The Telegraph – They have been left arguing that there is no serious crime problem in Washington DC, despite evidence to the contrary.
Shots rang out again in Washington DC on Monday night, claiming the US capital’s 100th murder victim of 2025. Granted, that figure is slightly lower than the 112 Washingtonians estimated to have been slain in the city by about this time last year, but it is still high enough to blight it with one of America’s worst murder rates. In 2023, it was placed ahead of Bogota and other third-world capitals that DC liberals would likely consider dangerous hardship posts and altogether avoid.
But critics of Donald Trump’s decision to take over Washington’s police force and deploy federal agents and 800 National Guardsmen to the city certainly do not share the president’s view that they “will be so happy” now that someone is finally taking the problem seriously. Instead, they are succumbing to bouts of Trump Derangement Syndrome that are seriously challenging both logic and ideological consistency at what could be an important juncture in the restoration of responsible American law enforcement.
“Get lost”, posted Democratic House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries, who falsely claimed Trump has “no basis” to take over DC law enforcement. Washington mayor Muriel Bowser described Trump’s move, which she nevertheless acknowledged is legal under Section 740 of the District of Columbia Home Rule Act of 1973, as “unsettling and unprecedented”. Perhaps she’s forgotten that, just two months ago, Trump deployed five times as many National Guardsmen to address civil unrest in Los Angeles.
Eleanor Holmes Norton, the District of Columbia’s elected delegate to Congress, called Trump’s decision “an historic assault on DC home rule” and a “counterproductive, escalatory seizure of DC’s resources to use for purposes” that she claimed without evidence are “not supported by DC residents”. Ian Bremmer, an international relations analyst, took to X to float a conspiracy theory that Trump is “gradually normalising use of the National Guard in liberal cities,” in a manner that “paves the way for using the National Guard at a more strategically important time, say, during elections”.
On and on the complaints have gone – with others suggesting that the president acted only because he knows he’s losing (despite Trump’s and his party’s relatively high poll ratings). Social media footage of a sparsely attended protest in downtown Washington organised by a group called “Refuse Fascism!” showed a small number of activists carrying signs declaring that “Trump Must Go Now”.
Trump’s opponents in the liberal media have taken particular comfort from recent statistical declines in some violent crime rates – imagining them to be the definitive proof that the president is motivated not by tackling criminality or cleaning up Washington DC, but by some sinister desire to augment his own power.
The general editorialising ignores, however, that Washington’s baseline of violent crimes is still intolerably high, that such crimes are regularly committed by teenagers who face relatively light sanctions even for murder, that DC laws and prosecutorial practice can be highly permissive toward criminals, that patterns of crime now affect the entire city rather than isolated areas, and that non-violent crimes – such as car theft – have not appreciably declined. Nor do they acknowledge what Trump has repeatedly identified as his larger goal, to turn America’s capital into a showplace.
The combined effect of the Left’s hysteria at the president has to put them, once again, on the side of violent criminals, left arguing that either there is no serious crime problem in Washington DC (despite all the evidence to the contrary) or that there is a problem but that nothing much should be done about it.
From the reactions of the leaders of America’s fading progressive movement, one could easily deduce that they do not wish for the capital to be a showplace, or for Americans anywhere to feel confidence, pride, or patriotism in their national capital. After all, if their compatriots did feel that way, what use would they have for Democrats?