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Opinion
How the Left Can Flip Crime From a Political Liability to a Political Advantage
Democrats can go on offense by defining what it actually means to be serious about safety: not by stoking fear, but by advancing a clear, consistent, solutions-driven agenda that both prevents crime and breaks its cycle.
May 17, 2026
As the economy falters, prices surge, and yet another Middle East conflict grinds on with no clear endgame, Donald Trump’s presidency appears to be slipping into free fall. His support has eroded among the very voters who once powered his return to office, and Americans are losing confidence in the issues that once defined his appeal—especially the economy and immigration. With the midterms looming, Republicans are flailing.
But Trump and the Republicans always have a tried-and-true political playbook: fearmongering about crime. And unless Democrats go on the offensive, it just may work.
Trump has already signaled that crime will once again be a centerpiece of the midterms. In support of that aim, he has repeatedly urged Congress to pass “a tough new crime bill,” falsely taken credit for bringing down crime rates, and exploited crime victims to cast Democrats as cold and uncaring in the face of tragedy. But crime is not the strength it once was for Trump.
Thanks to his unpopular federal troop deployments and violent mass deportation tactics, voters are losing confidence in his approach to public safety.
As ICE, the National Guard, and other federal forces expand their footprint in communities across the country, voters are getting a clearer picture of what “tough-on-crime” governance looks like in practice—and most don’t like what they see.
To be clear, Republicans still hold an overwhelming advantage on crime in public opinion. But that edge is driven less by outcomes than by emphasis: They talk about crime relentlessly—even when rates are near historic lows—amplifying and exploiting understandable fears. Democrats, by contrast, too often cede the narrative—either by pivoting to safer ground or by trying to one-up Republicans with “tough-on-crime” rhetoric that voters don’t find convincing.
Today, Democrats of all stripes are talking loudly and often about affordability—the right tactic after being perceived as out of touch in the wake of the 2024 election. But they have yet to find a unified message around public safety, leaving them vulnerable to the inevitable barrage of GOP attack ads stoking fears of crime and immigration.
My team and I have briefed dozens of candidates and elected leaders over the past several months, and the message we are so often left with is one of hesitation and uncertainty around public safety. From our work with Hill offices to mayoral candidates, the reality is that the party is not prepared to truly address crime. Unless Democrats define the issue on their own terms, they’ll once again be forced to play defense on one of the most politically potent issues in American life.
Democrats cannot afford to go silent on crime, nor can they afford the “tough-on-crime” approach that some in the party are advocating—a familiar playbook that echoes the advice many received last year on immigration enforcement. But those who followed that guidance are now finding themselves under attack for it. Votes once seen as smart politics—backing measures like the Trump-backed Laken Riley Act, resolutions praising US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers, or increased funding for the Department of Homeland Security—are quickly becoming political liabilities. As ICE, the National Guard, and other federal forces expand their footprint in communities across the country, voters are getting a clearer picture of what “tough-on-crime” governance looks like in practice—and most don’t like what they see.
This moment presents an opportunity. Democrats can go on offense by defining what it actually means to be serious about safety: not by stoking fear, but by advancing a clear, consistent, solutions-driven agenda that both prevents crime and breaks its cycle. In a country where nearly half of all people have had a family member incarcerated and about 3 in 10 people say they or a member of their household have been a victim of a crime, we must chart a new path forward. Democrats don’t have to look far to see which solutions truly deliver on safety.
Democratic mayors are working to drive historic declines in crime—through sustained investments in youth programs, community violence intervention, crisis response, targeted gun enforcement, and rebuilding trust between police and the communities they serve. Leading cities of all sizes, they’ve seen firsthand how violence shatters families and makes everyday life feel unsafe. They’ve also seen the damage of blunt “law and order” approaches that destabilize neighborhoods, limit opportunity, and erode cooperation with law enforcement.
