Watch the Moment MSNBC Realized Trump has Gotten Democrats to Defend Crime
“It’s a trap. Yes. It’s a trap.”
This is pure gold.
There was a moment yesterday on MSNBC’s Morning Joe when Mika Brzezinski was speaking with former host Chris Matthews when it dawned on them that Trump has gotten Democrats to embrace the indefensible position of defending crime in Washington, DC.
Mika and Matthews agree that this is a “trap” that Trump has set for them. Funny how Democrats keep falling into the very same trap.
Transcript via Real Clear Politics:
MIKA BRZEZINSKI, MSNBC HOST: I want to ask you, not just your take about this move by President Trump, what you feel about it, but also how Democrats should be responding. What do you think the politics of this is? I think it’s a political win for Trump, and I think that the Democrats need to go beyond saying no, look at the data, crime is going down.
I feel that is exactly the wrong response politically, even if it’s true, because the problems that D.C. is facing, whether the data shows it’s going up or down, is homelessness, crime, rats, poverty, disparity in wealth, all the systemic problems that cities are facing. And I’m wondering if Democrats need to go beyond the data and come up with a real answer to these problems. What do you think in terms of this on the political level?
Do you think this is a win for Trump? How do you think Democrats are responding?
CHRIS MATTHEWS: Well, there’s a couple things here. I think he’s showing strength, which is always a big thing with him. I want to go back to what you just said initially about me. I was a Capitol policeman just for three months. It was a patronage job. I later became a legislative assistant to a senator.
But I got to tell you, when he has a guy in the Justice Department now who said, kill the cops, kill the cops during the January 6th event, I’ll never forget that, that a president of the United States says no, he pardoned the people that committed crimes that day and had their pictures taken so you have hard evidence of their criminality. And he let them go. He pardoned them. And then he put this guy who says kill the cops in the Justice Department. It’s awful. It’s awful. Is he for the government or against the government? That’s a good question.
Now in terms of D.C., I’ve chosen to live my life here. I love D.C. I think it’s a beautiful city. When I go to work, when I do morning yoga, coming in early in the morning, I got to tell you it’s a beautiful city. Jefferson Memorial, the Washington Monument, the Lincoln Memorial. You come up to Washington Mall, it’s beautiful. Now there are some crimes that are evident and are iconic. If you come into this city, you’re going to see pup tents in DuPont Circle…
Trump looks at the city visually like a real estate agent. He wants to beautify the city like he’s doing at the White House with that ridiculous ballroom he’s putting in and getting rid of the Rose Garden. That’s Trump work. But I think it shows strength. I agree with you. I think this is a strength move against the big cities who are in a difficult situation on crime.
And the murder rate, you can’t keep saying violent crime is down, but the murder rate is up. To the average person, the murder rate is about life and death. You don’t brag about a rising murder rate. And the Democrats are, I agree with you, Mika, they’re falling into the trap of defending what’s indefensible.
MIKA BRZEZINSKI: It’s a trap. Yes. It’s a trap.
This is the short clip:
💡The moment when MSNBC’s Chris Matthews and Mika Brzezinski finally realize Democrats have been duped by Trump into defending violent crime in DC:
“It’s a trap!" pic.twitter.com/J3AlvIKGHA
— Western Lensman (@WesternLensman) August 13, 2025
And here’s the extended version:
Democrats and the media continue falling into this trap because their reflexive, knee-jerk reaction to everything Trump says or does is to take up the opposite position without even considering the implications.
On this point, CNN’s Scott Jennings says Democrats are acting like idiots.
🔥@ScottJenningsKY nails Democrats to the wall for opposing safer streets in DC:
“They’re acting like IDIOTS."
"Democrats don't know what to do with themselves. Every time Donald Trump tries to do something, they reflexively feel the need to oppose it without thinking through… pic.twitter.com/QycQ10KqjG
— Western Lensman (@WesternLensman) August 13, 2025
Featured image via YouTube.
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Comments
Yes, what a cunning ‘trap’ that Trump laid, to say ‘crime is bad, I will stop crime’.
Truly a 4D chess play, a riddle wrapped in a puzzle wrapped in an enigma.
“ Democrats and the media continue falling into this trap because their reflexive, knee-jerk reaction to everything Trump says or does is to take up the opposite position without even considering the implications.”
