Trump Takes Credit for Drop in Chicago Crime. Here’s the Catch.

The Department of Homeland Security is patting itself on the back for Chicago’s dip in crime—even though the record low has absolutely nothing to do with the presence of federal agents.

“Celebrating with Chicagoans that since Operation Midway Blitz in Chicago started, homicides decreased 16 percent, shootings decreased 35 percent (the lowest in four years), robberies decreased 41 percent, vehicular carjackings decreased 48 percent, and transit crime decreased 20 percent,” Homeland Security Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin emailed the Chicago mayor’s office Monday afternoon.

“Thanks to DHS law enforcement, Chicago has experienced the fewest summer murders since 1965!” McLaughlin concluded.

Crime was down across the board by the end of August, according to the Chicago Police Department. But how the Trump administration is responsible for the drop in Windy City crime doesn’t make sense, considering that DHS didn’t arrive in Chicago until September 8.

“Crime is down in Chicago, but ICE/CBP has nothing to do with that work,” posted the Chicago mayor’s office on Tuesday.

If anything, the presence of federal agents in Chicago seems to have made the city less safe. State-sanctioned violence has been nearly nonstop in Chicago over the last few months.

In October, agents used tear gas in residential areas “multiple times without audible warnings,” according to court documents, surprising families with the painful chemical irritant. A couple of weeks later, federal agents allegedly tear-gassed a group of school-age children on their way to a Halloween parade, in a residential Chicago neighborhood.

Regardless, DHS’s Chicago presence is apparently here to stay.

“We aren’t leaving Chicago,” McLaughlin posted on X Tuesday.

The White House is using a report from DoorDash, a food delivery service, to claim that the price of breakfast foods has gone down for American consumers. But their cherry-picked numbers are outrageously misleading.

As President Donald Trump continues to dismiss concerns about affordability, his administration released a report citing DoorDash’s first-ever State of Local Commerce Report, which was published Monday. Among other things, the company’s report claimed that grocery prices on breakfast items have dropped 14 percent between March and September 2025.

Trump officials took that 14 percent and ran with it throughout Monday, touting the statistic as proof that the president had managed to improve the economy. But that number alone is deceptive about the overall price of breakfast foods because of what items are included and what items are missing.

DoorDash’s claim is based on the company’s “Breakfast Basics Index,” which is made up of the price of four items: three eggs, a glass of milk, a bagel, and an avocado. Already, this is a poor metric for breakfast because DoorDash omits breakfast staples such as coffee, bread, bacon, or even orange juice—all of which have seen prices go up in the past year.

Drought and weather conditions in South America have led the price of coffee to increase more than 83 percent so far this year. Meanwhile, NBC News reported that the prices of bread, bacon, and orange juice all saw increases since October 2024. Only by omitting breakfast staples could the company claim a reduction in the price of the most important meal of the day and then be parroted by an administration desperate to assuage mounting concerns about affordability.

The number is also misleading due to what it includes. DoorDash’s report states that the 14 percent drop was “driven largely by the decrease in the price of eggs.” By mid-September, egg prices had crashed at least 70 percent since the highs of March that were brought about by the bird flu outbreak earlier this year. One graph provided by DoorDash, and shared to X by White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, showed a sharply declining price of eggs, while the other items had only gentle slopes.

The price of DoorDash’s “Everyday Essentials Index,” which included the cost of toothpaste, shampoo, toilet paper, laundry detergent, pain medicine, and diapers, “remained flat over twelve months,” according to the company. But in its own report Monday, the White House claimed those costs “fell over the past year.”

Leavitt claimed that DoorDash’s report proved Trump had “defeated Joe Biden’s inflation crisis—just like he promised.” In reality, inflation has steadily increased for the last five months in a row.

Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins also celebrated the results, writing on X: “More savings, less stress—that’s The Trump Effect.”

DoorDash is determined to be a “good partner” of the Trump administration, according to a private company scorecard that circulated through the White House in August. Trump previously met with DoorDash CEO Tony Xu in January.

The Trump administration has heavily relied on companies to spread its false claims about lowering consumer prices. Last week, Trump touted a decrease in the price of Walmart’s 2025 Holiday Meal as proof that groceries were less expensive—but failed to point out that last year’s basket contained more items.

Donald Trump’s Truth Social has its own AI-generated chatbot to compete with the likes of Grok and ChatGPT, but the program has one fatal flaw: It actually tells the truth about the president’s policies.

The AI search function debuted in August, a month after Trump ordered the end of “woke AI” in the federal government. But the program has since become one of his biggest detractors, highlighting the disparity between the Trump administration’s rhetoric and the reality of its work.

