Tuesday’s Clay Travis & Buck Sexton Show took on one of the biggest political issues in America: The Democrat crime wave, specifically the shootings and homicides spiking in major cities across the country for the last 12 months. President Donald J. Trump (who’ll appear live on the show Tuesday as our first ever guest) addressed the left’s failure to ensure safety at a weekend rally in Wellington, Ohio.

Trump said, “New York, Chicago, Los Angeles. They have great police forces. They’re not allowed to do their job, and now they’re all leaving. … Chicago — which is the single most dangerous city, large scale — has the strongest gun laws in the country. They even say the strongest gun laws in the world. And yet people are being shot by the thousands every year. Worse than Afghanistan! How about that?”

Buck noted the likely primary victory of Eric Adams, former NYPD police captain, in the Democrats’ New York City mayoral primary as a sign of the tide turning, and contrasted it with Joe Biden speech blaming guns. “They’re scrambling right now,” Buck said, “to try to find a narrative to tell people about why is it that things have gotten so much worse in cities.”

We’re not supposed to think it’s a result of undermining police, defunding police, or the rise of the BLM movement. According to the Wall Street Journal, New York City had 462 more murders in 2020, up 45%, and recorded almost a doubling of shootings. Atlanta murders rose 58%, LA 22%, Philadelphia 37%, and Portland, Oregon, suffered a whopping 533% increase.

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) addressed the Democrat crime wave, saying, “This party is a party of interest groups, of radical interest groups, and so when it comes to crime, this Democratic Party is the party of criminals, of murderers and rapists and child molesters. You know, you look at what they’ve done in the last five months. They’ve sent $1400 stimulus checks to every criminal in America.

“Murderers currently in jail got federal taxpayer checks courtesy of Joe Biden. They want every felon in America to vote. They want to strike down every law that prohibits felons from voting. And their approach to this, it doesn’t make any sense. You know where crimes come from? It comes from the criminals. Stop supporting policies that let violent criminals out early.

“Stop supporting policies that undermine the police.”

Clay remarked that the crime wave is nationwide, sparked by the George Floyd murder and the Black Lives Matter protests. “It would require a level of stupidity that even the dumbest out there cannot really embrace on a truly logical level” not to see the reason for all this suffering. But Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) dismissed headlines citing “percentage increases” as driving “hysteria” and lacking “context.”

“Buck,” Clay said, “I think I speak for both of us when I say — this has certainly been my history as a lawyer — when police commit crimes or are alleged to commit crimes, they should be prosecuted. But we can’t use these individual viral anecdotes as evidence of a systemic problem when, as you point out, the data reflects that they are not in any way actually systemic in nature.”