Three weeks ago, on August 7, President Donald Trump declared that the violent crime rate in the nation’s capital had reached emergency proportions, prompting him to federalize the local police force and send almost 2,000 National Guard troops into the city’s streets. But it wasn’t until last week that Washington D.C.’s Democrat Mayor, Muriel Bowser, withdrew her previous objections to Trump’s intervention and publicly admitted that the National Guard troops have already significantly reduced criminal activity across the city.
“We know that we have had fewer gun crimes, fewer homicides and we have experienced an extreme reduction in carjackings,” Mayor Bowser said at a wide-ranging news conference, while flanked by top city officials, including the chief of police,” Bowser said. “We greatly appreciate the surge of officers that enhances what MPD [the local Washington, D.C. Metropolitan Police Department] has been able to do in this city,” the mayor added.
Her largely upbeat evaluation, praising the success of President Trump’s intervention, stood in sharp contrast to her initial reaction. She previously had called Trump’s actions “unsettling and unprecedented,” and took strong exception to Trump’s description of her city, Washington D.C., as having been “overtaken by violent gangs and bloodthirsty criminals.”
Trump had previously responded to Democratic criticism by boasting that his Washington D.C. intervention had already proven its success by creating an initial 12-day period without a single homicide in the District of Columbia, which Trump said was “the first time that’s taken place in years.”
At her news conference, Mayor Bowser updated the D.C. crime statistics to cover the 20 days immediately following Trump’s August 7 intervention. That data supported Trump’s initial claims of success. According to Bowser, there were only five homicides in D.C., three (37%) fewer than during the same period last year. Robberies were more than halved, from 119 last year to 45 this year, and an epidemic of carjackings in Washington D.C. was nearly eliminated, falling from 31 last year to just four in the current period.
Bowser said that she had a conversation with President Trump earlier that day, in what she called a “courtesy meeting,” and that she also had what she called a “substantive meeting” with both U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi and White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles; however, she did not say what issues were discussed during those meetings.
While Mayor Bower’s news conference remarks were largely positive about the changes that have resulted from Trump’s law and order intervention, she also admitted that there had been a “break in trust” between the local police and the residents of Washington, D.C. She also called the deployment of National Guard troops from across half a dozen Republican-governed states an inefficient use of resources. She also objected to masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement [ICE] agents detaining suspected illegal immigrants in her city for deportation. As the mayor put it, “I am devastated by people [in my city] living in fear.”
TRUMP’S ANTI-CRIME MEASURES GETTING UNEXPECTED SUPPORT
But despite these caveats, Mayor Bower’s public admission that Trump’s anti-crime intervention was successful drew rare praise from the White House and was widely reported even by the consistently anti-Trump mainstream news media. There were also early indications that Trump’s readiness to send in more National Guard troops to strengthen the enforcement of law and order in America’s largest and most crime-ridden cities has the support of most of the general public.
“We thank Mayor Bowser for her cooperation and her willingness to help us make D.C. safe and beautiful,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said the day after the mayor’s press conference.
“The President Trump approach of upholding law and order by letting our brave men and women in blue actually do their jobs to aggressively fight crime works,” Leavitt said. “In just a few weeks, President Trump has done more for D.C. residents than Democrats did in 50 years.”
TRUMP’S DEMOCRAT CRITICS PUT ON THE DEFENSIVE
Meanwhile, prominent Democrats across the country, including would-be 2028 presidential candidates Governor Gavin Newsom of California and Governor JD Pritzker of Illinois, as well as Governor Wes Moore of Maryland, harshly condemned Trump’s previous use of the National Guard to restore law in order in Los Angeles, their current presence in Washington, D.C. and threats to do the same in Chicago, New York City and Baltimore, as illegal presidential power grabs in the country’s largest Democrat-controlled cities.
Last week in Chicago, Governor Pritzker, flanked by other local Democrat elected officials, denied that Chicago is experiencing a crime emergency, despite the city’s notoriously high murder rate, which would warrant a Washington D.C.-type federal intervention, and accused President Trump of “attempting to manufacture a crisis.”
Nevertheless, it is obvious that the popularity of Trump’s recent anti-crime initiatives has put nationally prominent Democrats even further on the defensive in the wake of Trump’s nationwide electoral victory last November. California Governor Newsom, in particular, is now trying to emulate some of Trump’s actions. Specifically, Newsom has announced that he has begun assigning California Highway Patrol officers to help local police to fight crime in the state’s major cities. Newsom insists that he is “not reacting and responding to anything” that Trump has done to fight crime, but it is nevertheless readily apparent that Newsom’s newfound interest in fighting the violent crime that has been running rampant in his state for years is an effort to boost his credibility as a potential 2028 Democrat presidential candidate.
