Democrats are once again denying the obvious, this time about D.C.’s crime problem, to ‘resist’ Trump. But they’re wrong — I should know.
D emocrats and their media allies once again are insisting that something objectively bad is not actually all that bad, if it’s bad at all.
In doing so, they’re only further alienating themselves from voters — and handing President Trump another potentially massive political victory.
This has been a consistent problem for Democrats during the Trump era. Whether it’s denying soaring crime rates or shrugging off unchecked illegal immigration, the Democratic Party’s strategy of indiscriminate opposition to whatever Trump is doing means they’re routinely denying or downplaying obvious problems, granting him repeat opportunities to prove them wrong and contrast himself favorably with the public.
The president, citing the high crime rate in the nation’s capital, invoked the D.C. Home Rule Act last week to federalize the District’s Metropolitan Police Department. His administration also deployed federal troops to the capital.
The Democratic response thus far, much of it echoed by the press, has yet to rise above the level of an indignant, “What crime?”
“I walk around all the time,” said Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.), who enjoys the benefit of an armed security detail. “I feel perfectly safe. They’re full of it.”
“Citing a nonexistent crime crisis,” said the New York Times’ Peter Baker, “Trump plans to take over the Washington DC police and put troops in the streets of the nation’s capital.”
He added in reference to a dubious statistic: “Contrary to his claims, violent crime in DC is at a 30-year low.” (MPD Third District Commander Michael Pulliam was suspended in May following allegations that he had been cooking the books to minimize serious crimes.)
“I should note,” CNN’s Dana Bash said, “that the most violent moment in recent history in D.C. was January 6, 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.”
There have been 101 homicides and 536 cases of assault with a dangerous weapon in D.C. so far this year. There was a shooting on June 9 in which one person was killed and three were injured. In May, two Israeli embassy staffers were assassinated outside the Capital Jewish Museum in downtown D.C. The gunman allegedly shouted, “Free Palestine!” One of the embassy victims, a 26-year-old Jewish woman named Sarah Milgrim, was not immediately killed after she was struck and knocked over by the first round of gunfire. The alleged gunman then patiently walked over to Milgrim as she attempted to crawl away and unloaded the rest of his clip into her body, according to prosecutors.
“As you listen to an unhinged Trump try to justify deploying the National Guard in DC, here’s reality: Violent crime in DC is at a 30-year low,” said Hillary Clinton, who once cited the robbery and murder of a 27-year-old Democratic staffer in the capital as justification for stricter gun control laws.
Crime? What crime?
What part of the nation’s capital having a homicide rate that is nearly six times the rate in New York City do these people not understand? We’re not even treading in new territory here. Trump didn’t invent D.C. crime from thin air; this is a crisis more than a decade in the making.
I can attest to this!
In the 15 years that I worked and lived in the capital, I was mugged at gunpoint, had a knife pulled on me for trying to separate a fight between two homeless people, and had my car stolen. In 2018, my then-seven-month-pregnant wife was chased by three preteens, knocked to the ground, and robbed of her phone. They put what she thought was a gun to her head. It turned out later that the gun was a toy. Talk about cold comfort.
Our car was broken into numerous times, in different locations. A team of contractors who were working on a house across the alley from our home was robbed at gunpoint of their tools, not once but twice. We had neighbors suffer break-ins. One neighbor was stabbed during a break-in.
I once witnessed a parked motorist beating the daylights out of his female passenger. He drove away as soon as he saw me approaching. I tried several times to call 911, but no one would pick up on the other end. As it turns out, this is a common experience for those who try to call for help in D.C., as the Washington Post would later report.
Don’t just take my word for it. The data agree, Democratic claims to the contrary notwithstanding.
Most shocking are the homicide numbers, which first crept from a low of 88 in 2012 and then rocketed to a 20-year high of 274 in 2023. The numbers came down in 2024, but clocking in under 200 is hardly reason to celebrate, let alone suggest all is well.
There were 270 reported cases of rape in the nation’s capital last year, according to FBI crime statistics. Those are just the cases that were reported.
Next, of course, are the carjackings, which got so out of hand between 2020 and 2023 that law enforcement officials began handing out free tracking tags to help future victims locate their stolen cars. It was also around this time that city officials advised motorists to always “travel with someone whenever possible, especially at night.”