These leaders are channeling a broader political reality: Most Democratic and independent voters want leaders who are serious about safety, not a return to reflexive “tough-on-crime” politics. That means a comprehensive approach that responds swiftly to stop violence, solve crime, and prevent it in the first place. It pairs accountability with fairness—holding everyone to the same standard, including police and elected officials. And it reflects a continued belief that public safety is strengthened not just through enforcement, but by giving people a real chance to break cycles of incarceration and build stable lives. Importantly, as we head toward the midterms, polling shows that when Democrats demonstrate to voters that they are truly serious about safety, this approach consistently outperforms “tough-on-crime” rhetoric.
Notably, these local leaders come from across the Democratic spectrum. Regardless of whether they consider themselves progressives, moderates, or something in between, they share an approach that works to deliver safety and win elections. They know that safety isn’t about scoring political points; it’s about building credibility and delivering what works. It’s time Democrats learned that lesson as well.
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Hope in a Time of Democratic Decline
Two major reports released this year tell a grim story: Global freedom continues to decline and the US has lost its longstanding classification a liberal democracy. But hope lies in the data.
May 17, 2026
The US score on the University of Gothenburg’s V-Dem Liberal Democracy Index declined by 24% in only one year, while its world rank dropped from 20th to 51st place out of 179 nations.” The US joins nearly a quarter of the world’s nations undergoing democratic backsliding, and is on its way to joining the three-quarters of the world population, some 6 billion people, who live in autocracies. If President Donald Trump’s first term “laid the foundation”, according to the report, the second term has seen the backslide quicken.
The bad news is now measurable. V-dem rates the US as an elected democracy, losing its higher position as a liberal democracy. V-dem points to a breakdown of liberal characteristics including freedom of expression, respect for civil liberties, and well-functioning checks and balances, especially those between the executive branch and the judiciary. Freedom House reports a similar dramatic decline. As does the Democracy Meter.
Such a democratic crash is typically associated with coup d’etats. According to V-Dem we are back to the lowest level of democracy since 1965, when President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act, establishing the US as a democracy that enfranchised, at least in law, all citizens.
Trump did not create our democratic weaknesses, but he is exploiting them. Power has been unevenly coalescing in the presidency since at least Andrew Jackson’s administration. Democrats have done little to roll back the executive overreach that marked George W. Bush’s post 9/11 War on Terror or Barack Obama’s drone strikes. Even former President Joe Biden could not help but overuse executive orders to overcome congressional gridlock. These precedents emboldened Trump. If the imperial presidency has previously been restricted to despotic rule abroad, it is now directed to the US' own citizens and subjects. Trump is the domestic return of the imperial boomerang, establishing what political theorist Nikhil Pal Singh calls a “Homeland Empire.”
The 2026 midterm elections are more than a referendum on Trump. They are a test of whether American democracy can repair itself.
We were warned. This most recent executive power grab was foreshadowed by the Project 2025 Heritage Foundation plan to enact “unitary executive theory.” By 2026, according to Project 2025 Tracker, half of the 320 objectives have been met. We have entered what former Republican adviser Gregg Nunziata calls “the age of American Caesarism.”
Still, buried within V-dem’s report are two important lessons of hope. The first lesson is that demand for democracy, as both a norm and practice, remains strong. Democracy remains powerful as an ideal, which is why even autocrats rarely reject elections outright and often rely on the appearance of democratic forms to confer legitimacy. Trump may troll liberals by cosplaying a king, selling 2028 merch, or even quipping in relation to the midterms that “when you think of it, we shouldn’t even have an election.” But Trump still requires elections to be viewed as legitimate—even within the Republican Party. Uncertainty in elections can never fully be removed while democracy remains the norm.
The second lesson is that the first election after a democratic slide is a pivotal moment to reverse the trend. This means the 2026 midterm elections are more than a referendum on Trump. They are a test of whether American democracy can repair itself. Elections remain dangerous to autocrats precisely because they cannot fully control what voters will do.
Nevertheless, autocrats still attempt to tilt the playing field in their favor. To consolidate their grip on power, autocrats engage in what Stephen Levitsky and Lucan Way call “competitive authoritarianism.” Opposition remains legal and elections are still contested. But authoritarians weaponize the executive and judicial machinery of the state to make opposition costly.