But the problem facing Democrats as they prepare for next year’s midterm elections is that most American voters will be able to easily see the difference between the clear initial success of Trump’s crime-fighting initiatives in Washington, D.C., and the half-hearted effort to replicate them by ineffective Democrat elected officials around the country, such as Newsom.
REPUBLICANS WILL USE THE CRIME ISSUE FOR NEXT YEAR’S ELECTION
Following Trump’s lead, Republican candidates across the country will be able to argue during their midterm campaigns that voters in crime-ridden Democrat-governed cities around the country do have a choice. Trump’s crime-fighting D.C. initiative has already become a test case showing us what America’s long-suffering cities could look like if their voters put more Republican local candidates in power. The D.C. example proves that urban residents do not have to continue to put up with the crime, chaos, and general local government dysfunction that is the result of having elected the soft-on-crime liberal Democrat officials. After being in uninterrupted political power for decades, those Democrats have bankrupted their cities and run them into the ground. Furthermore, in response to calls by the radical progressives who run the Democrat Party today to defund the police and elect soft-on-crime local prosecutors willing to allow all but the most violent and dangerous criminals to go unpunished, they have made the poor, minority group-populated neighborhoods in their cities unsafe places for their residents to live and raise their children.
While Trump made major gains with minority voters in those cities during last November’s presidential elections compared to his results in 2020 and 2016, due mostly to inertia, their local politics is still dominated by liberal Democrat candidates. However, that is not the case with the large number of swing voters who live in America’s suburbs but who regularly work and/or play in the downtown business, sports, and entertainment districts of the nearest big cities. They don’t want to have to worry about their personal safety in commuting to their jobs or during an evening out on the town, or the safety of their children using public transportation to travel between home and their preferred school.
Over the past several years, a significant number of inner city and suburban residents who have the necessary financial means are choosing to “vote with their feet.” They are leaving those dangerous cities and neighborhoods in large numbers to live in the much safer communities in GOP-governed red states, such as Florida and Texas, where elected officials do not have the same liberal tolerance for crime as in most blue cities and states.
DEMOCRATS SUFFER FROM THE BLUE STATE EXODUS AFTER THE 2030 CENSUS
However, the full political impact of that national population shift will not be felt before the presidential election of 2032. That is when the population shift from blue states to red states will be reflected for the first time in the redistribution of the 435 seats in the House of Representatives. In that election, red state Republican candidates will be expected to win most, if not all, of the significant number of seats lost by the blue states due to the crime-induced shrinkage of their populations, as revealed by the results of the next constitutionally mandated nationwide census, scheduled for 2030.
In the meantime, Republican candidates will have a real opportunity in next year’s midterm election campaigns to use President Trump’s effective response to the crime control problem he has already demonstrated in Washington, D.C., to whittle down the Democratic governing majorities in blue states and cities across the country. Republican candidates will be able to argue that they can make our inner cities and suburban neighborhoods safe again by doing something that their Democrat local elected officials have consistently failed to do over the past 50 years. They will promise to restore the lost quality of life and public safety in our cities and suburbs by enforcing the law. By having the local and state police and courts take the relatively small number of repeat criminals, who are responsible for most of the crime, off the streets and into our prisons, Republican officials will be able to promise the elimination of the menace that these dangerous criminals currently pose to this country’s law-abiding citizens and their families.
Meanwhile, nationally prominent liberal Democrats are still making public statements that seek to minimize the seriousness of the nationwide surge in violent crimes since the start of the Covid pandemic lockdown in 2020.
DEMOCRAT EXCUSES FOR TOLERATING CRIME EXPOSED
For decades, elected Democrat officials in this country’s largest cities and states have claimed that they are powerless to do anything that would reduce the rampant theft, carjackings, gun violence, and spreading homeless encampments, which have reduced large sections of America’s greatest cities into third-world-like slums. Instead, these elected Democrats deny their responsibilities by invoking woke rhetoric which falsely blames these problems on the “systemic racism” of American society, “structural inequalities” which the liberal Democrats claim turns these violent street criminals into victims, and perhaps most counterproductive of all, they blame the alleged bias of this country’s police officers, the vast majority of whom are willing to risk their lives daily in order to keep our streets and communities safe.