“When you are coming to a stop,” they added, “leave enough room to maneuver around other cars, especially if you sense trouble and need to get away [and] DON’T stop to assist a stranger whose car has broken down.”
It’d be funny if this weren’t roughly the same operating procedure for U.S. convoys in Iraq.
“One way we could make DC safer and cleaner without using the national guard would be to restore the $1b in cuts to the city budget that was passed into law with Trump’s signature—which Trump and Republicans were supposed to reverse but never got around to,” quipped MSNBC’s Sam Stein.
The D.C. council last year passed a $21 billion budget. In July, it approved a $22 billion budget for 2026. The city’s total state expenditures in 2024 were $18.7 billion. For context, this exceeds the total amount spent that year by Nevada, Alaska, Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Delaware, Vermont, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, or Maine. In some cases, D.C. spends more than several states combined.
Was it a lack of budgetary spending that saw an Uber Eats driver get dragged to death in 2021 after he attempted to stop two teenage girls from stealing his car? Should we have simply spent more to prevent a Washington Commanders running back from being shot twice in the leg during an attempted robbery in 2022? What about that Rand Paul staffer who was stabbed in the head and lungs in the middle of the afternoon in 2023, or the Congressman Ron Estes intern who was murdered in 2025 during a drive-by shooting?
Maybe $23 billion is the magic number to achieve a somewhat normal crime rate.
The problem with the smug, reflexive opposition, aside from the sheer pigheadedness of it all, is that it blinds Democrats to what people mean when they talk about the type of lawlessness seen in cities such as D.C., Los Angeles, and St. Louis. They’re talking about the high crime rate, but also the things that go hand-in-hand with it: the loss of trust, pervasive dirtbag behavior, and a general culture of disorder. There are murders, rapes, and assaults — and also societal breakdown, and an invasive sense of danger, disregard, despair, and insecurity.
In the capital specifically, there’s the everyday scene of Metro riders who pay nothing to ride the rails, choosing instead to hop the turnstiles and enjoy “free” transportation courtesy of those who are apparently sucker enough to keep paying. There are the omnipresent homeless encampments; open sewers and open wounds. There are the tweakers outside bus and Metro stops, either in the process of injecting high-octane narcotics or surrendering mind and body to the “fenty flop.” There are boarded-up stores, out-of-business signs, and random gangs of truants roaring around on motorbikes and ATVs, choking traffic both in the street and on the sidewalk. There’s the casual shoplifting. There are the locked plexiglass cases in stores across the city, where everything from diapers to toothpaste to cellphones has been hidden away in response to a culture where theft has become as normalized as drinking a glass of water. There’s also the fact that Walmart abandoned its original plans to open six stores in the District, choosing instead in 2023 to shutter its H Street location in favor of a consolidation strategy.
Between the actual crime and the culture of disorder, the capital clearly has a problem. It’s impossible not to notice. It’s baffling, as a matter of practical politics, that Democrats have adopted this dismissive and even denialist attitude, especially when their position is so easily disproven. It’s even more baffling that Democrats keep doing this, reflexively contradicting the president and caviling, when he’s clearly right and an overwhelming majority of voters agree with his position. The Democratic Party better hope Trump’s approach to crime in the nation’s capital fails. Otherwise, this will end up as great a disaster for them as unchecked illegal immigration, where Trump proved in the opening months of his second administration that, contrary to Democratic assurances and assessments, the federal government can, in fact, do something about it.
It’s also befuddling that journalists and pundits — people who supposedly know a thing or two about messaging — keep affirming this self-destructive Democratic tendency. Everyone involved in the effort this past week to downplay D.C.’s unacceptable level of crime looks, frankly, ridiculous. Meanwhile, as they continue to self-immolate and beclown themselves, Trump marches forward, making headway with voters who agree with him on principles as basic as “crime is bad.”
My family and I no longer live in the capital, and not just because of its outrageous cost of living or the fact that the most incompetent people alive run what that city calls a “government.”
We left because it’s not fun playing Russian roulette every day with our lives and property. And we didn’t leave so much as we fled.
Things are not great in the seat of American power. Anyone with eyes and access to crime statistics can tell you that.