The grand irony of the day I was sexually assaulted in Washington, D.C., is that my skirt really was rather short, not that you could actually see it.

It was November 2019, and exactly one incriminating inch of skin was visible from my chin to my toes. I was wearing a turtleneck dress, my then-boyfriend’s old peacoat, and a pair of thigh-high boots that covered my entire leg up to the bottom of the coat — unless you were searing for a sliver of skin in between my legs for a fraction of a second in between my steps.

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I was not drunk. It was not late. I was not in a bad area. With permission, I was leaving the Washington Examiner office a little early, just after 3 p.m., to prepare for a joint birthday party I was hosting, walking east on L St. Northwest toward 13th St. toward my Chinatown apartment when I felt the jolt of pressure, then pain, of a stranger’s fingers inside of me. I whipped around in a frenzy to see a tall man smiling at me as his hand wove under my coat and between my legs, flashing his ultra white teeth and almost a wink at his little stolen moment, and then he ran down the alley going north. I screamed and stumbled into the street. It was broad daylight, with two eyewitnesses who stayed to corroborate my story to the police. Later, a detective would tell me that there were multiple private security cameras on the block. But the man was never arrested, and I was never called back. The last thing the police told me was that if I ever saw him again, I could make a citizen’s arrest.

I guess I should consider myself lucky, as far as crimes in D.C. go. Earlier that year, one of my best friends was maced by a group of teenage girls outside a Safeway, and a few years later, a mutual friend would be stabbed in broad daylight. My husband was the victim of a hit and run while he was on a jog, which the police saw but refused to pursue. And my fellow On Deadline cohost has had a gun pulled on him and his car stolen more than once. By the time Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s (R) 2021 victory liberated Virginia from COVID-19-era tyranny, Mr. Doescher’s proposal of a move across the Potomac that came with one of marriage elicited more of a “Hell yes” than an “Oh well.”

I still take the metro into D.C. every week to work. I still walk down L St. Northwest. I still cavort across town for on-the-record meals and off-the-record martinis, and despite my better judgment, I still love D.C and want it not to be a wasteland of shuttered and boarded-up storefronts, silent but for gunshots and the wailings of the deranged and drug-addled lunatics who wander the city.

So, naturally, it should surprise me that the Democrats who dominate the district evidently do not agree.

When President Donald Trump announced he was invoking Section 740 of the Home Rule Act to federalize the D.C. police and crack down on the worst of the district’s violent crime, Democrats and their media stenographers exuded more apoplexy than they had over the violent crime itself.

The ostensibly objective New York Times reporter Peter Baker insinuated that Trump, “citing a nonexistent crime crisis,” was a hypocrite for cracking down on violent crime because he “himself has been convicted of 34 felonies and is the first criminal elected president.” CNN’s Dana Bash proclaimed that “the most violent moment in recent history in D.C. was Jan. 6,” and MSNBC’s Ken Dilanian declared that crime in D.C. “is actually at historical lows.”

Jan. 6 was indeed a disgraceful day. The 174 law enforcement officers assaulted that day indeed outnumbered the 60 injured during D.C.’s race riots in May 2020, though nobody was murdered during either event. But crime in D.C. is nowhere near historic lows. In their effort to triple down on opposing everything Trump even suggests, Democrats have deluded themselves into defying the cold, data-driven reality that D.C.’s violent crime rate is a national disgrace.

It is true that D.C.’s homicide rate has fallen from its 20-year high in 2023. It is also true that the lower homicide rate in 2024 — 26.6 per 100,000 people — was the fourth highest of the nation’s cities and more than twice as high as the murder rates of Bogota, Baghdad, Mexico City, and Nairobi. Both the 2024 homicide rate and the 2024 violent crime rate of some 500 violent crimes per 100,000 residents in D.C. are more than any other state in the union. That’s, of course, if you believe the data isn’t understating — the police commander has been suspended for allegations of intentionally downgrading the data.

The city’s liberal elite may be subject to carjackings or sex crimes, but they can mostly ignore the worst of violent crime because it simply doesn’t affect them. Nearly half of all violent crime victims in D.C. and more than half of its homicide victims are residents of Wards 7 and 8, where nine in 10 residents are black and a quarter are impoverished.

More than a quarter of sex crimes and two-fifths of murders went uncleared last year, as did the overwhelming majority of robberies and nonfatal shootings.

D.C.’s dark indigo electorate may not necessarily agree with Trump’s solution, but they agree that violent crime is a crisis. Just last year, the Washington Post found that two-thirds of the district’s residents consider local crime to be “extremely” or “very” serious, with fewer than a quarter considering themselves “very” safe from crime.

Within the confines of the Home Rule Act, Trump cannot solve all of (as former Vice President Kamala Harris liked to say) the root causes of the crime crisis. For example, officers widely attribute the 5% increase in juvenile crime in 2024 and the fact that juveniles are responsible for two-thirds of carjackings to the more than doubling of truancy at D.C.’s public schools. The 30% of middle schoolers and the majority of high schoolers who are truant have to be doing something all day, and the police suspect that said something is often violent crime. One of the 15-year-old Maryland girls who stabbed a DOGE employee over the weekend had “major truancy issues,” according to Judge Kendra Briggs. Section 740 doesn’t fix the fact that the Office of the Deputy Mayor for Education does not follow up on educational neglect reports, nor does it fill the 1,000-officer void in the Metropolitan Police Department, which has a staffing level of a half-century low.

All of this is why Republicans are considering bringing the half-century experiment of D.C. home rule to an overdue end. The Constitution mandates that Congress govern the seat of the federal government, but as with the depreciating U.S. dollar, Great Society, and the rest of our modern ills, the Home Rule Act was championed by President Lyndon B. Johnson and signed into law by President Richard Nixon. The year was 1973, and D.C.’s population was larger than it is today.

WHY TRUMP IS RIGHT ON DC CRIME

The 2019 sexual assault was far from the worst thing that’s ever happened to me, but the assailant is still out there, presumably at large. The National Institute for Criminal Justice Reform estimates just 200 to 500 people are responsible for D.C.’s thousands of gun crimes, and the Bureau of Justice Statistics found that convicted sexual predators in general are three times as likely to be rearrested for repeat offenses as other criminals who serve their time. Presumably, the man who attacked me is still out there.

Hollywood starlets can flee Studio City for Cannes, and big bankers can trade Manhattan for Miami. But the Constitution demands that D.C. be in D.C., and Congress still reserves the power to federalize the D.C. police for the president. In a city of some 700,000 people, nearly 16,000 or over 2% have been the victim of a crime in the first eight months of this year, including 55 victims of sex crimes and 101 murders. Those numbers might not be too high for our media elite — but they are for Trump and for me.