Trump revives “superpredator” myth to justify D.C. takeover

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Trump brings a moral panic out of mothballs

The president doesn’t trust the data, and he’s deeply worried about kids with guns.

Speaking on the phantom crime wave that forced him to take control of Washington, D.C.’s police force, the president fretted about the supposed scourge. Trump has long advocated for charging children accused of crimes in the nation’s capital as adults. At a Cabinet meeting on Tuesday, he tried his hand at a bit of amateur criminal psychology.

"They’re children, but they’re criminals, he said. “You have 14-year-old kids that are evil. They're sick. And they have to be put away… You can’t have a society where they’re allowed to walk the streets.”

To listeners who weren’t around for the prosperous and paranoid mid-’90s, Donald Trump’s words almost seem shocking. But the seasoned vets among his audience have heard this number before.

Academic John J. DiIulio Jr. coined the term “superpredator” in a 1995 cover story for now-defunct conservative rag The Weekly Standard. DiIulio’s piece warned of a new type of remorseless young person, willing to steal and kill without so much as a troubled night’s sleep. In “The Coming of the Super-Predators,” he imagined the new millennium ushering in a nationwide wave of tens of thousands of “murderers, rapists, and muggers” who place “zero value on the lives of their victims.” DiIulio predicted that violent crime would explode exponentially, making the gang wars of Los Angeles’ Crips and Bloods look like…well, child’s play.

Of course, that didn’t happen. Violent crime was already on the decline in the United States, a trend that continues to this day. But with more newsmagazines, radio talk shows, cable television hours and nascent webpages than ever to fill, the media didn’t let the data get in the way of a story that got readers and viewers’ blood pumping. Americans had more than ever before, and they were ready to be convinced that a middle-schooler in a ski mask was coming to take it.

Conservative columnist Suzanne Fields warned of “America’s teen ticking time bomb.”

“‘Superpredators’ Arrive: Should we cage the new breed of vicious kids?” an on-the-nose headline from Newsweek read.

Around the time that Bob Dole was warning that “today’s newborns will become tomorrow’s super-predators” and First Lady Hillary Clinton was painting a picture of kids with “no conscience,” DeIulio began to fret about the monster he’d created. He told NPR in 1996 that the phrase had “sort of… gotten away from me.”

Trump surely knows better in 2025. Prior to his presidency, one of the biggest black spots on Trump’s legacy was helping to fuel the media hysteria around youth crime in New York City. In 1989, the then-real estate developer took out full-page ads in major New York newspapers calling for the death penalty for five teens who were wrongfully accused of rape.

A more modern, progressive Trump tried to tar former President Joe Biden with the same “superpredator” panic brush as Hillary Clinton back in 2020, saying that the ‘94 crime bill sponsor threw around the out-of-fashion phrase in his Senate days. (Biden denied it, though he did say something similar.)

All that hard-won wisdom is gone in Trump’s second term. He’s desperate for a justification to punish his enemies and is scrambling around for any story that gets his base looking away from Jeffrey Epstein’s case files. So, he’s dug up a shopworn boogeyman, knowing that his supporters would startle at their own shadow if he told them it came from a city near the coast.

What do you think? Does Trump actually believe there’s a crime wave in D.C.? Is he playing to his base, or is he just old and gullible? Sound off in the comments by tapping the speech bubble icon at the top of this email.

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