Lying Trump has 'pants on fire' on Chicago murders
BGA finds Chicago actually outpaces nation in reducing gun violence
The BGA found that President Trump told more than a few stretchers in his Chicago speech on Monday. (One Illinois/Ted Cox)
By Ted Cox
President Trump is a liar with “pants on fire” when it comes to Chicago’s gun violence, according to a prominent government watchdog.
Trump addressed the International Association of Chiefs of Police at Chicago’s McCormick Place convention center on Monday, using the event to once again criticize Chicago’s gun violence and to chide Chicago Police Supt. Eddie Johnson for not attending.
“Afghanistan is a safe place by comparison,” Trump said, surrounded by police chiefs and with Chicago cops cordoning off streets for blocks around to discourage protesters and keep them concentrated on the president’s later political fundraiser downtown at his Trump International Hotel and Tower.
But, in a column published in Wednesday’s Chicago Sun-Times, the Better Government Association’s PolitiFact Illinois fact-checking initiative found that the president told more than a few stretchers when he got down to details.
“And Chicago has the toughest gun laws in the United States,” Trump said, a claim One Illinois took immediate issue with, and that the Politico analysis determined “repeated a Pants on Fire! claim,” its lowest rating for truth.
Trump went on to earn another “Pants on Fire!” citation when he said, “Over the last two years, the number of murders in America and America’s major cities has dropped, unlike here, by more than 10 percent. And if we ever took Chicago numbers out of our total numbers, the numbers would be incredible — and they already are, including Chicago.”
Politifact said, “Trump missed the mark on multiple counts” there, as in 2018 U.S. murders were down just 6.9 percent from 2016. Over the same two years, Chicago dropped more than 26 percent, from 765 murders in 2016 to 563 in 2018. It pointed out that decline was “larger than those seen in all but three of the nation’s 30 largest cities: San Antonio (Texas), San Diego, and San Jose (Calif.).”
“The president is right about one thing,” PolitiFact quoted Johnson as saying in his response to Trump later that day. “Violent crime in the United States declined last year for the second consecutive year. But it was Chicago that set the table for those reductions.”
Chicago murders and shootings are down this year as well compared with last year.
The story also quoted Ames Grawert, of the New York University School of Law’s Brennan Center for Justice, as saying Trump was “dead wrong on Chicago,” adding, “The city’s gotten a lot safer in the past two years, and it’s not right to say Chicago’s lagging the national trend. … It’s one of the cities that’s led the downward trend of the last two years.”
Politifact didn’t even get into a story Trump has been telling since he was on the campaign trail in 2016 and that he repeated Monday, about an aggressive, no-nonsense Chicago “mystery cop” on a motorcycle who insisted he could end the city’s gun problems in a week — or, as Trump put it Monday, maybe just a day.
“You could fix this up so fast,” he said.
But Trump has never revealed the supposed identity of that super cop, nor has he ever produced him, making him something of a unicorn fantasy figure.
“If there’s somebody that can stop crime in a day, then I will bow down to them and say bring it on, but that’s just no going to happen," Johnson said Monday, adding that no one has ever come forward when they’ve searched for Trump’s apocryphal Chicago police officer.