Donald Trump, the Crown Prince of Crime

While the president howls about crime in liberal cities, he is taking drastic action to make it worse everywhere.

by Ryan Cooper September 24, 2025

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.

SNIP*
Detectives will not be respected when police act like invading colonial troops, regularly committing violent atrocities against city residents. It’s one reason why homicide clearance rates are in the toilet. (Another is an ongoing de facto work stoppage among many police departments.) That is why after the murder of George Floyd, the Biden administration entered into consent decrees with many American cities and police departments—to cut down on police brutality, which is both gravely unjust and makes crime worse. Trump, naturally, is pulling out of those consent decrees.
https://prospect.org/justice/2025-09-24-donald-trump-crown-prince-of-crime/