One recent example is a widely shared video clip on social media showing Maryland liberal Democrat Congressman Jamie Raskin, during his opening statement at a meeting of the House Judiciary committee on May 7 of this year. Raskin said that crime has “always been part of our history,” as if voters in Democrat-ruled cities have no right to expect their elected local and state officials to enforce existing laws and protect them and their family members from attack by violent repeat criminals. Thanks to the passage by the same elected Democrat officials of no-cash-bail city and state laws for violent criminals, they have been allowed to roam our streets, free to prey upon innocent victims, mostly in poor, minority-populated neighborhoods, without fear of prosecution or punishment for their crimes.
Last week, Congressman Raskin, who was one of the lead prosecutors for House Democrats when they tried to remove Trump from office during his first term as president by using the impeachment process, came to the defense of Maryland’s Democrat governor, Wes Moore, who was publicly criticized by President Trump for permitting crime to run rampant in Baltimore. Trump also said that Baltimore might be the next city to which he would dispatch National Guard troops to help restore law and order.
In a televised appearance on CNN, Raskin began by praising Governor Moore for “standing up [against Trump] for the free state of Maryland.” Raskin then added, “We’re not going to be pushed around by this fraudulent would-be king [President Trump].”
In answer to Trump’s criticism, Governor Moore suggested that the president visit Maryland to “walk our streets and not just talk [bad] about us from the Oval Office.”
TRUMP REJECTS AN INVITATION TO WALK THE STREETS OF BALTIMORE
Trump then responded in a message posted on his Truth Social account, “Governor Wes Moore of Maryland has asked, in a rather nasty and provocative tone, that I ‘walk the streets of Maryland’ with him. I assume he is talking about out-of-control, crime-ridden Baltimore. As President, I would much prefer that he clean up this crime disaster before I go there for a ‘walk.’”
But the final word in this dispute came from White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson, who said in an email to The Hill that, “If Democrats spent half as much time addressing crime in their cities as they did going on cable news to complain about President Trump, their residents would be a lot safer.”
Last week, President Trump signed a pair of executive orders that threaten to withhold federal funding from the D.C. government if the requirement for cash bail for the release of arrested criminal suspects is not reinstated, and if local police don’t fully cooperate with the additional federal forces, including ICE, now working to make the District safer. The executive order reinstating cash bail, which was banned by the District Council in 1992, said that its previous prohibition had left “criminals free to endanger American citizens visiting our Nation’s capital, Federal workers discharging their duties to our Nation, and citizens of the District of Columbia trying to live their lives safely.”
TRUMP CONDEMNS NO CASH BAIL AND CALLS FOR CAPITAL PUNISHMENT IN D.C.
Explaining the motive for the new executive orders, White House spokesman Taylor Rogers said in a statement that “anyone with common sense knows that releasing dangerous criminals back on the streets after they commit a violent crime is a bad idea.
“The Left can continue to coddle criminals — but, under President Trump’s direction, there will be a price to pay for heinous crimes committed, such as murder… assault, and armed robbery.”
Trump has said that he also wants to cut off federal funding to other jurisdictions around the country that have ended the practice of requiring arrested criminal suspects to put up cash bail for their release before trial.
The president also said at a televised cabinet meeting last week that he wants to see the death penalty, whose use was banned in 1981 by the D.C. Council, imposed on every person convicted of murder in Washington, D.C., as a further deterrent to violent crime.
However, federal prosecutors can seek the death penalty in federal courts in Washington, D.C., for people accused of one of the violent crimes subject to capital punishment under federal law. These include certain types of first-degree murder, terrorism-related murders, espionage, treason, murders tied to large-scale drug trafficking or racketeering, murders of federal officials and witnesses, and deaths resulting from hijackings or kidnappings, among others.
For example, according to U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro, who was appointed by Trump to be the top federal prosecutor in D.C., the Justice Department is now conducting a death penalty review of the case against Elias Rodriguez. He is the man accused of fatally shooting a young couple, Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim, who both worked at the Israeli Embassy, on May 21, just after they left a diplomatic reception at the Capital Jewish Museum in D.C.
