Ken Dilanian Calls Out Trump for Bragging About Crime Data He Once Called ‘Fraudulent’

MS NOW’s Ken Dilanian called out the irony in President Donald Trump touting 2025 FBI data showing a drop in violent crime on Friday after campaigning on the premise that those same federal crime statistics were “fraudulent.”

Trump made his way to Long Island on Friday to speak to a crowd of law enforcement officers, both about public safety and about his enthusiasm for New York Republican gubernatorial candidate Bruce Blakeman. Attorney General Todd Blanche and FBI Director Kash Patel joined him.

The president took credit for lowered crime rates across the country, including in Washington, D.C., claiming, “It was so bad when I got there.” Now, he bragged, “young beautiful girls” show up at the White House to thank him for his work on the issue.

In reality, though, as Dilianian explained to the network’s Katy Tur on Friday’s edition of The Moment, “This new FBI report shows that crime declined precipitously last year — and I’ll say again, because it also declined in 2024 and 2023,” adding that dropping crime rates are “a trend that dates back to the ’90s, with the exception of a massive spike in violent crime during COVID.”

He continued:

Since then, though, after the pandemic, crime had sort of settled back to normal levels and continued the trend, but when those reports came out during [former President Joe Biden’s] administration, as you said, Donald Trump claimed they were fraudulent. And it wasn’t just Donald Trump — it was the entire Republican Party establishment and opinion-makers. And they convinced half of America, millions of people, that, in fact, crime was going up when it was going down. Trump campaigned on this issue.

I went to Detroit and rode along with the police, who told me that absolutely crime was going down in their neck of the woods, and Trump just wouldn’t believe it, and he made other people believe otherwise. But the minute he took office, Katy, he began embracing these FBI numbers that he once criticized. So did Kash Patel. So did Todd Blanche. And now, they’re trying to tout this as something that they did, when in fact, the federal government has very little to do with violent crime. Murder, rape, and robbery — these are state crimes.

Watch the full clip above on MS NOW.

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