I once worked with a quite incompetent neurosurgeon who reflexively disagreed with everything I said. Didn’t matter what it was. One day, we were both at a conference and he made a statement about something—I don’t recall what it was. I then said that that was a good point and I agreed with him. He immediately responded by saying that, actually…he was having second thoughts about what he had just said and decided he had been wrong initially.
I couldn’t help myself—I just started laughing.
Murder is a very difficult crime to misclassify, downgrade, or ignore. So if your statistics show rising murder rate but your criminal violence reports are going down, somebody is cooking the books.
“a guy in the Justice Department now who said, kill the cops, kill the cops during the January 6th event”
This apparently refers to Jared Wise. Perplexity.ai: “He is a former FBI agent who participated in the January 6, 2021, Capitol riot and was captured on police bodycam footage during the event shouting at police officers to “kill ’em” and calling them “Nazi” and “Gestapo.””
At least Matthews refers to J6 as an “event” rather than an “insurrection”. And Mika understands that dealing with crime is a win for Trump.
Progress!!
Thanks for this item. Because I never heard of the incident before.
I guess when you’re ENTIRELY peacefully protesting behind the lines at the US Capitol, and the Capitol Police suddenly wheel and start firing flash grenades and rubber bullets into the faces of the crowd, including children, emotions can run a bit high and things can be said.
(And for those of you who think the days are over of search engines silently deplatforming results they don’t want you to see, think again. Search for:
january 6 capitol police began by shooting
Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo deliver three or four top pages where 50% of the results are Biden Malarkey directly from NPR and PBS; the rest from Biden’s DOJ, Capitol Police, Politico, FactCheck, NYT, WaPo, WIkipedia, The Blaze, and even some dipshits at an outfit called American Oversight that decry a “heavily armed, Trump-incited mob attack” right in the subhead.
The Russian yandex.com? Most fairly matched my query in the second hit.)
I had an argument with Perplexity.ai because the only sources it used for my question about Jared Wise were leftist. I managed to get it to admit that it should have included Wise’s abject apology from his trial.
AI is almost completely worthless for political questions since it is trained on mainstream media.
Priceless.
Mika Brzezinski says “the problems that D.C. is facing, whether the data shows [sic] it’s going up or down, is homelessness, crime, rats, poverty, disparity in wealth, all the systemic problems that cities are facing.” She’s absolutely right because DemoncRat voters will not elect to office people who want to fix homelessness, crime and rats, which are within their purview because they’re trying to fix the other things which are not within their purview. So DemoncRat run cities have become cesspools of homelessness, crime and rats, which then appear to be systemic but really are not. For any other city, I would say, stew in the mess of your own making, but Washington DC is different because it’s the nation’s Capital. From my perspective, home rule for DC has been a mistake because of the public officials elected by DemoncRat voters. Home rule should be terminated and Congress should retake control of running DC.
And they never will. It is literally impossible to elect somebody capable of ‘fixing’ homelessness, because THEY WANT TO LIVE LIKE THAT. True homeless, those just fallen on hard times that need support to get back on their feet, are a tiny fraction of the homeless population, and they have all the support network they need
Almost all of them are drug addicts or mentally ill that are utterly incapable of NOT being homeless. You can’t ‘fix’ them. The only solution is prosecute public drug use.
I agree. But I also stand firm in the need to reopen psychiatric hospitals to house the mentally ill. They don’t belong in prisons or homeless. They belong in a mental facility so they are not a harm to themselves or others.
There are some crazy people out there.
And it’s worth pointing out that a large percentage of drug addicts/alcoholics are mentally ill or injured who are self-medicating.
Not only would a huge part of the homeless problem be eliminated with housing the mentally ill in institutions but a huge part of the drug traffic as well.
Our society’s “compassion” in getting rid of the asylums and being soft on drugs has resulted in the hopeless squalor of homeless encampments.
“Suicidal Empathy?”
“Suicidal Empathy?”
“Take me in, O tender woman.”
…….the need to reopen psychiatric hospitals to house the mentally ill…….
…….and former presidents who don’t where the heck they are or what they are doing or where they have been or what was signed by autopen the last four years while they were in a coma.
“ The only solution is prosecute public drug use.”
Or, let natural selection take its course.