Trump also said that he would ask Republican congressional leaders, House Speaker Mike Johnson and Senate Majority Leader John Thune, to pass legislation that would permit the extension of the deployment of National Guard troops and federal control over the District’s police force. Under Section 740 of D.C.’s Home Rule Act of 1973, Trump’s authority to commandeer D.C.’s police department expires after 30 days unless Congress votes to extend it.
TRUMP CALLS OUT DEMOCRATS FOR MAMDANI’S RADICAL POSITIONS
Trump has also seized upon the permissive attitude towards petty crimes by the winner of the Democrat primary for New York City’s mayoral race, anti-Israel advocate Zohran Mamdani. He, as well as Queens Democrat Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC), is a proud member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) whose 2021 party platform calls for ending the enforcement of all misdemeanor-level criminal offenses, including illegal drug use and sales, and other “petty crimes” such as trespassing, fare jumping, the shoplifting or theft of property worth up to $1,000, assault without a weapon and driving a car while intoxicated.
The DSA platform also declares all forms of policing and criminal detention to be “instruments of class war” designed to “guarantee the domination of the working class” and demands an end to arrest and prosecution for petty theft, such as shoplifting, which it calls “the criminalization of working-class survival.”
The party’s socialist platform also declares that, “For all of the working class to achieve collective liberation, we must constrain, diminish, and abolish [all forms of state imprisonment and the] police themselves.”
Since he won the Democrat mayoral primary, creating a real sense of panic among leading New York State Democrats over his extreme leftist beliefs, Mamdani has been trying cautiously to back away from some of his most unpopular views. However, his years of on-the-record ultra-liberal comments, including some he made during this year’s mayoral primary campaign, have made it very difficult for skeptical voters to take his recent repudiation of those positions seriously.
MAMDANI’S CURIOUS TOLERANCE FOR CRIME
For example, during the primary campaign, Mamdani repeatedly called for the NYPD to stop focusing on what he’s called “non-serious crimes,” which he blames on the failures of our society instead of the criminals. He has also publicly challenged the purpose of imprisoning anyone, including violent criminals.
In one of his current mayoral campaign videos, Mamdani says, “Police have a critical role to play, but right now we’re relying on them to deal with the failures of our social safety net, which is preventing them from doing their actual jobs.” Mamdani now claims that he no longer supports defunding of the police, which he endorsed in one of his posts on Twitter in 2020, when he was a member of the New York State Assembly representing a district in Queens. Instead, Mamdani now claims that as mayor he would keep the NYPD at its current size, but change its job to focusing only upon only what he called the most “serious” crimes.
However, it is not at all clear what kind of crimes Mamdani considers to be serious. During a 2021 protest outside of the Manhattan DA’s office, demanding the shutdown of New York City’s main prison on Riker’s Island, Mamdani challenged New York State’s legal definition of violent crime and declared that the concept of violence itself is what he called “an artificial construction.”
Democrat apologists for Mamdani note that, as mayor of New York City, he would not have the power to change New York State criminal law, but he could order the NYPD to stop making certain categories of arrests and pressure local prosecutors to drop the cases against some arrested suspects.
According to the Republican Party’s New York City mayoral candidate, former Guardian Angels leader and current conservative talk show host, Curtis Sliwa, Mamdani’s election as mayor “will create an EZ-Pass for criminals, enabling them to repeatedly commit misdemeanor crimes. This will make the police even less effective at enforcement. Ultimately, this will cause the quality of life to decline dramatically, leading to a breakdown of law and order and resulting in chaos and disorder.”
The bigger problem for the Democrats with Mamdani is that, as their official mayoral candidate, it is harder for more moderate Democrat candidates to distance themselves from his extreme anti-Israel, anti-police, and anti-free-market socialist views.
THE NEW AMERICAN CONSENSUS IN SUPPORT OF FIGHTING CRIME
Democrat candidates across the country are also now aware that the need to support a more effective fight against crime in this country is no longer a partisan issue. According to a recent AP-NORC survey, eight in ten Americans, including 96 percent of Republicans and 68 percent of Democrats, agree that big-city crime is a major problem. In addition, a clear majority of all recently surveyed voters now say that they approve of the way that President Donald Trump is trying to reduce it in Washington, D.C., and potentially other major crime-ridden cities, such as Chicago or Baltimore, in the very near future.
