With his efforts to take control of law enforcement in Washington, D.C., this week, President Trump has pushed the issue of crime back to the foreground of American politics.
In doing so, he’s invited a fight with Democrats, who are treading cautiously as they seek to forcefully oppose the federal incursion into the nation’s capital, something no president has ever attempted, without getting caught up in a debate over public safety on Mr. Trump’s terms.
Mr. Trump and his Republican allies wielded the sharp increase in violent crime in urban areas during the pandemic as a campaign cudgel, winning control of the House in the 2022 midterms. Mr. Trump expanded his winning coalition two years later, in part with promises to prevent the rest of America from becoming like the cities he called “unlivable, unsanitary nightmares,” deriding the data that showed improvement across the country.
While his tactics in Washington, D.C., are extraordinary, the effort is an actualization of one of his most tried-and-true political arguments: Democrats — often Black Democrats — have let lawlessness run rampant in the cities and states they were elected to run. At a moment when Mr. Trump’s approval ratings even among his supporters are declining, he appears to be laying the groundwork for Republicans to once again weaponize the issue in the midterm elections.
Mr. Trump has sent National Guard troops to patrol the streets, turned federal law enforcement officers into beat cops and sought to put the local police department fully under his administration’s control. And the president has suggested he wants to bring his brand of law and order to Chicago; Baltimore; Oakland, Calif.; and New York, all liberal cities in blue states, while avoiding any mention of high-crime cities in red states, like Memphis or St. Louis.
Among Democrats, there is widespread agreement that Mr. Trump is stoking fear for political gain and exaggerating statistics to justify a power grab.
But there is also recognition that the party must acknowledge that concerns about public safety continue to resonate not just with Mr. Trump’s supporters, but with their own.
“We as Democrats should be careful not to cede the issue of public safety to Donald Trump and Republicans,” Representative Ritchie Torres, who represents the Bronx, said in an interview. “We should own the issue of public safety, because it matters to voters.”
For his part, Mr. Trump made clear this week he sees his moves as a political slam-dunk.
“I think crime is maybe 100 to nothing, so I think we may get very well some Democratic support,” Mr. Trump said on Wednesday.
Trump made inroads across blue states like New York, New Jersey and California in 2024, alarming Democrats who worried that his messages about crime, immigration and quality of life had appealed to their voters, too. That year, a survey by Pew Research Center found that nearly six in 10 adults, including almost half of Democrats, wanted the reduction of crime to be a top priority for American leaders — a figure that had grown since 2021.
The differing approaches the party has taken to Mr. Trump so far over his crackdown in Washington were on display in neighboring Maryland, where a group of lawmakers, including five members of Congress, raised grave concerns for democracy. They framed the president’s assertion of federal oversight of the Metropolitan Police Department and his use of the National Guard to patrol the streets as a “soft launch of authoritarianism.”
By contrast, Gov. Wes Moore, a Democrat, called the takeover a distraction, echoing party leaders like Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer.
“I see this as performative and nothing more,” Mr. Moore said in an interview, “because if he wanted to have a serious conversation about violent crime, he should have to pay attention to the work we’re doing in the state of Maryland to be able to address the issue.”
Mr. Moore accused Mr. Trump of ignoring the fact that the homicide rate in Baltimore is the lowest it has been in 50 years. “That doesn’t fit his narrative,” Mr. Moore said. “This is just a series of ignorant tropes that he continues to lay out.”
Some Democrats, though, warn that reality is not as important as perception — something that Mr. Trump has long been adept at shaping with his will and his echo chamber.
They recall Democrats’ ineffective efforts during last year’s presidential election to promote statistics showing that the economy was improving — while Mr. Trump and his allies hammered away at the pain people felt over persistently high prices. He won the support of voters with deep economic concerns.
“D.C. presents the easiest opportunity for him to make crime an issue when it’s not, and politics is perception,” said Mike Morey, a Democratic strategist who advised former Representative Sean Patrick Maloney in the 2022 race he lost to Representative Mike Lawler, a Republican, largely over the issue of crime.
