This summer has brought uncomfortable moments for President Trump.

His administration’s handling of the investigation into Jeffrey Epstein has divided his party. Economic data has begun to sour as his economic policies have taken hold. His signature domestic policy bill has proved unpopular, and foreign conflicts he had promised to end — including in Gaza and Ukraine — are still raging.

His extraordinary effort to take over law enforcement in Washington, D.C., which is ramping up as it enters its second week, helps nudge the political discourse toward what he has long seen as more favorable terrain: A fight with Democrats over crime. (And they are determined not to take the bait.)

It wasn’t so long ago that Trump was praising the nationwide drop in the murder rate — or even that one of his own officials in Washington was specifically touting the drop in violent crime there. By deploying National Guard troops to patrol the streets and seeking control of the local police, his opponents say, Trump is transparently stoking fear for political gain, and exaggerating statistics to justify a power grab.

But public safety is tricky territory for Democrats, as my colleague Lisa Lerer and I wrote this morning, and Trump knows it. Republicans seized on the pandemic crime spike to win control of the House in 2022 and to help expand Trump’s coalition in 2024, even though rates of violent crime had, by then, begun to recede.

For Trump, the argument that Democrats have let lawlessness run rampant in the cities and states they run goes back even further, as have his efforts to invoke race in his discussions of crime, which my colleague Erica Green wrote about today.

In the late 1980s, Trump took out ads calling for the death penalty for five Black and Latino men who were accused of raping and beating a woman in Central Park (The men were later exonerated; he said he would not apologize.)