The Bulwark asked the Trump-owned chatbot a series of questions about the impacts of Trump’s agenda, ranging from tariffs to the insane claim that he has “solved” eight wars over the last 11 months.

Here’s how the experiment went (with answers edited down for length):

Q: Do Trump’s Tariffs cost the American people money?

Truth Search AI: Yes. Tariffs are taxes on imports that U.S. importers pay and largely pass on through higher prices, so the costs are borne mainly by American businesses and consumers.

Q: Did Donald Trump lie about the 2020 election being “rigged” and “stolen?”

Truth Search AI: Yes. Courts, Trump’s own advisers, and official investigations found no evidence that the 2020 election was “rigged” or “stolen,” despite his repeated claims.

Q: Did people storm the U.S. Capitol on January 6, [2021], because of Donald Trump?

Truth Search AI: Yes. Multiple official and contemporaneous records attribute the January 6, 2021, Capitol breach to a pro‑Trump crowd mobilized around his false election‑fraud claims and pressure campaign to stop certification.

Q: How many wars has Trump ended since taking office in 2025?

Truth Search AI: None. There is no verified instance of President Trump formally ending a war since taking office in January 2025.

Q: Have grocery prices gone down since Donald Trump took office on Jan. 20, 2025?

Truth Search AI: Short answer: No. As of 2025, grocery prices have not fallen since Jan. 20, 2025; they have continued to rise modestly on net.

Thousands of student protesters in Belgrade, Serbia, formed a human shield on Tuesday around a bombed-out military complex, vowing to stop Jared Kushner’s redevelopment company, Affinity Partners, from turning the historical monument into a luxury complex.

NATO bombed Serbia for 78 days in 1999 in an effort to end then–President Slobodan Milosevic’s violent ethnic cleansing of Albanians living in Kosovo, which resulted in the death of 13,000 people (mostly ethnic Albanians). NATO bombed bridges, military buildings, and government buildings. Human Rights Watch estimates that as many as 528 civilians were killed in the bombings. 

Many Serbians still see the bombed buildings as a point of cultural and architectural pride today. 

But in May, Kushner’s company and the Serbian government signed a deal for a 99-year lease of the land the bombed-out buildings are on for “revitalization”—meaning a high-rise hotel, office space, and stores. It will be a $500 million project. Kushner’s company will reportedly build a separate memorial for the bombing elsewhere.  

“The economic progress in Serbia over the past decade has been impressive,” Kushner said at the time. “This development will further elevate Belgrade into the premier international destination it is becoming.”

Protests were planned from the minute the deal was signed. “This is a warning that we will all defend these buildings together,” one of the students told the Associated Press on Tuesday. “We will be the human shield.”

It is unclear how effective the protests will be in delaying or denying the project.

Virginia Senator Tim Kaine accused MSNBC host Katy Tur of “overdramatizing” Democrats’ anger after he voted with seven other Democratic senators to end the government shutdown without any meaningful concessions.

Tur, who spoke with Kaine on Monday, questioned him about why he chose to end the shutdown without securing the Affordable Care Act subsidies that the Democrats had been fighting for. “It doesn’t seem like some of the party is just angry about this; it seems like this is ripping the party apart at a time where it felt like the party was coming back together postelections,” Tur said. “How do you convince your fellow Democrats to stay together on this, and how do you convince voters across the country to believe in the Democrats again?”

“Can I just say: ‘Ripping the party apart’? I think you’re overdramatizing this,” Kaine replied, looking smug. “I know the news business is to try and make everything the biggest crisis since the Cuban missile crisis, or something. There’s differences of opinion!”

Tur, defending her point, went on to quote responses from fellow Democrats, like California Governor Gavin Newsom, who called the deal “pathetic.” “This is me quoting Democrats. I’m not making things up. It’s reading what people are saying and reporting it,” she insisted.

“We’re a big tent, we have different points of view,” Kaine responded. “I’ve been doing this for 31 years. This is by far, by far, a minor league issue within the Democratic Party.”

The most that Kaine and his fellow Dem defectors could do to prevent Americans’ health care premiums from shooting up was get Republicans to agree to a vote on extending the subsidies, which is unlikely to pass in the Senate (and not even guaranteed to happen in the House). But Kaine still touted this as a victory.

“We’re going to unify around having the health care fight within a month, and people are going to see where Democrats are and see where Republicans are,” he said.

What Kaine fails to realize is that he and the seven other Democrats who voted to end the shutdown have already shown us where they stand, and the rest of the party won’t forget it.