Bulwark Takes - Explaining MAGA’s Crime Obsession

Episode Date: September 8, 2025

Sam Stein and JVL discuss the Supreme Court’s decision on ICE and racial profiling, as Trump and MAGA over-inflate how bad crime is as an excuse to continue to raid cities and detain anyone, even American citizens. Read JVL’s The Triad, Understanding Trump’s Pivot to “Crime”

Hey, guys, welcome back to The Bullwork. I'm Sam Stein, managing editor. Here with my bud, JVL. We are here to talk about crime and racial profiling and Trump. There was a couple of things that happened over the weekend and then today. And then, of course, you've dressed it in the trial. But I want to start with today. A Supreme Court decides that they're going to lift a hold on these sort of roving deportation units that the administration have been dispatching to Los Angeles. And basically, they did it by saying that it's totally cool to racially profile. Some of the quotes in there from Brett Kavanaugh are amounted to saying, hey, if someone is Hispanic speaking Spanish and hanging out at a Home Depot, it makes common sense that they might be more likely to be here illegally and therefore send ice after them. And he said, look, if you discover after the fact that they're not here illegally, just let them go. To me, this is just sanctioning racial profiling. And to a lot of other people, too, frankly. How'd you read it? Yeah. So this is a Fourth Amendment.

case, and the argument against is these are unreasonable searches and seizures, and these are being conducted without any probable cause. And it is important to understand the Supreme Court released this decision without any explanation. Right. It was just, yeah, no, they can do it. Brett Kavanaugh, I guess, really wanted to get on the record. How much he agreed with it? Which is a weird thing to offer a concurrence. He did not have to do that. Yeah. I'm going to read something from his concurrence. As for stops of those individuals who are legally in the country, the questioning in those circumstances is typically brief, and those individuals may promptly go free after making clear to the immigration officers that they are U.S. citizens or

otherwise legally in the United States. Right. Let me just read you some headlines. U.S. citizen detained by ICE in L.A. says she wasn't given water for 24 hours. U.S. citizen says she was arrested and jailed by ICE in San Francisco. U.S. citizens, legal residents, detained during Southern California legal raids filing claims against the government. Pregnant U.S. citizen arrested by ICE went into labor prematurely in California, claim says. It is simply not the case that in practice what Kavanaugh believes to be true is what is happening universally. And so, like, I don't even know what to, it's like he's living in an alternate universe.

Well, you'd have to play it out this way. If you are Hispanic or look Hispanic and you live in Los Angeles and you go, go to Home Depot, but you are a U.S. citizen. From now on, you'd have to bring your papers with you. You'd have to, right, bring your citizenship. Whatever papers, prove your citizenship. You couldn't leave. Let's say you forgot to do it at that time.

And they round you up and you claim to them, I am a U.S. citizen, but they don't believe you. You are fucked until somehow you can get a lawyer on the phone or figure out a way to get your citizenship authenticated in front of them. And even then, it's unclear how long that will take. In that act of detaining you, putting you in a detention center, forcing you to actually get a lawyer, there are damages that are associated with that act that are not just fiscal. Lawyers don't do these things for free, Sam. Yes, I know. It's crazy.

And so now you're basically saying to people, you have this burden that you have to carry around unless you are stapling your citizenship papers to you at all times. And I'm not trying to be like a dot-eye liberal about this, but it does strike me that. the white male Supreme Court justice is the one who did this. He has nothing to worry about. He's not going to go out and get detained or, you know, it's so to not understand the problems associated with racial profiling is beyond. So there, I mean, that is one way to read this is that this is an out of touch lawyer out in his ivory tower who simply doesn't understand the way in which law enforcement

conducts itself, because this isn't a case of law as being enforced. force is just a case of LEOs being rogue, except that Kavanaugh and this court also said recently that it was not acceptable for universities to take race and ethnicity as one of the factors they consider in making admissions. So as far as I can tell, colleges can't use anything that they may intuit about a person's race or ethnicity to bestow admissions, but agents of the state who carry weapons and are authorized to use lethal force can detain people based on. I mean, I don't want to be one of these people who are like, it's all racism, but I think it's all racism. There's a fair amount of

it here. I just don't understand legitimately. What is another way to read that? There is not really, It's hard to read it another way. Actually, the only other way, and it is still racism, but the only way is that it's a highly politicized Supreme Court that will just do whatever. Well, that's fair. Yeah. Whatever the Trump administration wants. Right.