That contest was waged in New York City suburbs where crime was relatively low, but Mr. Lawler and his allies repeatedly attacked Mr. Maloney using headlines from the city’s pandemic crime spike. Public safety is already an issue in this fall’s contest for mayor of New York City, while Republicans are signaling their intent to raise the matter during next year’s race for governor of New York.
“We have to be careful not to lean too heavily on statistics, because people form their judgments about public safety based on their own lived experience,” Mr. Torres said.
Stoking fears of crime, and braiding them with race, has been central to Mr. Trump’s public and political persona since the 1980s, when he 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.
In 2016, Mr. Trump proclaimed himself the “law and order” candidate as he accepted his party’s nomination for president and took office by describing gangs, drugs and inner-city blight as “American carnage.” Four years later, as Black Lives Matter protesters demonstrated across the country, Mr. Trump once again ran against crime in urban centers, describing living in cities like Baltimore, Oakland and Detroit as “like living in hell.” He seized on the small number of Democrats who supported calls to “defund the police” amid a broader reckoning over the treatment of people of color, particularly Black people, by law enforcement officers.
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There are signs that the party is better prepared to ward off Mr. Trump’s attacks on crime than it was in 2020 and 2022.
“What Democrats need to do is keep calling out the lack of reason to do this other than to distract and to assert more power,” said Representative Dan Goldman of New York, who called Mr. Trump’s actions “authoritarian fascism.”
Some Democrats have seized the opportunity to talk about their own credentials on public safety in places where violent crime has fallen on their watch, while being careful to acknowledge that a falling crime rate doesn’t mean there isn’t a problem.
“No mayor in the country, myself included, is saying that we solved this issue of violent crime,” said Brandon Scott, the mayor of Baltimore, adding that “we have to keep going until we make our cities even safer.”
In Washington, Mayor Muriel Bowser, a Democrat, appears well aware that Washington’s historically low rate of violent crime hasn’t prompted a significant change in people’s perception of the issue. (A Washington Post-Schar School poll conducted last year found that 65 percent of Washingtonians rated crime as an “extremely serious” or a “very serious” problem in the District, up from 56 percent in 2023, when the crime rate was actually higher.)
She initially responded to Mr. Trump’s takeover this week with a cautious and conciliatory tone. Even as she called it “unsettling and unprecedented,” she acknowledged that some residents wanted to see more done to reduce crime.
Her tone grew more defiant after the Trump administration sought to tighten its grip over the city police.
Some of the cities Republicans long regarded as crime-ridden punching bags seem to have fallen off Mr. Trump’s radar entirely. Take San Francisco, where, in 2022, voters ousted Chesa Boudin, a progressive district attorney, after a wave of car break-ins and burglaries had spurred a pervasive sense that San Francisco was unsafe, even as some metrics showed that violent crimes like homicides were declining.
Last year, San Francisco residents denied Mayor London Breed another term in office and elevated Daniel Lurie, a moderate Democrat and wealthy nonprofit leader who made cracking down on crime and improving homelessness central tenets of his campaign. So far, he has refrained from criticizing Mr. Trump by name.
“The best argument against this notion that Democrats ruin cities is to run the city effectively,” said Steven Bacio, the co-founder of GrowSF, a moderate political advocacy group.
It does not hurt, perhaps, that Mr. Lurie, a white man and an heir to the Levi Strauss fortune, replaced Ms. Breed, a Black woman who was willing to occasionally spar with Mr. Trump.
That’s not lost on Mayor Scott of Baltimore, who described Mr. Trump’s complaints about crime as a thinly veiled attack on Black leadership.
“My city and all the others called out by the president on Sunday, led by Black mayors, are all making historic progress on crime,” Mr. Scott said. “But they’re the ones getting called out, and it tells you everything that you need to know.”
Kellen Browning and Ruth Igielnik contributed reporting from San Francisco and Washington, D.C.