disseminating the lie that Haitian immigrants ate the pets of their neighbors in a city in Ohio, he perfectly summed up the MAGA approach:

“If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do,” he told CNN back then. “It comes from firsthand accounts from my constituents. I say that we’re creating a story, meaning we’re creating the American media focusing on it.”