With President Trump mulling troop deployments in more American cities, Democrats are responding with denials that crime is a problem — reflexive opposition that amounts to a weak posture. Voters tend to be more favorable to politicians who imply the improv rule: Respond “yes, and” to advance a topic. Never reject a premise with a “no.”

The mayor of Chicago, Brandon Johnson, struggled to execute the Democratic Party’s strategy Tuesday on MSNBC. The host of “Morning Joe,” Charles “Joe” Scarborough, asked if Chicago’s streets “would be safer if there were more uniformed police officers” or “federal funding to help put 5,000 cops” on duty.

Mr. Scarborough pressed Mr. Johnson five times and was met with five denials. It was an opportunity to say, “Yes, and” Chicago would welcome more federal dollars. Mr. Johnson could then have pivoted to arguing that Mr. Trump isn’t sending police officers, but National Guard soldiers who are not instructed or equipped for law enforcement.

A fight over methods offers a better chance of success. The Harvard Caps/Harris poll released Monday found that 54 percent of registered voters believe Mr. Trump’s actions in Washington, D.C., are justified versus 46 percent who found them “unjustified and not necessary.”

Tuesday on CNN, a Maryland Democrat, Congressman Jamin “Jamie” Raskin of Maryland, drew rebukes for his response as well. “Crime,” he said, “has always been part of our history,” a rhetorical shrug at the problem Americans see in headlines every day. 

Mr. Raskin also said that crime is “at a 30-year low” in Washington, D.C., and “down” in Baltimore and Chicago. This ignored the congressional probe into D.C. undercounting crime and that the Second City led the nation in 2024 with 573 homicides.

Sunday on “Meet the Press Now,” Illinois’s Democratic governor, Jay Robert “J.B.” Pritzker, focused on trends, too. Although Chicago had more murders last year than in the U.K., Mr. Pritzker said it “is actually operating extraordinarily well and in a much better position from a crime perspective than it was four years ago.”

Democratic mayors at Los Angeles, Oakland, New York City, and Baltimore all carried the party line that crime is falling. Yet there’s a reason for an old journalism saying, “if it bleeds, it leads.” A single murder or child abduction can strike fear into a city; citizens find slim comfort in statistics.  

In Oval Office remarks on Monday, Mr. Trump made a meal of the rosy scenarios painted by Democrats. He called Mr. Johnson “a very incompetent mayor” and refuted his assertion that the National Guard had “only arrested nine people” in Washington, D.C., putting the number at “well over a thousand.”

Mr. Trump said that guardsmen “took hundreds of guns away from young kids” and “apprehended scores of illegal aliens” along with “dozens of illegal firearms.” He noted that Washington, D.C., was on a streak of “zero murders” that had stretched to 12 days before ending on Tuesday.  

The back-and-forth didn’t strengthen the Democratic hand. In this month’s Economist/YouGov poll, 67 percent of American adults judged urban crime a “major problem.” Just 3 percent said it’s not one and 55 percent that it had increased since 2020, the final year of Mr. Trump’s first term.

The Democratic governor of Maryland, Wesley “Wes” Moore, had a more effective response on Sunday’s “Face the Nation.” He called the National Guard deployments “unconstitutional” and a “violation of the 10th Amendment” protecting the state sovereignty. This, he said, ran counter to the GOP’s small-government orthodoxy.

Ordering soldiers, Mr. Moore said, “to do a job that they’re not trained for is just deeply disrespectful.” He then performed a classic political parry, calling Mr. Trump’s actions “a distraction.” Having made his case, the governor said he wouldn’t activate Maryland’s National Guard for policing.

It is said that perception is reality in politics. Rather than denying Mr. Trump’s concerns about law and order, Democrats would be better off advocating for solutions other than federal troops. “Yes,” they can say, crime is a problem, “and” pledge to work with him to address it in the cities they serve.