And now, I was thinking about this, I mean, because Trump has obviously suffered some setbacks on the lower court level, but there's really been only one real setback. And I don't even know if he can qualify that biggest setback for him at the Supreme Court level. And that was the Obrego-Garcia order. early on. That was vague enough that they kind of skirted it for a little bit. But other than that, he's pretty much gotten everything he could want from the Supreme Court. And a lot of this has been done on the shadow docket like you're talking about. But they've allowed him to fire heads of independent agencies. They've basically sanctioned almost all of his immigration stuff.

The big questions are what will happen with appropriations. But they've said he can undo congressionally created offices like USAID, which is, again, an insane thing. It takes an act of Congress to create these things with the president. Can you unilaterally destroy them? What? And so he's basically been giving, and that might, I guess, substantiate what the whole, like, we'll just do what Trump wants them to do argument. But I do think race is obviously coming here.

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And that's kind of coming to a head in Chicago, where over the weekend you had that napalm tweet that Trump put out, not a tweet, a bleat, whatever, who the fuck cares? I love to try it today because it got at something that's, like, bothering me. And what do you tell about Derek Hunter sock and just the contradictions and the lack of outrage from Derek Hunter and how that would launch the triad here? Yeah. So there's this mouth breather named Derek Hunter. And back during the election campaign, he wrote an op-ed for the Hill in which he was like, oh, Kamala Harris is lying to you about Trump sending the military after U.S. citizens.

And it turns out, yeah, Trump, Trump sent the military after U.S. citizens. And he did it in Los Angeles. He has done it in D.C. He, over the weekend, threatened to do it in Chicago. And again, saying Chicago is about to see why it's called the Department of War, not saying, like, the criminal underworld in Chicago. He's not saying the Moroni family, right? Right.

Like, just, yeah, we're going to make war against the U.S., this great American city. Anyway, this seems like kind of a thing that maybe if I were Derek Hunter, I would be like an unbelievable shame over. But in fact, he has spent the last 48 hours doing like dozens upon dozens of tweets about crime. And our old buddy, Mark Caputo, formerly the bulwark, now at Axios, had a big story about this today where this is how MAGA and Trump is pivoting. They are pivoting hard into crime. And you are, I mean, you could see it in real time today by going to Twitter and looking at feeds like this guy, Derek Hunter's and Charlie Carter. Everything is just crime, crime, crime, videos upon videos and demands of how, how dare they, right? I'm sure you've

seen this today, right? No, it's a Charlotte video that they've been pushing, and it's horrible. Like, obviously, individual crime like that, and even more than individual, you know, if you have any collective issues of crime in a community, it's horrible, but what they do is they amplify it, and then they turn around and say, well, why aren't you paying attention to it? Why aren't you, why are you ignoring? Why does it mean ignoring it? So it is a bit bit, yeah. Yeah. So this serves a few purposes for, for the administration. The first is which, crime becomes a pretext to continue deployments of the military, right? And that is my belief, maybe this is wrong.

My theory is that all of that stuff, the military, is really aimed at softening the ground for November of 2026, when they are going to want to deploy military to high turnout overwhelmingly democratic areas and attempt to shave like 300ths of a point off of turnout, right? which in close elections, if you do it pretty smartly, right? If you moneyball this, I bet you can find ways in which, you know, 300s to the percentage point here and there, like, manages to flip the house. And they know they're playing for very thin margins. But the other thing it lets you do is right now their big weakness is the economy. Economy is like really, things are not good. We are heading towards a recession.

This allows the administration to posit that there is another crisis even more important than whatever economic bad news there is. And that's crime. And it even allows them, and this is funny because, you know, Trump will never admit that there's an economic crisis, I don't think.

Like, he'll just insist that everything's great, even while we're in recession. But if he decides he does want to give a little ground on that, like he has to, he can do it and then blame crime for it. He can say, it's because of these criminals have stabbed us in the back. And because of all the Democrats

who have enabled them and who are on the side of the criminals, that's why you're blah, blah, blah. Well, he can do that. He can also, and he's done so far, blame immigration, obviously, right? Like all the jobs losses they've said is just because we're kicking out the illegal immigrants. And, you know, third line is that Native-born Americans are noticing job growth. And so there's a duality to it.

I guess I'm kind of curious because I'm trying to wreck my head about this. In 2018, was that the caravan election where they warned about the caravans coming? I'm trying to remember. I think it was. I can be wrong because I feel like they were all caravan. elections for a stretch there. The OG caravan election, but they do this playbook. I think what's different about this is that it's not explicitly about immigrants.

