Donald Trump, the Crown Prince of Crime

https://prospect.org/justice/2025-09-24-donald-trump-crown-prince-of-crime/



Thanks to Donald Trump’s absurd trade war, the prices on just about everything are going up—with one notable exception. According to a Wall Street Journal investigation, the price of cocaine is down by about 50 percent. Who says the president isn’t doing anything about the affordability crisis? Folks, we’re putting good old blow back into the reach of working families! A gram of nose candy on every kitchen table!

The reasons, according to the Journal, are a deal between the Sinaloa and Jalisco cartels, driven in part by both Joe Biden and Trump’s attack on fentanyl production, but also the recent diversion of border agents away from drug interdiction and towards mass deportation. “In Arizona, two Customs and Border Protection checkpoints along a main fentanyl-smuggling corridor from Mexico have been left unstaffed. Officers stationed there were sent to process detained migrants.”

Now, it’s not even clear that cheaper cocaine is all that big of a deal. It’s not good for you, but better that than fentanyl, which is responsible for a massive spike in overdose deaths over the past five years or so (granted, those deaths are down by about a third from 2023). But the influx of cheap coke is an illustrative example of how the most hysterically anti-crime president in decades is actually taking dramatic steps to create more crime.

Let me first consider typical street crime. For decades now, crime control policy has been dominated by a politics of vindictive punishment. As the violent crime rate surged in the 1960s through the 1990s, a bipartisan consensus was established that the best thing to do was violence: increase funding for police, reduce access to appeals, make prison conditions worse, make sentences longer, etc.

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