Clarification: I’m talking the joy-poppers, not the truly mentally ill.
You think turds on the street are a cleanup problem?
I don’t know, but the ones that were in the white house the last four years were.
I suspect that this opinion will be unpopular with our libertarian leaning crowd here, but I think that we need to re-examine out un-nuanced acceptance of the legal authority of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”. The phrase comes from the Declaration Of Independence, not the Constitution.
The Declaration of Independence is not a legally binding document in the way that laws, the Constitution, or statutes are.
The 5th Amendment of course promises: “No person shall… be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.”
However, the legal standard for individual liberties has been set so far in favor of the individual that that the society as a whole is being harmed.
Your right to live as you choose should not be permitted to infringe on my right or live as I choose, nor should you be allowed to live in a matter that damages my property or diminishes its value.
In short, we need to lower the legal standards which currently prevent mentally ill people from being hospitalized…. not for their own benefit but to reduce the harm they cause to other’s pursuit of happiness.
I don’t believe the “legal standards” (or the DoI founding principles) are the chokepoint here.
Number one, the “legal standards” for incarcerating criminals are largely the same as they were 50 years ago (versus stupidities such as California’s $900 shoplifting cap). It’s just that blue polities have decided not to enforce theirs.
Number two, the “legal standards” for incarcerating the insane haven’t really changed all that much either. What has changed is the availability of places to incarcerate them. You can’t assign people to facilities that don’t exist, so judges avoid doing so.
Our problem is that we are letting 20 million illegals from Mexico pursue happiness in our country.
Libertarians, real ones anyway, believe in the principle of non aggression which extends to other individuals, their property and their contracts/private agreements. That principle includes inferred rights associated with those such as enjoyment of the property. Some folks try and straw man libertarianism as endorsing unrestrained personal liberty to do whatever they want even if it impacts others. That is anarchy not libertarianism.
Easy example is a noise violation. I can play my music as loud as I want but it can’t impact others. If I disturb my neighbors then I am violating the non aggression principle b/c the noise impacts the enjoyment of their property. Same for vagrant weirdos harassing passersby… they violated the non aggression principle so lock their ass up. If Cray Cray get them into a mental hospital to get help don’t just arrest them to let them go back on the street to reoffend. Same for the drugged out whackos… I could care less if some dude wants to shoot up heroin so long as his choices don’t impact others but when he’s passed out in the doorway of a business or in a schoolyard that’s not excusable b/c he’s an addict …lock his ass up. No we should not be providing methadone or anything else, he goes cold turkey and if he makes it through he can eventually be released when he serves his prison term for the crimes they committed.
In sum libertarians believe very strongly that individual responsibility accompanies individual liberty, that the consequences of those choices in exercise of individual liberty must follow and that the legitimate gov’t purpose is pretty narrow; defense of Nation, public safety and enforcement of private contracts.
Although not part of the Constitution, the words of the Declaration are exactly that – a declaration of intent for the purpose of the establishment of a new country. They provide guiding principles for the interpretation of the Constitution and the purpose of government in general, as do other founding documents that are not part of the Constitution.
I usually just describe them thusly: the Declaration is the goal statement; the Constitution is the business plan.
To defend crime directly without hedging. They have been quietly defending crime for decades.
“homelessness, crime, rats, poverty, disparity in wealth, all the systemic problems that cities are facing. “
disparity in wealth is thrown in with all the others as “systemic”
NOPE
all the policies of the left have given us rats homeless crime welfare fatherless homes etc etc
BUT “DISPARITY IN WEALTH” is not “systemic”
thats like blaming the gun for the crime,,which lefty does as a systemic avenue of We aint responsible for our kids shooting those guns…bs they spew
the system is capitalism ,,WHEN ALLOWED to flourish
it creates and wipes out “disparities” as a low IQ person who has a service to offer can still become wealthy IER,, ,then they could have imagined under that socialist system they promote to their low IQ people ,, as the answer to equality …equity
Disparity in wealth IS systemic. It’s necessary in a capitalist system, just like you can’t take benefit from hydroelectric power without a disparity of elevation.