The political problem of Democrat candidates trying to advocate for civil liberties without being characterized by their Republican opponents as being too soft on crime is not new. During the 1988 presidential election, Democrat candidate Mike Dukakis, then the governor of Massachusetts, was badly hurt by a television ad that accused him of being responsible for the temporary release of a convicted murderer named Willie Horton, who then committed another heinous crime. According to a famous political analysis of that election by William Galston and Elaine Ciulla Kamarck, the now infamous Willie Horton ad confirmed the common voter perception that, like other liberal Democrat candidates, Dukakis was “weak on crime and more concerned about criminals than their victims.”
The voter rejection of Dukakis over his soft-on-crime reputation prompted the next Democrat presidential candidate, Bill Clinton, to go out of his way to show the voters that he could be as tough on crime and criminals as any conservative Republican.
After he was elected president, Clinton signed into law, with the outspoken support of then-Democrat Senator Joe Biden, the 1994 Violent Crime and Law Enforcement Act. That legislation is now notorious for having imposed much harsher federal prison sentences for relatively minor drug crimes, as well as the so-called three-strikes rule, mandating life sentences for a third conviction for a violent or drug crime. The bill has also been blamed for accelerating the mass incarceration of many members of that generation’s young Black males who got caught up in the illegal drug culture of the era.
THE LINGERING COSTS OF THE 2020 GEORGE FLOYD PROTEST
The current rise of crime control into a major national political issue was triggered by the dramatic rise in violent crimes stemming from the nationwide wave of protests during the summer of 2020, which was triggered by the strangulation death of a black man, George Floyd, at the hands of a white Minneapolis police officer. Floyd’s death led to the rise in demands by extreme liberal movements such as Black Lives Matter for the defunding of allegedly “systemically racist” local police forces across the country. That predictably led to a nationwide spike in violent crimes and the natural political reaction to that spike, public calls for the restoration of police funding for the replenishment of many local police departments. Their ranks had been severely depleted by a wave of forced resignations and early retirements because being a policeman was no longer considered to be an honorable profession, at least in the eyes of many “woke” Democrats, and the promoters of their racist anti-police narrative in the mainstream news media.
Years later, local police departments across the country still have to compete for qualified recruits with other law enforcement agencies such as the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). It is offering potential candidates signing bonuses of up to $50,000 plus assistance with student loan repayments. That is the major reason why the Metropolitan Police Department in Washington, D.C. is still so shorthanded, and why, despite her initial resistance, D.C. Mayor Bowser has welcomed the National Guard reinforcements that President Trump has supplied.
MAYOR BOWSER BEING CRITICIZED BY HER FELLOW D.C. DEMOCRATS
Janeese Lewis Democrat who represents D.C.’s Ward 4 on the council, said that Bowser’s messaging was out of step with the anger of residents in her ward over the surge of federal law enforcement. Also, because her ward also has a large immigrant population, she said she was “outraged” by the ICE activity she had seen and heard about from her constituents, and was gravely concerned about the pattern she sees of masked ICE agents stopping residents who appear to be immigrants and detaining them while hiding their own identities.
Speaking about the mayor’s reversal towards Trump’s intervention, Lewis George added, “I don’t know what [this new] strategy is, but it’s not a strategy that’s going to work.”
On the other hand, D.C. Council Chairman Phil Mendelson, who is also a Democrat, was more sympathetic to Bowser’s compromised political position. He said, “She’s trying to navigate between protecting home rule and the federal oppression,” in recognition of the fact that, unlike all other major American cities, which are self-governing under the authority of their state’s government, the local government of the District of Columbia, under the D.C. Home Rule Act, is directly subservient to the authority of the federal government.
Another long-time Washington, D.C. resident, John Malcolm, a USA Today opinion contributor, admitted that while he should feel outrage at President Trump’s deployment of federal troops in the streets of his hometown, in fact, he was glad that “[Trump] has done it.” That was because, according to Malcolm, “the D.C. government has proven itself to be inept at addressing the situation or even acknowledging that there is a situation that needs to be addressed. In fact, it played a significant role in creating the current crime crisis [in Washington, D.C.].”
WHY D.C. NEEDED TRUMP’S FEDERAL TROOP SURGE
Malcolm argues that “Trump’s federal ‘surge,’” is a necessary response to the efforts by the D.C. government to defund the Metropolitan Police Department, which, as a result, is now short 800 officers. The disarmed National Guard troops that Trump has sent in are “allowing more of the armed MPD officers to spend more time in areas [of D.C.] where the crime problem is particularly bad.”
