Karoline Leavitt tried to take a victory lap on her boss’s behalf—only to share an article that undercut the Trump administration’s boasts about falling crime rates.
The White House press secretary shared an Instagram Story on Wednesday and excitedly declared, “Make America Safe Again,” alongside a graphic from an Axios article showing a chart of crime plummeting across major cities.
However, the substance of the article shared by Leavitt, 28, does not clearly support the celebratory message she appeared to attribute to President Donald Trump, 79.
Although a report from the Major Cities Chiefs Association (MCCA), cited by Axios, shows a decline in every crime category across the U.S. in 2025 compared to 2024, the outlet included a “reality check” at the end of the article that undercuts the Trump administration’s claim that the drop can be attributed to Trump’s policies.
”Violent crime rates in many cities have been falling significantly since former President Biden’s last two years in office," Axios noted, adding that the decline began after a sharp surge in 2020 during the COVID era, at the end of Trump’s first term as president.
Within the same hour that the press secretary boasted that crime was down, she appeared to realize that the article from which she pulled the graphic she shared on Instagram did not fully praise the president.
“This ridiculous framing is why Americans don’t trust the media,” Leavitt wrote on X, criticizing an Axios post that linked to the article and read: “Crime plunges in major cities despite Trump’s crackdown rhetoric.”
The post was deleted following Leavitt’s comment, with Axios explaining that the original had compared the drop in violent crime to Trump’s push to deploy federal troops in U.S. cities. The updated version now reads: “Violent crime dropped sharply across America’s biggest cities in 2025, according to new data reviewed by Axios.”
Leavitt, who last week defended her boss after he shared a racist video of Barack and Michelle Obama and said the media should “report on something today that actually matters to the American public,” took issue with the word “despite” in the original post.
“President Trump securing the border, mobilizing federal law enforcement to arrest violent criminals, and deporting the worst of the worst illegal aliens is EXACTLY what’s driving the massive drop in crime,” the press secretary wrote on X.
Since the start of his second term, Trump has portrayed some American cities as “crime-ridden,” singling out the nation’s capital first in August, when he deployed National Guard troops to “liberate” Washington D.C. from “crime, bloodshed, bedlam and squalor and worse.”
In September, the commander-in-chief declared that other Democrat-run cities would be next on his crime crackdown and later deployed the military domestically in Los Angeles, Portland, Chicago, and Memphis—deployments that The Washington Post reported Thursday were withdrawn late in January, without public acknowledgment from the White House or the Pentagon.
Nonetheless, despite Leavitt’s claim that Trump’s immigration crackdown—which has led to the deaths of two U.S. citizens by federal agents in Minneapolis and sparked mass protests across the nation—resulted in “deporting the worst of the worst illegal aliens,” documents show that only a small fraction of the nearly 400,000 migrants detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) since last January are violent offenders.
According to Department of Homeland Security data obtained by CBS News, fewer than one in seven of those arrested since Trump’s return to office had charges or convictions for violent criminal offenses.
Though the MCAA report has shown that homicide rates fell by 19.3 percent, rape by 8.8 percent, robbery by 19.8 percent, and aggravated assault by 9.7 percent across the U.S. in 2025, experts told the Council on Criminal Justice (CCJ) that this decline—which has been present over the past three years—is the result of various factors, not just one.
“Explanations for the three-year decline in violence should be thought of as hypotheses, as very little causal evidence has been produced on the rise of violence in 2020-2021 and the fall of violence from 2023 onward,” Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs at Princeton University, Patrick Sharkey, told CCJ.
The Daily Beast has contacted the White House for comment.
