“I’m announcing a historic action to rescue our nation’s capital from crime, bloodshed, bedlam, and squalor — and worse. This is Liberation Day in [Washington,] DC, and we’re going to take our capital back,” President Donald Trump declared in a press conference on Monday. “Our capital city has been overtaken by violent gangs and bloodthirsty criminals, roving mobs of wild youth, drugged-out maniacs and homeless people. And we’re not going to let it happen anymore. We’re not going to take it.”
Flanked by Attorney General Pam Bondi, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and others, Trump announced his plan to invoke the Home Rule Act (via an executive order declaring a “crime emergency”) to do two things: federalize the DC police force and deploy 800 National Guard troops to help patrol the city’s streets. For the time being, he is also sending FBI agents to aid in crime-fighting.
“You want to have safety in the streets,” Trump said. “You want to be able to leave your apartment or your house where you live and feel safe in going to a store to buy a newspaper or buy something, and you don’t have that now.” He’s right, and the fact that such crime is rampant in our nation’s capital is a disgrace. Obviously, it’s something he’d like to clean up before celebrating America’s 250th birthday next July 4.
Trump’s move is reminiscent of 2020, when he also deployed National Guard troops to DC to quell the widespread riots after George Floyd’s overdose death.
Democrats and their allies in the Leftmedia find a different point of comparison. “I should note,” CNN’s Dana Bash smugly opined, “that the most violent moment in recent history in DC was January 6th, and it was an attack on the United States Capitol by a lot of people who were doing it in the name of Donald Trump.”
Without going down the January 6 rabbit hole, it’s certainly fair to condemn the riot that day. The thugs who battled police were a disgrace to our nation, not least because they deprived the entire Right of the moral high ground. Violent, police-beating riots are what leftists do, not conservatives. Trump didn’t exactly have his best day, either, though it was a far cry from “inciting an insurrection,” which Democrats ridiculously impeached him (again) for.
Nevertheless, Bash is a partisan hack who’s trying to score cheap political points. The only person killed on January 6 was Ashli Babbitt — by a Capitol Police officer. Trump also offered to deploy the National Guard ahead of time, but Nancy Pelosi, by her own admission, failed to secure the Capitol.
The sanctuary city of DC is a violent place every day of the year, and it has nothing to do with what happened for four hours one January afternoon four and a half years ago.
That isn’t the only line of attack from the Left. Democrats and the media are also using statistics to paint an alternate reality.
“Violent crime in the District is at the lowest rates we’ve seen in 30 years,” said the DC City Council in a joint statement, which called Trump’s plan a “manufactured intrusion on local authority.” Multiple Democrats and Leftmedia outlets parroted the same statistic.
A couple of notes: First, urban crime, which was always bad, spiked all over the country thanks to those aforementioned George Floyd riots, which Democrats and their constituents fomented. Joe Biden loved to try to claim credit for “solving” problems he caused. Crime was one. Inflation was another. Failing to enforce the law, encouraging (and even bailing out) rioters, and then claiming to have solved the problem you created is what you might call a party foul.
Second, those DC statistics are, shall we say, questionable. They’re so dubious, in fact, that a DC police commander was suspended last month and is under investigation for manipulating DC crime statistics. Strangely, no Democrat or Leftmedia talkinghead mentioned that when trumpeting the “30-year low” stat. Nor do they note that crime often goes unreported, which further influences statistics.
As for the DC Metropolitan Police Department, Chief Pamela Smith is Joe Biden’s inept DEI hire, and she’d rather distribute “safe sex” kits at a pride parade than serve the best interests of the rank and file. Besides, the department’s union … agrees with Trump. “Crime is spiraling out of control,” the union said Monday, “and immediate action is necessary to restore public safety.”
Furthermore, DC in 2025 compared to DC in 2023 is the wrong relative comparison, and just because crime is going down doesn’t mean it’s low.
Murder is just one type of violent crime, but only St. Louis, New Orleans, and Detroit have higher murder rates than DC among major American cities. It’s higher than Chicago. According to a White House fact sheet, “If Washington, D.C. was a state, it would have the highest homicide rate of any state in the nation.” (Note: Democrats want it to be a state so they get two more senators.)
DC’s murder rate is almost twice that of Bogota, Colombia, and more than three times higher than Mexico City’s. Both are overrun by violent drug cartels. “We doubled up on Baghdad,” Trump added. Last year’s 187 murders in DC were down from a 2023 high of 274, but they’re still more than the pre-Floyd days of 2019, when there were 166 homicides — also far from ideal.
Just hours after Trump’s announcement, yet another man was shot and killed in DC.
Trump will focus on some bad areas of town. “We’re getting rid of the slums too,” Trump said. “I know it’s not politically correct.”
Yet he knows DC crime isn’t relegated to a bad neighborhood or two. Trump noted that, in 2023, Democrat Representative Henry Cuellar was carjacked, and Republican Senator Rand Paul was nearly fatally stabbed. Trump was at least partially motivated by the highly publicized attack last week against the DOGE staffer known as “Big Balls.” The victim may have been unusually high profile, but the crime (carjacking) is quite common.
“I understand a lot of you tend to be on the liberal side,” Trump told the reporters gathered in the White House press room, “but you don’t want to get mugged and raped and shot and killed. And you all know people and friends of yours that that happened.”
Indeed, even amidst media antagonism toward Trump, ABC’s Kyra Phillips revealed that she “was jumped walking just two blocks down from here.” She admitted, “We can talk about the numbers going down, but crime is happening every single day because we’re all experiencing it firsthand.”
Phillips may get it, but don’t miss the almost unreal hilarity of this gem from The Washington Post: “‘This is a safe city, but overhearing and witnessing gang threats and then watching the camera footage of the thuggery is disturbing,’ said one resident, speaking on the condition of anonymity over concerns of personal safety.”
Still, Democrats need Trump to fail and are already working toward that end. They cannot, after all, allow such a stark contrast between their own perpetual misgovernance in American cities and Trump’s successful efforts to clean things up. The petty criminals on DC’s streets may prove far easier to thwart than the sophisticated criminals on Capitol Hill.
“Washington, DC, should be one of the safest, cleanest, and most beautiful cities anywhere in the world,” Trump asserted, “and we’re going to make it that.” It’ll take much more than a few hundred National Guard troops to fix the broken culture in American cities, but here’s hoping (and expecting) he’ll succeed in our capital.