Taking a page out of the authoritarian playbook, Trump has worked to discipline institutions that might constrain him. He has filled the administrative state with party sycophants, hollowed out government agencies, and targeted media and universities. He wields violent rhetoric to delegitimize opposition, both antifa bogymen and centrist liberals, and pardons those who illegally act in the administration’s interests, encouraging others to act with impunity. The list goes on. The point is to intimidate civil society and silence dissent. Historian Timothy Snyder calls this “anticipatory obedience.”
The danger, however, is that Trump is not alone. His impulses have become intertwined with party strategy. Voting rights are the clearest example of this unified threat. Trump’s SAVE Act has stalled in the Senate, but the Roberts Court has arrived with the cavalry to fulfill the Republican party’s long-awaited agenda. The recent Callais v Louisiana has already revealed itself to be a cudgel in Black voting districts. In a perverse acceptance that racism no longer exists, the ruling has green-lit a gerrymander race to the bottom.
Trump is a political bully. He seeks to whittle us down with near constant reminders that he has the power and we do not. Broadly, this thumb-on-his nose strategy underpins his social media message. This is its only message: Power begets power. Trump is relying on us to accept defeat that has not yet occurred. But power is not the same as inevitability. Despite the increasingly stacked odds, the upcoming midterm elections are a pivotal moment to repudiate autocracy.
Justice Elena Kagan, in her stinging dissent in the Callais v Louisiana decision, reminds us that the Voting Rights Act “was born of the literal blood of Union soldiers and civil rights marchers” and “[brought] this Nation closer to fulfilling the ideals of democracy and racial equality.” Rights were born in struggle. They can be lost in despondency. We must remind ourselves that democratic institutions are not self-executing: We are the guardrails.
What I call a “living democracy” builds on the uncertainty and hope that lies within the heart of the democratic project. The late political theorist Sheldin Wolin named this hopefulness “fugitive democracy,” something fleeting that must be continually renewed. As Wolin writes, “The possibility of renewal draws on a simple fact: that ordinary individuals are capable of creating new cultural patterns of commonality at any moment.” It is up to us to rebuild hope in our political communities and in such numbers that we can defeat the electoral odds stacked against us.
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For Maine Communities, Congress Must Fund Defenders, Not Detention and Deportation
Having experienced firsthand the terrors of the Trump administration’s detention and deportation agenda, Maine has already paid the price of this cruelty. We cannot afford one additional dollar of public investment in immigration operations.
May 17, 2026
In recent weeks, Congress passed a budget proposal seeking additional billions to fund federal immigration operations. Despite widespread public opposition to the inhuman actions of the Trump administration’s immigration agencies, Congress is moving forward with these budget plans that would further harm the stability and well-being of Maine’s families and immigrant communities. As the budget reconciliation process continues, Sens. Susan Collins and Angus King and our representatives must reject these dangerous proposals and instead fund real solutions to protect families and our constitutional rights.
On top of the $170 billion that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was granted last year, the proposal passed by the House and the Senate would give $70 billion in additional funding for harmful immigration operations, with no strings attached. Having experienced firsthand the terrors of the Trump administration’s detention and deportation agenda, Maine has already paid the price of this cruelty. We cannot afford one additional dollar of public investment in immigration operations.
Over the last 15 months, DHS has used its billions to send federal agents into Maine and other communities to abduct people from courtrooms, workplaces, and homes, tearing them from their right to a fair day in court. This has led to unprecedented Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention rates, an ever-increasing death toll in detention, thousands of family separations, and growing numbers of removals without due process.
According to an analysis by our organization, ICE apprehensions in Maine increased 37% when comparing all of 2024 and the first 10.5 months of 2025. ICE predominantly targeted Black and brown individuals without any criminal charges. ICE relies on categorizing people as having “Pending Criminal Charges” or “Other.” They targeted working-age men, disproportionately from African and Latin American countries, robbing families of their breadwinners.
