Newspaper Says Trump Canceled Interview After Being Questioned On Numbers

Former President Donald Trump pulled out of an interview after he was asked to back up his claim that crime is on the rise under President Joe Biden, a newspaper has reported.

The Detroit News reported that Trump’s campaign had agreed to an interview with the newspaper on Tuesday after a campaign speech. However, when the newspaper began probing it about crime data, the campaign abruptly cancelled the interview.

“The Trump campaign had initially agreed that Trump would participate in an interview with The Detroit News on Tuesday,” state politics reporter Craig Mauger wrote. “But after the newspaper began asking about the Michigan crime data before the event, a campaign aide said the presidential candidate no longer had time for an interview after the speech.”

Newsweek has contacted the Trump campaign for comment via email.

It comes after the former president claimed at a Michigan campaign event on Tuesday that there is a “crime wave” going on at levels “nobody has ever seen before.”

“The amount of crime that we have is unbelievable,” Trump said, later labeling this perceived rise the “Kamala crime wave.”

In big cities “almost all run by Democrats,” he said, “you can’t walk across the street to get a loaf of bread. You get shot. You get mugged. You get raped. You get whatever it may be.”

There is no evidence to suggest crime is on the rise under Biden. Federal Bureau of Investigation data shows the national violent crime rate dropped in the first two years of the Biden administration, hitting 380.7 incidents per 100,000 people in 2022, down from 398.5 incidents in 2020.

However, the Trump campaign told the newspaper on Tuesday that the federal data was “totally unreliable at the present time” because the FBI arrived at the statistics by using “estimated crime numbers” for law enforcement agencies that didn’t report numbers. A third of the nation’s 18,000 police departments do not provide crime statistics to the FBI following a change in reporting requirements in 2021, according to The Marshall Project.

Meanwhile, Michigan-specific data tracked by the Michigan State Police showed that violent crime increased 12 percent to 48,674 incidents from 2019 to 2020 while Trump was in the White House. Violent crime rose again by 1 percent to 49,073 incidents in 2021 during the first year of Biden’s term, the data shows, before dropping in 2022 about 7 percent to 45,449.

MSP data also shows that murders in Michigan peaked in 2020, before dropping in 2021 and 2022, while incidents of robbery and rape have generally been decreasing since 2018.

Nationally, the murder rate spiked by 30 percent during the last year of Trump’s presidency, the largest one-year rise on record, according to CNN.

“Trump’s implication that the crime rate is only going up is false,” Anna Harvey, a political science professor and director of the Public Safety Lab at New York University, told CNN. “During 2020, the last year of the Trump presidency, violent crime rose dramatically. The murder rate, for example, increased by almost 30 percent, the largest one-year increase on record. But violent crime has been falling during the Biden presidency.”

During Trump’s campaign event Tuesday, the former president featured a recurring slide in the background that said a 2023 Gallup poll found 63 percent of Americans said crime was an “extremely” or “very” serious issue in 2023.

After the event, Michigan House Minority Leader Matt Hall told added that crime is a “serious problem” in his state. “I look at the polling. It’s not just illegal immigration and illegal immigrant crime, but public safety is an issue,” he told The Detroit News.

However, a Detroit News-WDIV-TV poll of 600 likely Michigan voters in July found that crime did not register as a top issue in the presidential race.

The Washington Post estimated that during his presidency, Trump made more than 30,000 false or misleading statements.

“Facts don’t matter when it comes to him,” Democratic state Representative Tyrone Carter, a former sheriff, told The Detroit News. “It’s about telling a story that benefits you.”