But just because urban crime is a real problem doesn’t mean that Trump can fix it by decree. Trump is exceeding his constitutional authority in attempting to circumvent the frustratingly iterative process of federalist democracy, which rarely offers political or practical shortcuts.

As with many things Trump, we are here because of abject Democratic failures. During the pandemic, much of America endured a rupture in personal safety and order. Reported homicides rose by a third between 2019 and 2022. Cities that seemed to have vanquished the bad old decades disintegrated in full national view: New York City’s murder level spiked 53 percent from near-record lows between 2019 and 2021, the sharpest increase in recorded history.

The summer 2020 riots, too, heightened voter fears. People who remember plywood Manhattan (stores boarded up against another night of window smashing), or who saw Minneapolis burn, can hold two perfectly compatible thoughts in their heads: just because there were peaceful protests in 2020 doesn’t mean there weren’t violent disturbances.

In much of the country, if not New York, rising violence in 2020 and 2021 was a sharp acceleration of existing trends; killings had been rising for a half decade. Moreover, even people who didn’t acutely fear being murdered had already noticed the gradual increase in pettier transgressions, with stores locking the toothpaste behind Plexiglass and drivers with fake plates blowing more red lights.

Crime and disorder, not coincidentally, exploded as high-profile cities, including San Francisco and New York, embraced new state and local policies to soften or altogether eliminate the consequences of committing many crimes — including, yes, reducing the use of cash bail to incarcerate suspects.

Democrats and their media allies and social-media surrogates for years ignored or minimized these failures and gaslighted the growing public anxiety. “Crime is much lower than it was in 1990,” we heard repeatedly, as if a 30-year-old, out-of-context benchmark could be a substitute for continued steady progress (never mind that no Democrat would ever argue that 1990 should serve as the singular barometer to track other ills).

“Crime is higher in red states,” we heard (and still hear). Democrats ignored a big reason for this disparity. People living in areas with higher population density have long demanded, and gotten, a lower crime rate, partly because they are more aware of crime’s impact. A person screaming threats on the subway can unnerve dozens of witnesses; scream on a rural road, and nobody will hear you.

 “Crime happens for a lot of reasons,” we heard, “you can’t just blame bail reform.” Sure, but those other factors were unwitting arguments for far more careful reform of criminal-justice laws, not for throwing out decades of practice and hoping for the best. For example, serious mental illness is proliferating, perhaps because of growing pot use. So it isn’t a good idea to discard one imperfect tool of incapacitating the violently mentally ill — keeping them in jail before a trial — without creating another, better tool: boosting the capacity for long-term, in-patient mental-health treatment. Likewise, organized retail theft, abetted by Facebook, has spread, which means that it isn’t a good idea to diminish the consequences for stealing stuff from stores to feed this new market. 

 The latest Democratic argument is that crime is now falling, not rising. Good news, yes, but this line of reasoning ignores the impact of years of preventable trauma. This “mission-accomplished” take also ignores the fact that crime isn’t falling uniformly. Overall felonies in New York City, for example, as of mid-August, remain 29 percent higher than in 2019. 

Into this void of Democratic leadership slides Trump. As on immigration, tariffs, and federal budget efficiencies, the president wants quick results. One of his twin executive orders on Monday decreed that “federal policies and resources should not be used to support jurisdictions with cashless bail policies,” and directed the attorney general to compile a list of states and cities with such policies governing crimes that “pose a clear threat to public safety and order,” so that federal agencies can “suspend or terminate” their grants. The other order directed the Pentagon to “designate an appropriate number of each state’s trained National Guard members to be reasonably available for rapid mobilization” for “quelling civil disturbances and ensuring the public safety and order.”  

 But there’s a major difference between the president’s actions on immigration and trade and his actions on state and local disorder. Whether you agree or disagree with Trump’s tariffs and immigration measures, there’s no question that the federal government has substantial authority, under both the Constitution and statutory law, to govern these areas.

 By contrast, state and local governments, not Washington, govern most crime and disorder. (The main exceptions are crimes that cross state or international borders.) The constitutional basis is clear. Article IV requires that states respect the “judicial proceedings of every other state,” thus implying that such proceedings will differ from state to state. A person who flees one state to escape prosecution for a serious crime is to be extradited “to the state having jurisdiction of the crime,” further solidifying state, not national, control. Moreover, Trump has no authority to revoke existing federal grants or restrict future federal funding based on a state’s criminal-justice laws. Congress, not the White House, sets conditions on federal grants. 