Instead of attacking families and their constitutional rights, our federal funds should be used to support families and uphold due process.
Immigrants are integral to our state. More than 19,000 children in Maine have at least one immigrant parent. Over 56,000 immigrants live in Maine—and though they make up only 4% of the population, immigrant workers account for nearly 5% of the labor force. In 2025 alone, Maine’s immigrant residents paid 625.8 million in taxes.
In the face of escalating raids, in partnership with Presente!ME and their People’s Coalition on Safety and Justice, Maine Immigrants Rights' Coalition launched an Immigrant Defense Hotline and Resource Hub in October 2025 as “Community Watch” to record ICE sightings and offer legal support. Because there is no public defender system in immigration court, our services have been a critical last line of defense. But up against chaotic federal agencies with unlimited funding, this has not been enough.
Instead of attacking families and their constitutional rights, our federal funds should be used to support families and uphold due process. Research, including a recent three-year randomized study by the Vera Institute of Justice, consistently shows that people with a lawyer are far more likely to obtain the legal relief they are entitled to—allowing them to return to their jobs, communities, and families. When our rights and communities are threatened, we must fund defenders, not the detention and deportation machine.
As a diverse network of over 100 organizations, my partners and I are committed to defending due process and holding the government accountable. Just as we work every day to hold DHS accountable in the courtroom, Congress must do the same in Washington and reject this unnecessary and harmful infusion of funding for immigration detention and operations. Congress should invest in less costly, more supportive services like legal representation that uphold the right to due process and help people navigate the immigration system without disrupting our communities.
As Maine’s congressional leaders move forward with their budget reconciliation proposals, we urge them to remember that the stability, rights, and well-being of our communities are in their hands. We send you to Washington to invest in solutions that give every Mainer a fair shot at building a safe, stable, and dignified life in this nation they call home.
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Donald Trump’s Tower Envy
Trump believes that being president should remove any barrier to erection of new structures, from arches to paint jobs to statues, no matter the violation of law or taste.
May 17, 2026
In her 1984 book Missile Envy , Helen Caldicott identified the Freudian motivations behind the impetus of Cold Warriors to build bigger bombs and more powerful rockets. President Donald Trump has tower envy, a neurosis over the feeling that other world leaders have larger buildings. Why does Trump insist on putting his name on variously sized structures, commissioning statues of himself, and undertaking misguided and illegal renovations of existing facilities? The reason comes down to a narcissistic fascination with monuments to power such as those erected by Soviet leader Joseph Stalin and Romanian dictator Nikolai Ceausescu, but dating to Napoleon Bonaparte and his Arc de Triomphe.
Trump has long aimed for the sky with his towers, his Mar-o-Lago castle, and his unfinished great Mexican wall. He first sought to make his name through a failed project for a 150-story skyscraper on New York’s Upper West Side. But Trump rose to the occasion with the Grand Hyatt Hotel that opened in 1980, and next erected the Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue with its gaudy interiors. Perhaps suffering from Stendhal syndrome, a transient paranoid psychosis brought on by exposure to cultural objects, Trump began supplication to Soviet leaders in the late 1980s to unveil a Trump tower in Moscow. Russian operatives have since forced his unconscious to contemplate Russian President Vladimir Putin’s scandalous virility as manifested in the $30 billion Sochi Olympics and a $1.4 billion golden palace. The result is rampant tower envy.
His Triumphal Arch
Trump believes that being president should remove any barrier to erection of new structures. These range from arches to paint jobs to statues. Trump is insisting on building “a gold-accented giant victory arch” along the Potomac River, at 250 feet taller than the Lincoln Memorial and the US Capitol. Despite overwhelmingly negative feedback from the public, the “Arc de Trump” gained approval of a commission stacked by Trump loyalists who share his lack of taste, sensibility, and history. Trump commission documents reveal a grotesque, grandiose, disruptive, and unnecessarily impotent structure. The arc may help the president overcome clear feelings of inadequacy like those of Napoleon Bonaparte who died well before his Parisian Arc de Triomphe, at 150 feet, was completed.