The reason this is not unfair is that here, unlike in monarchical Europe, the wealth is not statically distributed. Any hustler can go from poverty to comfortable wealth through luck and effort… and the children and grandchildren of rich parents can piss away that legacy on small dogs, big handbags, and residential resorts (or coke and Ukrainian hookers) and end up on assistance. The top 10% of earners always control 90% of the money (or whatever the exact numbers are), but the trick is that people move fluidly in and out of that top 10%.This topic is explained expertly in “The Millionaire Next Door.”
Though not as clear a path as in the past. Take a look at rates of homeownership by those under 30 today v a couple decades ago, then look at them from 1970. Take a look at real inflation adjusted wages from 1970 to today, its a relentless decline. The difference between then and now is stark and reasons ARE structural though probably not entirely deliberate. The lower rates of marriage and rising age of first marriage reflect the economic realities. Gotta be financially viable to attract a mate and many can’t at all with those who can can’t do so until 31 for men.
The golden era of post WWII economy was a temporary phenomenon. Cheap energy, mass employment in well paid jobs, GI Bill boosting home ownership, new home construction/build out of Suburbs and little international competition in manufacturing/industrial sectors. The boomers grew up in this period of brief economic ultra prosperity where buying a home and getting a good paying job were relatively easy. The shift to 401K and stock investments accelerated the bubble. Many rode the asset bubble and think they are somehow gurus when it was really just happenstance advantage of their generational cohort.
The Boomers bought homes with a one income household and lived very well. Today that’s all but impossible for average people. The globalists shipped out the manufacturing jobs in the 90s and early ’00s. Their green allies effectively shut down coal fired electric generation and crippled entire regions dependent on coal mining. Meanwhile the globalists allowed/encouraged tens of millions of illegal aliens to flood the Nation keeping wages low. Add in the affirmative action and quota hiring/promotion on top of this which did limit individual prospects.
As Gen X I did OK financially. I delayed gratification, saved and invested though it was pretty easy to do that in an Army career when deployed and in training for long stretches. I took advantage of the tail end of the asset bubble to buy rental homes with OPM used the rent to pay mortgage/expenses then sold at a very appreciated prices 2x what I paid.. Same for my home, used cheap credit to buy and my military housing allowance to fund the payments and sold out making about a 65% profit. Invested heavily in equities post ’08 and rode the natural cycle back up. I did well b/c I rode the natural cycle not b/c I’m some whiz. Today there’s more than 500K more sellers than buyers looking for homes. Institutional investors are buying up residential properties crowding out families looking for a home. Rent and subscription pricing model for younger workers whose wages are artificially suppressed by cheaper imported or offshore labor is the new normal and it is systematic. The under 35 generations are struggling with these systematic problems.
Many of them are not acting.
To actually BELIEVE the lefty talking points makes one an idiot.
To cynically use those points to influence idiots is to be a Dem politician.
Maybe – I know this is going to sound crazy – but maybe the point of fighting crime wasn’t to score political points. Maybe President Trump really wanted to fight crime!
That can’t be. Everyone knows politicians only do things to score points with one group or another.
Of course Trump may be a politician in name only.
Democrats don’t worry about murder, silly! They worry about the Clintons ruining them like lambs before a slaughter!
If only we could get the lot of them to stand on a short pier while Trump helpfully advises them that they probably shouldn’t take a long walk.
Mika doesn’t look anything like Admiral Akbar…
I was going to comment that the Admiral is no longer the handsome dude he was in 1983.
It’s so heartening to see an old, broken valise agree with a a dissipated, old Irish drunk.
91% of DC residents say crime is a big problem and only 7% say it’s not a problem. I wonder if that 7% are the criminals?
“Worried? Aboot what? Heeeeeeyyyyy! Relax, buddy!”
Only some of the criminals. The rest of the criminals are angry about being robbed the other day.
It has been my experience that in any survey roughly 10% of the respondents just wants to @#$?!! with the poll taker and will respond accordingly.
The governor of NM mobilized the National Guard back in April to deploy to Albuquerque because of out of control crime. They’ve been on the streets since May. Yesterday she declared a state of emergency for Española and Rio Arriba county which is northeast of Albuquerque. That declaration includes the ability to deploy the National Guard there as well. Española has always been a dangerous town (I won’t even drive through unarmed) and local media is tripping over themselves explaining to us why this is completely different from what Trump has done. Even democrats here understand it’s the same.