During the 2016 campaign, Donald Trump made a strong anti-crime case. He argued that high-crime communities needed more police, not fewer, and that murder had jumped dramatically in the wake of Barack Obama's soft-on crime policies, Department of Justice, targeting of police departments, and administration tolerance for anti-police riots in major cities across the country.

The media critiqued Trump's specific claims. They claimed that he was exaggerating the rising crime problem in the wake of what Heather McDonald's called the Ferguson

effect. But Trump's overall message was absolutely right. While the left claimed the crime rates

were doing fine, had been dropping for decades, they neglected that murder rates rose in

America's years after a sustained drop, and violent crime rates have risen in America's 30 biggest cities.

Today, the Wall Street Journal reports, quote, homicides rose in most big American cities in 2016,

continuing a worrisome trend for police and criminologists that began last year,

even as murder rates in most cities are nowhere near the levels of two years ago.

Trump actually took crime seriously during the campaign.

During the RNC, he stated, quote,

decades of progress made in bringing down crime

are now being reversed by this administration's rollback

of criminal enforcement.

This was smart strategy, as I said at the time.

Clinton, by contrast, ran on the notion

that mass incarceration was the big problem,

that the system was implicitly biased,

and that her husband's plans to lower crime, which were actually wildly successful, they had

to be dismantled. No wonder she lost. Republicans ought to run on crime regularly across the country.

That's how Republicans can get elected in places like California and New York. Remember Richard

Reardon and Rudy Giuliani? Well, Trump did, and he did well in states that have

seen unrest over policing and crime. Wisconsin, of course, he won, saw a riot in Milwaukee, Michigan,

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