 The Founding Fathers had a practical basis for reserving most criminal-justice powers at the state and local level. States differ from one another, in everything from culture to geography to population density. The circumstances in which a person charged with homicide can make a self-defense claim, for example, can and should differ between a predominantly rural state, in which citizens know they are largely on their own, and an urban state, in which citizens know the police are stationed on the next block. Voters in a state with a well-funded public-health system may feel more comfortable releasing a chronic thief provided he attend rehab, and voters in a state with a sophisticated mental-health system may think someone arrested for punching a stranger may be better rehabilitated in a hospital rather than in a jail.  

 Enforcement, too, is better left to state and local officials. National Guard troops have a role in protecting people and property during real emergencies — after a hurricane, say, when a neighborhood is entirely depopulated and needs protection from looting. But Guardsmen and women can’t make the subtle daily distinctions that police officers must make.

Unherd Suggested

How crime shattered DC

By Emily Jashinsky

A police officer regularly stationed at a Bronx subway stop may develop a knack for knowing which fare-beater to let off with a warning — a day laborer he knows, who has just forgotten his wallet — and which fare-beater to serve with a fine. A police officer patrolling a gang-plagued Brooklyn street may arrest one person for swigging from an open bottle of vodka, because he knows that that person was just released from prison for a violent crime. He may walk by another individual engaged in the same behavior, because he knows that that person is walking home from his father’s funeral.  

 That’s not to say that governors and state legislators always, or usually, get it right on creating and maintaining criminal-justice systems, or that city police get it right on enforcement. But the past few years have shown that state and local democracy is working, albeit slowly and imperfectly. In New York, for example, Gov. Kathy Hochul and the state legislature have tightened the criminal-justice laws several times, in part because the governor was threatened by a close Republican challenger in 2022 and will likely face a similarly close opponent next year. San Francisco voters threw out their progressive district attorney. 

 The democratic process at the state and local level is annoying, difficult, takes too long, and isn’t guaranteed to have a perfect or even a good result, but this doesn’t mean that the process is irrevocably broken. As with all issues of democratic governance, the question is: compared to what? 

Trump isn’t powerless in nudging states in the right direction. The president could ask Congress to enact a bill similar to the Clinton-era “Cops on the Beat” program, which offered $8.8 billion in grants ($19.4 billion in today’s inflated dollars) to hire police officers. Congress could attach certain conditions to these grants, including requirements to report better data. The federal government could require state and local jurisdictions, for example, to report on what percentage of suspects arrested for nonviolent crimes and released on no or low bail go on to face re-arrest for similar and more serious crimes. New funding for in-patient and intensive outpatient mental-health treatment could require states and cities to report on the share of patients who are arrested for criminal behavior after release.

Trump has tapped into a problem, which is more than national Democrats have done. But acknowledging a problem, though critical, isn’t the same as fixing it.

The factory workers constructed and inscribed the black granite for the Vietnam Memorial in Washington. They created a national monument at Arlington for the Pentagon victims of the September 11 attacks, and they did the same for the heart-stopping 9/11 monument to New York City. They do it too for individual men and women who have been killed in action. When I was there, the Iraq war was raging and they were busy.

Two things struck me about Granite Industries and its place in US life. The first was how remote America’s beating heart can be. Vermont is mainly forest. In winter, it glistens in gorgeous silence as the snows come and go. This company plays a central part in American life and yet exists in an unexplored, unpopulated corner of the nation.

The second thing was how corners of the nation can be not just unexplored but genuinely separate from the rest. Yes, America is a collection of states, and yes, the constitution does not refer to a single nation. But the lived experience of these facts is still somewhat alien to those of us who come from centralised nations, and frankly alien to some Americans, particularly on the Left, who have convinced themselves in recent decades that the Unum is more important than the pluribus.

It’s a fascinating fact that the very same people who value diversity seem not to be keen on it in an area of American life where it has traditionally existed: the relationship between the states and the central federal government. There is evidence aplenty that this diversity is growing to an extent that is unavoidable, occasionally dangerous, but in some ways positive.

To state the obvious first: American states are hugely different even in areas where the geography, the weather, the feel to a visiting Martian, might be similar. Vermont and New Hampshire are good examples. When I drove to see the headstones that day, we crossed from New Hampshire. There’s a sign, “Welcome to Vermont” — but there doesn’t have to be. The last thing you see on the New Hampshire side of the interstate is a Walmart and dozens of other large stores and car parks and accompanying tat.

Then just trees. This is because New Hampshire has no sales tax. So no big stores see the point of basing themselves on the Vermont side of the border where you have to pay a hefty 6% on anything you buy. In theory Vermonters have to declare stuff they bring home but, well, that’s in theory.

There is otherwise little difference between the states — both mainly trees perched on granite. But New Hampshire is a proto-libertarian paradise whose state motto is “Live Free or Die” (there used to be a Free State Project that tried to get libertarians to live there) and Vermont is one of the most taxed and regulated states in the Union whose most famous politician is a self-described socialist, Bernie Sanders.

