A Question Now Arises, Which Blue City Is Next on the President’s List?
“This is a safe city, but overhearing and witnessing gang threats and then watching the camera footage of the thuggery is disturbing,” a resident of the nation’s capital told The Washington Post over the weekend on condition of anonymity due to safety concerns.
In both content and anonymity, the statement recalls Washington D.C. Mayor Marion S. Barry’s infamous comment that if one did not count all the murders, Washington’s crime rate under his disastrously mayoralty was not so very high.
Barry has a statue dedicated to his memory in downtown Washington, but another local politician is not having it.
“If D.C. doesn’t get its act together, and quickly,” President Donald J. Trump declared on his Truth Social platform last week, “we will have no choice but to take federal control of the city . . . If this continues, I am going to exert my powers, and FEDERALIZE this city.”
On Monday, Trump took a strong step in that direction, invoking Section 740 of the District of Columbia Home Rule Act of 1973 to declare an emergency, take control of the city’s police department, and deploy the District’s National Guard, which is uniquely under federal command.
This followed the temporary, seven-day deployment of federal law enforcement officers from multiple agencies, including the FBI, ICE, ATF, the U.S. Park Police, the Capitol Police, and the Secret Service, across the city to address crime.
Washington hews heavily anti-Trump, with more than 90% of its vote going to Democrats, and even its small community of Republicans having favored Nikki Haley in her primary challenge to Trump in last year’s race for the GOP presidential nomination.
His critics there are naturally aghast, though their opposition curiously sounds like they are defending their city’s high crime rate and urban blight — which ultimately victimize and degrade many of them — rather than accept that as of this week they will be considerably safer that they have been under decades of incompetent Democratic government.
It takes a special kind of progressive to deny that Washington is a mess.
So far in 2025, according to data released by the city’s police department last week, it has suffered 99 murders, 530 assaults with a deadly weapon, and 888 armed robberies.
As appalling as these statistics are, they represent a 26 percent decline in violent crimes over the 2024 figure. The year before that, 2023, was D.C.’s worst year for violent crime since the 1990s.
According to data from Congress, D.C. local government, and the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, from 2019 to 2024 Washington’s homicide rate — still the nation’s fourth highest this year despite the recent decline in violent crime — soared at 41 per 100,000 inhabitants.
Baghdad’s murder rate, by comparison, was 15.2 over the same period. Lagos, Nigeria’s was 15.1. Bogota’s was 11.
While this year’s baseline for violent crimes is still so awful that it should be totally unacceptable in any country’s capital city, Washington’s property crime rates have barely changed, with auto thefts, unarmed robberies, burglaries, vandalism, and arson mostly holding steady from previous years.
General urban blight — graffiti, litter, homelessness, petty street harassment, and other unsightly and unpleasant features of what could be a great city – remain present and pervasive.
In recent years, violent crime distribution has diffused across the city, with victims now regularly including white collar professionals, federal government employees, and even members of Congress.
In June, Congressional intern Eric Tarpinian-Jachym was murdered in what appears to have been gang war crossfire.
Earlier this month, Edward Coristine, a former DOGE official now working for the Social Security Administration, was severely beaten by a crowd of assailants while resisting a carjacking.
In 2023, Democratic Congresswoman Angie Craig was assaulted in the elevator of her building on Capitol Hill, while Texas Democratic Congressman Henry Cuellar was carjacked by armed assailants in Navy Yard, an area now known for its entertainment and nightlife.
Violent crimes are also increasingly committed by teenagers, who in DC’s legal system can only be maximally detained until age 21 with their identities protected — even when convicted of murder.
In February, Trump mentioned taking over the capital for the first time since he returned to office and has flexed federal authority in recent months.
In March, he ordered D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser to begin removing homeless encampments, a phenomenon virtually unknown in the capital before 2020, and got some results, though the problem remains.
On Sunday, he announced that he would remove all homeless people from the capital and eliminate crime there using forceful measures comparable to those he has used at the border.
Jeanine Pirro, his newly confirmed U.S. Attorney for D.C., has begun lobbying D.C. government to scale back laws allowing for light prosecutions of violent crimes and limiting criminal sanctions for juvenile offenders.
Trump has also mentioned repealing the District of Columbia Home Rule Act of 1973, which granted limited self-government to the national capital after 182 years of management directly by the federal government, as provided by Article I of the Constitution.
Theoretically, majority votes by the Republican-controlled House of Representatives and Senate should be enough to end Home Rule in this way, and in February Utah Senator Mike Lee and Georgia Congressman Andy Ogles introduced legislation to repeal it.
There may be legal challenges, and many of Washington’s 700,000 residents will undoubtedly complain, presumably even while dodging bullets or deluding themselves that living in the leafy and overwhelmingly white upmarket neighborhoods of the capital’s Northwest quadrant would have protected them under the dismal current order.
The pre-1973 status quo, however, would be infinitely better than the tragedy that Washington has become — for Trump’s critics and everyone else.
“Washington D.C. must be safe, clean, and beautiful for all Americans and, importantly, for the world to see,” Trump concluded his post while looking ahead to a summit meeting with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin.
On Sunday, he added “I’m going to make our Capital safer and more beautiful than it ever was before.”
His powers are extensive but working with Congress can help him complete the worthy project of federalizing Washington after 52 years of leftist failure.
An updated report of Aug. 11, in USA TODAY says, “President Donald Trump said he might expand his crackdown on crime in the nation’s capital to other major U.S. cities.”
And those in his sights could be, “New York City, Los Angeles, Baltimore, Chicago and Oakland, California,” according to the USA TODAY account.
No one should be surprised if these cities are next for federalization.
Especially the beyond progressive, beyond more than soft on crime left.
Paul du Quenoy is President of the Palm Beach Freedom Institute. Read Paul du Quenoy’s Reports — More Here.
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