Napoleon apparently inspired Trump’s feelings of meager crowd size. Napoleon insisted upon a grand cortege to mark his passage from one palace to another, with immense crowds lining the route. Recalled one observer, “Bonaparte deployed the pomp of royalty … he was preceded by 150 musicians, two thousand guardsmen, gold and silver gleamed on the carriage, the horses decorations and on the guardsmen's uniforms.” (Peter the Great assembled a parade of little people in 1710, but out of jest and love, not out of inferiority.) Trump, however, worries about size, especially crowd size. He ordered government photos retouched to show his inaugural crowd was bigger than Barack Obama’s. He said, “I get the biggest crowd size, and they keep getting bigger.”
He must affix his name to monumentalities to project virility and to deflect attention from corrupt deals with foreign governments, felonies, and alleged pedophilia.
Crowd size envy has its roots in psychological turmoil. Napoleon obviously had the first Napoleon complex. In the search for the source of his many complexes, the doctor who conducted Napoleon’s autopsy in 1821 secretly removed his penis. The member made its way through various collectors, becoming “like a piece of leather or a shriveled eel,” but perhaps bigger than Trump’s who, while tall and obese, is “smaller than average… not freakishly small,” but with “a huge mushroom head. Like a toadstool.”
Painting Over His Inadequacies
Napoleon commissioned the neoclassicist painter Jacques-Louis David commemorate his inauguration with a canvas over 20 by 30 feet. In 2014 Trump illegally used a Trump Foundation check to pay for a massive portrait of Trump in his golf finery at a Trump golf course that was well hung at the Trump Doral golf course bar. The Trump Foundation was closed over this and other fraud. Tower envy.
To inflate his diminished presidency, Trump paints over federal properties. Ignoring aesthetics, rejecting the will of the people, and breaking the law with every stroke, he ordered the painting of the reflecting pool between the Washington and Lincoln Memorials in blue. It may be that Trump has pool envy. Joseph Stalin never saw the finished “Moscow Pool,” the world’s largest outdoor swimming pool. It arose on the site of the demolished Cathedral of Christ the Savior, which the militantly atheist Bolsheviks tore down to erect a 430-foot Palace of the Soviets, with a huge Lenin statue on top. That project was abandoned as too costly, and it became a heated outdoor pool. Trump embraced his pool envy by tearing down the West Wing to build a ballroom.
For the reflecting pool paint job, Trump chose the color and contractor without any review, with a company that has worked for Trump at his private golf club given a no-bid contract, with sevenfold cost overruns before the job began. Trump used AI to make the pool great again: On May 1 the mortally obese Trump posted a fake image of himself, shirtless, but with his bulbous belly and breasts airbrushed away, alongside with several other Trump officials and an unidentified woman, but apparently one over 18 years old, as they lounged in the pool. The impotent creature followed by posting a photo of Presidents Obama and Joe Biden, and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) in the pool filled with feces.
Trump Tower Tbilisi, Georgia
The diagnosis of tower envy describes all Trump erections. He must affix his name to monumentalities to project virility and to deflect attention from corrupt deals with foreign governments, felonies, and alleged pedophilia. His masculine maneuvers do not always promise results. After he added his name to the Kennedy Center, performing artists cancelled their appearances in droves. This has required its shuttering for two years for “renovations.” Usually, leaders have the good taste to die before being so presumptuous as to put their name on currency, park passes, centers, institutions, buildings, airports, steaks, and centers for the arts.
Trump has no intention of avoiding newer erections as president, even as these actions violate the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution. Having pocketed money from Middle East leaders, the Trump family is expanding into Tbilisi, Georgia, with a 70-story Trump Tower” becoming the tallest skyscraper in the country; it will dwarf the 70-foot tall aluminum “Kartlis Deda” (Mother of Georgia, 1958) statue located on Sololaki Hill. Then there’s the Trump Tower Down Under, a $1 billion development at 91 floors, to rise with other real estate projects in Oman, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and perhaps the “Gaza Riviera,” if the president can get Jared Kushner and the Israelis to remove all Palestinians.