Malcom also notes that there is good reason to suspect that Washington D.C.’s crime problem is much worse than official MPD records would indicate. That is because the force’s police lieutenants and captains have been accused by the chairman of D.C.’s Fraternal Order of Police of deliberately downgrading the severity of citizen complaints about violent crimes, by, for example, reporting a shooting or stabbing as a simple assault and an armed carjacking as a simple theft.
Last week, the Republican-led House Government Oversight Committee launched an investigation into those accusations that D.C. police commanders were deliberately ordered by the department’s leadership to manipulate arrest data to make D.C. crime rates appear lower than they really are, and the federal Justice Department is also reportedly investigating the same allegations.
Trump and his allies have specifically challenged the accuracy of the sharp drop in D.C. crime statistics, showing violent crime dropping to historically low levels since 2023, when a spike in murders rendered Washington, D.C. to be one of America’s deadliest large cities on a per capita basis.
However, Malcolm adds, “You can fudge statistics, but not dead bodies. In 2024, there were 187 murders in the District. Is that better than the previous year? Yes. There were 274 murders committed in 2023. But D.C. still ranked near the top in terms of per capita murder and violent crime rates for a major city.
“Moreover, from 2009 to 2019, there were an average of 128 murders per year (with a low of 88 in 2012 and a high of 166 in 2019) in the District. That’s much lower than the total in 2024. And the odds of a victim dying while being assaulted or robbed in the District have risen 341% since 2012.”
TRUMP TOURS WASHINGTON D.C.’S MOST DANGEROUS DISTRICT
Malcolm was also impressed that when President Trump decided to see for himself the results of the National Guard deployment, he chose to visit Anacostia, a D.C. neighborhood whose crime rate is nearly 40% higher than the rest of the District, and the site of more than half of the city’s murders. He then thanked the National Guard troops assigned there for the arrest of over 100 individuals for firearms and drug offenses in Anacostia since August 7, making the streets of the neighborhood significantly safer for kids to play in and for people to live and work.
Meanwhile, Mayor Bowser has avoided answering specific questions as to the extent that she has ordered local police to cooperate with federal ICE agents who have been more active since August 7 in looking for illegal immigrants living in the District to deport. At her press conference last week, she said, “We do not have any information on anybody who was detained by ICE as far as I know,” but videos of ICE officers detaining immigrants in Washington, D.C. have been circulating on social media and discussed with great concern on several group chats.
When asked the same question, D.C. Police Chief Pamela A. Smith evasively said: “Based on the president’s executive order, we are supporting the ask of the Metropolitan Police Department to support our federal partners in this effort.”
Even just the appearance of collaboration between ICE and District police in recent weeks has drawn condemnation from local immigrant advocates who see it as a betrayal of Washington, D.C.’s self-declared sanctuary city status.
ICE AGENTS ARE PART OF TRUMP’S D.C. ANTI-CRIME SURGE
CASA, an immigrant-rights group, has issued a warning to members of D.C.’s immigrant community on social media, urging them to think twice before calling D.C. police to report local crimes because of the potential that such calls will also attract the attention of ICE officers.
D.C. officials have reported that calls to local police for service have increased by 18 percent since the federal law enforcement presence was heightened, compared to the same 20-day period last year, but according to Mayor Bowser, they do not know what percentage of those additional calls for help are coming, or not coming, from members of the District’s illegal immigrant community.
Meanwhile, as public schools in Washington, D.C. start a new term, some immigrant parents have been recruiting volunteers to monitor popular routes to those schools for signs of ICE agents on patrol, particularly around school campuses with large student populations of Hispanic children and recent immigrants.
Other ad hoc groups of liberal residents have volunteered and organized themselves to patrol the streets of Washington, D.C. during the night hours to keep an eye on the activities of the National Guard troops, ICE agents, and other federal law enforcement officials that they call “Trump’s occupation forces.” They are also using their smartphone camera to create videos to be posted on social media to document and publicize any questionable activities by the Trump forces, such as arrests or incidents involving violence, harassment, or the racial profiling of District residents.
TRUMP’S HUD WANTS IMMIGRATION INFORMATION ON D.C.’S PUBLIC HOUSING
Meanwhile, the Trump administration’s Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) has demanded that the District’s public housing authority share the citizenship status of the tenants living in the District’s public housing projects. The D.C. housing authority was also warned that refusing to comply by providing HUD with the citizenship information requested would put their federal funding in jeopardy. HUD has confirmed reports by the Washington Examiner that it is expecting the D.C. public housing authority to start sharing information on both immigrant and “mixed family” units by turning over their names, addresses, Social Security numbers, and information about their immigration status.