Good luck to them both. That’s the kind of difference that all America can cope with, even celebrate. What happens now though if the differences become even wider and extend into areas of life that touch everyone?

More from this author

Why does America hate itself?

By Justin Webb

One of the greatest political victories of recent times in America was that of the Federalist Society founded at Yale Law School in 1982. Its aim was “checking federal power, protecting individual liberty and interpreting the Constitution according to its original meaning” — in other words, upholding the legal concept of “originalism”. It set about its business of changing the judiciary and advancing its own members with gusto and guile and, via the Supreme Court justice picks of Donald Trump, has won its battle, indeed for a generation, won its war.

But coverage of the victory has concentrated on the wrong aspects of that core mission statement. Yes, originalism and individual liberty have consequences for law, but what of the first part, the checking of federal power?

This is what the court has begun to do and this is what might change America: de-nationalise it to an extent that goes far beyond the odd tax difference. The court may pull it apart or allow it to come apart gradually, but either way points to a new dispensation with some basic rights that all Americans can enjoy, but not nearly so many of them.

It’s worth stressing that the nationalisation of so much of American life was a bipartisan affair even if the Republicans rhetorically railed against it. The prominence of business regulatory issues on the GOP’s agenda meant that in some areas they were the keenest of federal regulators. Large companies tend to prefer comprehensive standards to a hodgepodge of local rules. But now of course the party has largely said goodbye to big business and howdy to the mom-and-pop world of low tax and local regulation. This change allows state control to be a genuine aim.

Individual states will be where the action is in this new world. The end of Roe v. Wade made no difference to the rights of women to have abortions in those states that want those rights protected. Indeed, in Kansas it may well have reinvigorated a local sense of the importance that abortion should remain legal. But what the court undoubtedly did is check federal power.

More from this author

The death of American dignity

By Justin Webb

The idea of national progress — an idea that extends back to FDR and the New Deal — may well be coming to an end. American history is rightly seen as a series of broad periods of consensus with one party or tendency in overall power. The most recent is the post-war welfare state, which not only improved the lives of Americans in material ways but also gave them the right to a decent life. This helped to forge a sense of national destiny, as such rights must be for everyone or else they don’t count as rights. That is what is threatened now. How odd if Trump — flawed in so many ways — goes down in history as the bringer of such profound change.

Of course, there are dangers. “States’ rights” used to mean rights for racists: a rallying cry for the slave-owning South. Might it again? Might states that don’t care much for national democracy go their own way? In Arizona, the Republican candidates for Governor and Secretary of State are both refusing to commit to accepting potential defeat in the midterm elections next month. They seem to be suggesting that Arizona opts out of democracy as it is currently understood. In the event of them winning office, it is difficult to see Arizona accepting anything other than a Republican victory at the next presidential election.

Unilateral secession is not permitted of course under the post-Civil War settlement. But what about plain rogue-ness? The Supreme Court is about to hear a case that would give added power over federal elections to state legislatures and might encourage them to refuse to certify results they didn’t like. It’s freedom for states to be sure, but is it democracy?

None of those threats is easily dismissed. But nor should the potential upside be ignored in a situation where — as a matter of simply empirical fact — Americans have grown apart and done so with some enthusiasm on both sides. Some will see federalism as a rescue mechanism: a multi-speed America where California can press ahead on climate change, Florida can cut tax on business, some states can decriminalise marijuana and some not. In the battle over trans rights some might favour natal females, perhaps in girl’s sport, and some might back the rights of trans women. Choices, choices, choices. Above all this becomes an America where you might want to do something, ban something, enforce something, but in my state we tell you to sling your hook. And the Supreme Court backs me.

Suggested reading

How Turbo-Wokism broke America

By David Samuels

America is huge. You can get a U-Haul truck and move. Millions do. You can also write home from where you have gone and tell folks how much better things are where you live. If you are convincing, they may press for change where they are too.

In 1968, Vermont became the first state in the continental USA to ban advertising billboards. You need a clear view of the trees, they decided. Some thought it was the beginning of communism, and would soon beenforced nationwide. In the end a couple of other tree-filled states joined in, but most of America is still a billboard heaven.

The point is this: you have no right to billboard-free life in America. But you do have a right to live in a state that bans them. If you feel strongly about universal billboard rights you are going to hate this: but you might have to live with it, and in time you’ll settle down.

The midterm elections next month will lead — via Democratic Party losses in the House and possibly the Senate — to more talk of the end of American democracy. Election deniers will be on the march. Yet although America is indeed troubled, there are still options short of conflict. Perhaps that’s the way to see the new federalism: as balm, in troubled times.