President Donald Trump has said a lot of weird things lately, but one claim from today in particular caught our attention. Trump went real weird with it during a press conference as he signed two executive orders, one against flag burning and one eliminating cashless bail for people accused of a crime in Washington D.C. Things went off the rails pretty quickly, however. In-between insisting he’s not a dictator and the ruthless violence of Chinese carp (no argument from this Great Lakes region resident), Trump began mumbling about a very strange form of car theft.
“Beverly Hills, I have friends, they leave their trunk open for their car because they know they’re going to be vandalized,” President Trump said. “They don’t want trunk ripped off in order for them to steal what’s in their bag. They leave doors open so when they go in to steal the radio, they don’t rip off the door.” He goes on to say that it’s “at a level that nobody’s ever seen before.”
What you have to fear is a super villain–level car thief
Now, I will admit, there have been times I’ve lived in places where the common sense philosophy was to keep your car clear of anything while also leaving your doors unlocked in order to save your windows, but I’ve never heard of this kind of cartoonish car wrecking violence in order to steal a radio. Radios, you might have guessed if you know anything about cars, haven’t been an object of desire in car thieves since the advent of integrated infotainment systems took over the car market.
Nowadays, a thief interested in pulling parts from a car is much more likely to go for a catalytic converter. Some thieves will also go for truck tailgates, but they aren’t ripping them off like the Hulk. They removing them to be resold, probably to other poor sods who had their tailgates stolen. Tires and wheels, along with batteries, are also popular stolen objects, but these are all famously parts you can acquire, not with Wolverine levels of strength, but with at most a Sawzall, a wrench, and just enough darkness to pull off the job.
There are no reports about thieves ripping off trunks or car doors in order to steal whats inside. It would be a terrible idea, right? How much attention that would attract. I’d pay money, or sit through a lecture about Jesus, to watch some guy rip a whole car door off or a closed trunk: those things are made to withstand fantastic forces involved in car crashes, after all, and usually need another car going pretty fast to remove them from the body of a car.
This all reminds me of the dehumanizing language surrounding the superpredator myth of the 1990s, which said legions of unloved mega criminals would soon flood the United State. It was as wrong and harmful to society as a whole back then as this weird accusation is today. In other words, we’re doing great, America.