For many years, illegal immigrants have quietly been allowed to live in the District’s public housing units, along with other family members who are in this country legally. In most cases, HUD does not have the legal authority to knock on people’s doors and remove those who are in this country illegally from their family’s apartments in public housing. However, under a data-sharing agreement with the Department of Homeland Security, HUD will supply its information on the immigration status of such individuals to ICE and other law enforcement agencies, which do have the authority to detain and deport them.
District officials also report that since Trump sent in the National Guard to safeguard the streets of Washington, D.C., approximately 81 homeless people who had been living on those streets have entered the District’s shelter system, thereby starting to reduce the number of people living in makeshift tent cities, which have given those parts of the District a third-world feel.
But far more important than the highly predictable local criticism of Trump’s anti-crime initiative in the nation’s capital, as well as from Democrats far from Washington, D.C., is the positive impact that the deployment of National Guard troops to fight crime has had on Trump’s nationwide job approval ratings. In a RealClearPolitics podcast, Mark Penn, who was one of then-President Bill Clinton’s top pollsters, reviewed the results of the latest survey by his company, the Harvard CAPS/Harris Poll.
TRUMP’S ANTI-CRIME INITIATIVES BOOSTING HIS POLL RATINGS
“Trump’s ratings [have] stabilized this month,” Penn said, referring to Trump’s loss of some of the strong support he had among independent voters on Election Day and when he first took office. “And I think he began to get traction on [the] crime [issue],” Penn continued. “He’s now shifted focus from immigration to tariffs, and now to leading a national crackdown on crime, and you’re seeing a generally favorable response to it.”
“Fifty-four percent approve of the president’s approach, using the National Guard in D.C.,” Penn explained. “That’s interesting. Any time I apply the word ‘Trump,’ [in a polling question] it’s very hard to get above 50%. If I take his name off the policies, I get 60, 70, 75, even 80% support —for example, [in polling the] locking up criminals who are here illegally. But when you put his name, the country is so polarized that Democrats won’t concede a single inch.
“So when he gets 54% approving, I think, wow, that’s like a normal 65%. That means some people approve of it, but won’t say they do if you put the name Trump in the questionnaire.”
Penn explained that while “Foreign policy may dominate the news, the public is razor-focused on domestic policy [and] it determines [about 98%] of their vote.” The veteran pollster also said that, “Americans are conflict-avoiders. They don’t support wars for long. But right now, they support Israel, they support trying to end the Ukraine war, and they support Trump trying to negotiate [a peace ending both conflicts]. They just don’t know how he’ll do it.”
Penn also said that, “The Democratic Party is [near] its lowest ratings. They’ve come up a bit from their super-lows, but they used to be near 50%. Now they’re at 41%,”
Nevertheless, Penn added, “Republicans are higher, but people are still holding onto partisan loyalties. Even though [many] Democrats are unhappy with their party, they’re not switching votes — yet. That will take [an election] campaign. If the midterms were held today, I think Republicans would eke out [a win]. But it depends on how people assess the [Trump] economy a year from now.”
While crime prevention continues to be a major concern for voters nationwide, including most D.C. residents, according to a Washington Post-Schar School poll, most Washingtonians nevertheless strongly oppose Trump’s intervention, and 65 percent have told pollsters they don’t think the federalization of the District’s police will reduce the local incidence of violent crime.
When Mayor Bowser was asked about District residents who have protested against Trump’s intervention by hanging D.C. flags from the porches of their houses and scrawling messages against it on the sidewalks, she defended their actions by explaining that, “They’re concerned about their rights and are defending their city.”
FINDING THE COURAGE TO SPEAK THE TRUTH
However, Washington, D.C. is one of the most strongly Democrat voting districts in the entire country. In the 2024 presidential election, former Vice President Kamala Harris won more than 92% of the vote, against less than 7% of the vote that Donald Trump received.
It should therefore not be surprising that Mayor Bowser has come to the defense of the right of her constituents to take protective actions against the threat that they feel, real or imagined, from Trump’s moves to take over the forces of law and order in their city. But it is also to Mayor Bowser’s credit that she has publicly recognized the real benefits of Trump’s actions to the safety of Washington, D.C.’s residents, while knowing that she would be heavily criticized by her Democrat political comrades for daring to publicly recognize the president’s accomplishment.
