For years, Americans watched their neighborhoods deteriorate. Carjackings in broad daylight. Smash-and-grab mobs emptying retail stores while police were told to stand down. Violent crime ripping through cities governed by progressive prosecutors who treated criminals like victims and victims like an afterthought. Between 2020 and 2022, it genuinely felt like the basic machinery of civilization was grinding to a halt — and nobody in charge seemed particularly bothered.
Then Donald Trump ran on a simple idea: enforce the law. Restore order. Protect American citizens first. The media predictably sneered. Pundits dismissed it as red meat for the base. Entire editorial boards assured their dwindling readerships that no president could actually reverse a violent crime wave through — heaven forbid — policing and border security. So. Did it work?
From The Post Millennial:
The murder rate in 2026 is set to be one of the lowest ever recorded, according to crime analyst Jeff Asher. He estimated that there will be 10,000 fewer murders in the US this year than in 2020, 2021, and 2022.
Asher said that to estimate total murders for the year, he used the crime data from the FBI’s Crime Data Explorer’s monthly data along with the Crime Index national sample to come to his conclusion. “We can combine them both to tell which does better in predicting the FBI’s estimates and use that to generate a forecasted crime count,” Asher wrote.
Ten thousand fewer Americans murdered every single year. Not a rounding error. Not a slight dip. A seismic, historic collapse in lethal violence — and these projections come straight from FBI data analyzed by one of the most respected crime analysts in the country. Funny how that works when you actually try.
A decline that dwarfs history
The projected 2026 murder rate of 3 to 3.8 per 100,000 residents doesn’t just set a new record. It obliterates the old one. The previous all-time low was 4.4 per 100,000, recorded back in 2014. This year’s number could land more than 20 percent below that mark.
Here’s what makes the achievement genuinely jaw-dropping. The last time America saw raw murder counts this low was the 1960s — when 150 million fewer people lived here. The current decline is steeper and more rapid than the celebrated “great crime decline” of the 1990s, which reshaped policing philosophy for an entire generation. For over a decade, from 2010 through 2024, the murder rate sat stubbornly between 4.9 and 5.1 per 100,000. That floor didn’t just crack. It disintegrated.
The Trump effect
Numbers like these don’t arrive by accident. The Trump administration deployed National Guard units into crime-ravaged cities. It launched enforcement blitzes that put boots on actual ground. It carried out record-level deportations of criminal illegal immigrants — the “worst of the worst,” as the administration put it. Simple formula, really: remove dangerous people from American streets and fewer Americans die on them.
Earlier this year, the FBI confirmed the trajectory with a preliminary report showing violent crime had decreased at a rate unseen in nearly 90 years — the steepest single-year decline since 1937. That predates Asher’s projections and reinforces the same undeniable conclusion. Enforcement works. It has always worked. We just needed leadership willing to do it.
What the left won’t admit
Remember “defund the police”? Remember progressive district attorneys in San Francisco, Chicago, and Philadelphia converting their justice systems into revolving doors? We were lectured — endlessly — that enforcement itself was the problem. That incarceration was cruelty. That border security was bigotry. The data now provides a rather comprehensive rebuttal to all of it.
Even left-leaning outlets have grudgingly acknowledged the raw numbers, though you’ll notice a conspicuous allergy to connecting the decline with any specific policy from this White House. The murders just… stopped, apparently. Spontaneously. One can only imagine the editorial contortions required to cover this story without crediting the president responsible.
But the real verdict isn’t written in op-eds or press briefings. It’s measured in the 10,000 lives preserved each year — mothers, fathers, sons, daughters who are still here because their government remembered its most fundamental obligation. Donald Trump promised to make American streets safe again. The data says he delivered. And no amount of media gymnastics will rewrite that.
Key Takeaways
- The 2026 U.S. murder rate is projected to be the lowest ever recorded in American history.
- Trump’s National Guard deployments and deportation of criminal illegal immigrants preceded the historic decline.
- The projected rate is over 20 percent below the previous all-time low set in 2014.
- America will see roughly 10,000 fewer murders annually compared to the 2020–2022 period.
Sources: The Post Millennial, Davis Vanguard
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