Democratic strategist James Carville called on his party to tie Donald Trump’s presidency, and the Republicans who supported it, to rising crime rates across the United States.
Carville argued in a Wall Street Journal op-ed published Wednesday that Democrats needed to hold Republicans’ feet to the fire following high-profile cases of police brutality, systemic racism, and a sharp rise in crime over the past four years.
“Mr. Trump infamously said about the government’s slow early response to the Covid crisis, ‘I don’t accept responsibility at all.’ He and the Republicans don’t accept responsibility for the crime wave either. Instead, they point fingers at everyone else,” Carville wrote. “But they built it, and they own it.”
Carville said Republicans are betting people will forget what happened during Trump’s time in office but that it was up to Democrats “to keep the disastrous failures of the Trump presidency, including on crime, alive and well from now until Election Day 2022.”
Carville called corruption the Trump administration’s “oxygen” and said the former president’s “stunning display of lawlessness” set an example to criminals who believed they, too, could evade justice.
Carville said years of skirting the law led to the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. He also called out recent Republican attempts to defend the attack and implored his party to ask: “Who really voted to defund the police? And who did it to cover up the investigation of a host of crimes? Not the Democrats.”
The funding Carville referenced is the $1.9 billion supplemental appropriations bill that would have amped up security at the Capitol. The House narrowly passed the legislation last week. All Republicans who were present during the count voted against it.
“So, Democrats, listen up: When it comes to crime, don’t pivot, don’t take it off the table- hold Mr. Trump and the Republicans accountable,” Carville wrote. “Make them own the crime wave they created. Democrats shouldn’t stop at police reform. We need to get the whole job done. Reform the police and clean up the Trump crime wave.”
Carville, who served as former President Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign manager, also wrote that the Democratic Party was “flat-out better” on crime than Republicans.
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He added that there are “plenty of good policies to reduce crime and reform police” but that Democrats can’t make sweeping changes until they have big majorities, “and we can’t win big majorities unless we go on the offensive against the cheap talk of the Republican Party.”
