Ask A Genius 1478: Trump’s Distractions, Apple’s Investments, and Why U.S. Crime Rates Are Dropping
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2025/08/07
Rick Rosner critiques Donald Trump’s latest antics, including claims about the 2028 Olympics and deflecting from Epstein inquiries. He questions the credibility of Trump’s partnership with Apple CEO Tim Cook over a $100 billion investment. Rosner analyzes the reported 4.5% drop in U.S. crime rates, attributing it to digitalization, reduced street life, and fewer opportunities for petty crime. He reflects on changes in society, policing, incarceration, and the evolving nature of crime in a cashless, surveilled era.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What else did Trump do recently that was dumb?
Rick Rosner: He said something about “the alliance” coming to Los Angeles in three years—whatever that means. Right now, he is constantly spewing random nonsense because people keep asking him about Epstein, and he wants to distract from it. He deflects with absurdities to change the conversation.
The amount of random nonsense Trump is throwing out now might be greater than at any previous point in his presidency. Yesterday, he announced that he and a board of advisors—including his former Attorney General Pam Bondi—are going to “take over” the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics.
For what purpose? Who knows. He will not run the Olympics. It is pure spectacle. He throws out chum—nonsense to keep people distracted—so they stop focusing on his association with Epstein.
Jacobsen: Apple announced it’s investing an extra $100 billion in the U.S. Any thoughts?
Rosner: So Trump and Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple, announced this $100 billion figure, probably for some new data center or infrastructure project. These kinds of announcements happen periodically. Some of them materialize; some do not. Remember when Foxconn, the huge Taiwanese electronics manufacturer that builds Apple products, announced during Trump’s first term that it was investing billions to build a manufacturing plant in Wisconsin? That never happened.
Companies will be building data centers for AI and non-AI purposes. Some of those will be announced but never built. Both Trump and Biden have tried to take credit for this sort of thing, and sometimes the credit is deserved. Biden passed a major infrastructure bill that includes subsidies and incentives to bring chip manufacturing back to the U.S.
But this is a long-term process. It takes years—often up to a decade—to go from planning to a functioning chip plant. Semiconductor manufacturing is exact and complex. You cannot just build a fab in six months. So whether this all leads to a domestic chip renaissance remains to be seen.
So does Trump deserve credit for any of it? I don’t know. Companies build things. It may suggest that tech companies aim to generate revenue and therefore require the necessary infrastructure. There is a profit incentive. That’s it.
Jacobsen: The U.S. crime rate fell by 4.5% in 2024, marking the second consecutive year of decline, according to the FBI. Thoughts?
Rosner: That means crime was still rising at least into 2022. Which is odd because I constantly hear people talking about how crime is worse now. When it comes to serious crimes—especially violent crime—the statistics matter. But one problem with U.S. crime data is that there’s no federal requirement for local police departments to report their numbers.
So the FBI has to gather data voluntarily from local law enforcement agencies. I assume they have people who reach out to all the central police and sheriff’s departments across the country and ask for crime figures. Based on that, they publish national statistics. But again, there’s no uniform reporting mandate.
Congress—thanks to pressure from the NRA and gun lobbies—has historically blocked efforts to mandate gun crime reporting or to fund firearm-related research.
But let’s assume the FBI’s numbers are reasonably accurate. Crime in the U.S. peaked in the late 1980s and early 1990s, under George H. W. Bush and during Clinton’s first term. Clinton cracked down on crime, passed tough-on-crime laws, and the prison population exploded. By the end of the 1990s, the U.S. incarceration rate had increased by about 400%. Did that reduce crime? Probably. But it also made the U.S. the country with the most incarcerated people in the world, both in absolute numbers and per capita. There has been some prison reform since then, but Republicans still push the idea that crime is out of control, even though crime is down more than 50% compared to the early 1990s.
But Fox News will cherry-pick any increase in crime in one city and make it sound like all of America is falling apart.
Of course. And another reason street crime is down is that street life itself has diminished. In the early 1990s, few people had cell phones. Google wasn’t a thing until the mid-2000s. The first iPhone came out in 2007. Now, there are more smartphones than there are adult humans. People don’t go out as much anymore. We carry less cash. And if people are not on the streets, there are fewer opportunities for street crime. So the digital shift contributed to the drop.
It makes sense that crime is going down. I don’t gamble in Vegas because I can do math and know it’s a losing game. Whenever I went to Vegas for work trips or bachelor parties, my activity was walking through casinos and seeing if anyone had dropped cash. Sometimes I would find a $10 bill or something. But now, you can’t even do that because gambling is all digital. You stick a card into a machine, load up credits, and use your credit card for everything.
So there’s not much physical money in circulation inside casinos anymore. I assume they’ll pay out in cash if you request it, but most of the process is electronic now. No one carries cash anymore. So it makes sense that robbery and street theft have gone down. If you’re going to make a heist movie, setting it in the present might not work. There are cameras everywhere, and we’re no longer a cash-based society. What are you going to do with $3 million in physical cash today? Most of the economy has moved online.
You probably want to set your heist movie in the 1980s or something, back when there was more cash in circulation. Or put it in the future and have people stealing organs or rare isotopes or whatever. I do not know.
It raises the question: what are the people who used to be doing crime doing now? I do not know. Playing video games, watching porn, posting on Instagram. Fewer people are committing petty crimes, which is not only lovely but interesting. It suggests that removing easy opportunities for small-time crime might reduce the number of crimes committed.
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