Right. But it's about cities that are become haven for crimes. I was watching Trump today speak about the D.C. situation at the prayer breakfast, wherever he was at this morning. It's like just men's on a different planet. It's like, I have an anonymous friend who finally, after four years of never going to eat, a restaurant in D.C., went out four times. week and a half. It's like, come on. And he said, I haven't got out in four years for dinner with

my wife. The restaurants were all closing because people were afraid, even if they were in a restaurant. You know, guys would walk in with guns into a restaurant. And that's over. It's not happening. It's now safe. And this man said, I've gone out to dinner in the last week and a half four times. That's helpful because DC restaurants are suffering. So it's good for his friend for helping prop up the local economy. But like, I do think there are people. But like, I do think there are who, and obviously there are people who believe that, you know, D.C., Chicago, New York City are just, you know, hellholes. And if you left your house, you would be stabbed. So I do think this is a message not obviously to the cities. It's to the people who are outside the cities who

look at, you know, who have this perception of city life that is totally unmoor from reality. Yeah. I want to do a little rant here. Is that okay? Can I just rant at you for a minute? So it drives me crazy that there are a lot of very well-meaning, people who hate Donald Trump, who will look at this and will begin with, well, of course, we do have a crime problem. I hate that, too, actually. And I just reject this framing completely. I rejected root and branch because saying like there's a crime, the crime is bad is like

saying that water is wet. All crime is bad. But guess what? There is always crime, always and forever. You cannot judge crime against some platonic ideal of, well, if we were Singapore, then maybe we'd only have two acts of graffiti every year and there would be no murders. That's not reality. The chart you put in your piece is unbelievable. I'm looking at it right now. From the FBI, the report of violent crime in the United States from 1990 to 2023.

You had the airport to the rate in 2020. But I'm looking back at 92, 93. Like, people don't remember. Like, that actually was a time when you would go into. in New York City and be, like, legitimately be scared. Times Square was just beep shows and, you know, vagrants in vagueness. The era of Bernie Gets, right? Yeah. I mean, the Charles Bronson movies and the, the Clint Eastwood vigilante movies. Right, right.

But my point is that I know serious person should judge crime in any way other than relatively. Like, it has to be judged relative to recent. American history and context. And to give in to the frame of, well, crime is a problem. Now, don't give into that. That's absolute bullshit. Even American cities where things are relatively bad are still infinitely safer than they were in 1990.

And guess what? Your parents and my parents went around Chicago and New York all the time in the 90s and they were fine too. Like, you know, this is, things are okay. And this weirdness of like, you know, hey, we're not afraid of polio. We're not going to get our kids vaccinated, but, oh, oh, I don't want to set foot in the Bronx. Give me a fucking break. It's all just racism, Sam.

Like, I honestly, and this is the other thing I want to say. Just if you, please, anybody listening to this, go look at some MAGA feeds on Twitter or on YouTube. Do that over the next 24 hours. Look at all the crime videos they're showing. Count the number of ones where the perps are white. Yeah, it's not, you won't see any. Because I'm telling you, it's zero. Zero.

It's zero. Unless there's a person who commits like assault or murder who's trans, in which case they can finger them. No, but otherwise, it is this weird. It's this total racialist vision. That guy, Derek Hunter, he's even posting, you know, pictures of assaults and, you know, videos of street fights from France because it's like anything to find places where there are black people hitting other people.

It's just a naked racist. Do you remember how the knockout game bad that happened? Yeah. And that to me stood out as like the epitome of what happens here, which is legitimately horrifying thing, but like maybe, you know, a handful of people were affected by it. And yet it consumed Fox News for weeks on end. I guess it makes good TV, makes good politics for them too. Can I say the other thing is so weird about this, Sam, is that this idea that like the media

is covering up crime, we are in like year 45 of if it bleak. leads, it leads, which is, you know, just turn on any local newscast anywhere in America and at 11 o'clock, it doesn't matter if somebody discovered cold fusion that day, they're going to lead with whatever murder happened, you know, in the nearest city. Like, this is, no, no, it's all relative. It's like, you know, what is the number of people who die from car accidents every year? Exponentially more than, you know, where you get in the inner city crime spree. So it's like, yeah, The priorities are wrong. The coverage is wrong, but it's where we are, and Trump's playing it.

Javier, always uplifting to talk to you. Yeah. Appreciate it, buddy. Yeah, it's great. Subscribe to the feed, guys. Click like. We appreciate that too. Talk to you later.