WaPo fails miserably at fact checking Trump, actually proves his point on Democrats, violent crime

The Washington Post attempted to fact check President Donald Trump last week on his claim that Democrat-run cities have the highest rates of violent crime.

However, the newspaper ended up just proving the president's point.

Last Wednesday, Trump said, "You hear about certain places like Chicago and you hear about what's going on in Detroit and other — other cities, all Democrat run. Every one of them is Democrat run. Twenty out of twenty. The 20 worst, the 20 most dangerous are Democrat run."

In response, the Post published an analysis article declaring that Trump was incorrect. "Trump keeps claiming that the most dangerous cities in America are all run by Democrats. They aren't."

Using FBI data on violent crime occurrences per city, the Post found that, indeed, Democrats control almost all of the top-20 most violent American cities.

From the Post:

Most of the current mayors of these cities are Democrats. Two of the mayors of cities with the most reported violent crimes overall, though, are independents and one, the mayor of Jacksonville, Fla., is a Republican. Among the 20 cities with the most violent crime per capita, one isn't a Democrat: the independent mayor of Springfield, Mo.

The graph included in the Post article was visually damning.

So, while Trump was incorrect to say that all of the top-20 most violent cities are ran by Democrats, the Washington Post confirmed the sentiment that Trump tried to convey: when Democrats are in charge, crime is more likely to happen with increased prevalence.

But, according to Washington Post writer Philip Bump, that doesn't really matter.

"Trump would no doubt shrug at that detail, decrying as 'fake news' the revelation that his assertion was only slightly wrong. And, in fairness, it actually doesn't matter that four of the 32 cities listed above have non-Democratic mayors — because it doesn't really matter that the other mayors are Democrats," Bump, the author behind the analysis, wrote.

Bump justified the correlation between crime and Democrat-controlled cities by showing that Democrats almost always win urban areas, which typically have higher occurrences of crime than suburban and rural areas.