Trump celebrated 'big success' cutting crime. Was he right?

President Donald Trump celebrated the decline in murder and the National Guard deployments at the State of Union. Here's what the data tells us.

President Donald Trump touted the nation's declining crime rate at his marathon State of the Union address, celebrating the "big success" of his deployment of National Guard troops into American cities.

Trump said he inherited a nation beset by "rampant crime" when he took office in 2025, but his administration has since achieved a "turnaround for the ages."

Violent crime has generally been falling in the United States since reaching a peak in the 1990s. Violence surged during the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic at the tail end of Trump's first term, but began to recede while President Joe Biden was in office.

"I'm not sure I'd agree quite with the framing," Jeff Asher, co-founder of the data analytics firm AH Datalytics, said of Trump's statements on crime. "And a lot of the comments are, I'd say, imprecise and probably lack the context of what was happening in terms of the nation's crime trends really since 2023."

Trump said "the murder rate saw its single largest decline in recorded history" in 2025. "The lowest number in over 125 years — year 1900," Trump said.