Tower envy, brute monumentalism, and cheap cover-up are Trump’s go-to aesthetic design.
Another tacky celebration of the Trumpian legacy is his Garden of American Heroes. The garden involves the creation of 250 statues depicting a list of Trumpian “founding fathers,” activists, political figures, businesspeople, athletes, celebrities, and pop culture icons. Trump ordered the garden to be finished before July 4, 2026, on the 250th anniversary of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence which, like the Bible, he has never read. Some of the funding will come from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), which has a new grant competition to create “up to three statues” at $200,000 per statue, and which “must be life-size and made of marble, granite, bronze, copper, or brass,” but no Botox or orange dyes. Sadly, Elon Musk’s “DOGE” illegally cancelled 1,400 NEH grants, and it remains unclear what impact Trump’s “garden” grants will have on more valuable NEH humanities research programs. In the meantime Trump covered the White House rose garden with concrete pavers because he actually hates gardens.
If You Paint it, They Will Come
Trump loves gloss paints and gold accoutrements to distract attention from his infirm, swollen, and discolored appendages; for them he uses concealer and support socks. He ordered covering the blemishes of the 130-year-old Eisenhower Executive Office Building across the street from the White House with white paint. White paint white may help make the building appear larger, but still not as large as Ceausescu’s Palace of Parliament, the second-largest administrative building in the world after the Pentagon, with more than 1,100 rooms and a nuclear bunker underneath. (Three thousand workers died during its construction.) Perhaps in response to Ceausescu’s grandiosity, Trump insists on erecting an ever-growing ballroom, now at $1 billion and with a nuclear bunker of its own.
But an authoritarian paint job will destroy the Eisenhower Building’s exterior of granite (quarried in Vinalhaven, Maine, in America, not like most Trump products that are manufactured abroad). Paint adheres poorly to granite, reveals its imperfections, leads immediately to peeling, chipping, staining, and requires forever high maintenance—which is why no one paints granite kitchen counters. But tower envy, brute monumentalism, and cheap cover-up are Trump’s go-to aesthetic design.
Everything He Touches Turns to Gold
If not his own Lenin-like mausoleum, which was constructed with polished, but not painted granite, there will be a Miami-based excrescence, the Trump Presidential Library, perhaps with a mock-up bathroom to display the secret documents he stole from the White House—modeled on the bathroom he used at Mar-o-Lago to hold them. Also to be interred are the 747 jet that the Qataris gave him in return for favors. An auditorium featuring an already completed 22-foot gold statue of Trump will crown the spectacle. As one of his potent progeny, Eric, wrote, “Over the past six months, I have poured my heart and soul into this project with my incredible team… This landmark… will stand as a lasting testament to an amazing man, an amazing developer, and the greatest President our Nation has ever known.” Sculptor Alan Cottrel manufactured the recently-unveiled statue, but was misled about its purposes and meanings, and he gently called it a “cluster f--k.” Contrell was instructed by the statue’s crypo investors “to alter Trump’s appearance… making him thinner and removing his ‘turkey neck,’” which may be a euphemism for some other appendage.
Whatever the size of the gold president, Trump’s Christian nationalist handlers have forgotten the fact that the 22-foot gold erection recalls the biblical story of the golden calf in the Book of Exodus and the punishment to those who embraced idolatry. Even more, the golden Trump will not rise above the largest bronze statues in the world, the 65-feet tall effigies of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il on Mansu Hill in central Pyongyang. One hopes that Trump does not set his eyes upon the 555-feet tall Washington Monument, the world’s tallest stone (marble) obelisk. We have heard that Trump wants to paint it orange.
If you have any doubt, remember after 9/11 Trump instinctively ejaculated on that day that one of his buildings had become the tallest in downtown Manhattan.
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