CRIMETry As He Might, Trump Can’t Take Credit for the Nation’s Murder Drop
The Trace has fact-checked the president’s claims about violent crime and immigrants during his State of the Union.
This storywas originally published by The Trace, a nonprofit newsroom covering gun violence in America. Sign up for its newsletters here.
In the first State of the Union of his second term, President Donald Trump repeated dubious claims that the record low murder rate is entirely his doing and that his federal occupation of sanctuary cities is responsible for the nation’s record crime drop. He also baselessly portrayed immigrants as criminals.
We fact-checked his assertions.
Trump Took Credit for the Record Drop in Homicides.
At the top of his speech, Trump said, “Last year the murder rate saw its single largest decline in recorded history.” He appears to be referencing a January study from the Council on Criminal Justice, a nonpartisan think tank, which found that 2025’s homicide rate could be the lowest recorded since 1900. While the reasons for the drop are unclear, Trump has touted that statistic several times in the past few weeks.
Homicides were already on the downswing and nearing record lows when Trump returned to office. In 2021, there were 26,031 homicides in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In 2024, the last full year such data was available, homicides had fallen to 20,162 — around the same level as they were in 2019, the year before the pandemic.
The vast majority of those homicides — around 75 percent — were gun homicides, which spiked in 2020 during Trump’s first term and continued to increase into 2021, before beginning a gradual and consistent decline through the remaining Biden years.
At a recent panel on plummeting gun homicides hosted by The Trace, Jeff Asher, a crime statistician who runs the Real-Time Crime Index, which compiles data from hundreds of police departments, said Trump couldn’t confidently take credit for the murder drop — nor could anyone else. “The answer is, we don’t know” the reasons for the decline, Asher said. But he noted that it started in earnest in 2023, more than a year before Trump took office. “We saw a record drop in murder in 2023, 2024, and then again in 2025,” Asher said. “So the roots of it are probably stuff that happened in the 2021-2022 time frame.”
