The Telegraph – Donald Trump should do everything he can to clean up the capital’s crime-ridden streets.
“A nightmare of murder and crime,” Donald Trump called Washington DC during the 2024 election campaign, adding that the US national capital was “a dirty, crime-ridden death trap, that must be taken over and properly run”.
The president’s animus against Washington continued after he returned to office, when he charged that Washington’s elected local officials were “not doing the job – too much crime, too much graffiti”. On Feb 19, while returning to Washington from Mar-a-Lago, Trump suggested a federal takeover of the capital city’s municipal governance to address its many woes.
Now, nearly seven months into his second term, Trump appears to be on the brink of doing just that: “federalising” Washington by bringing many, or perhaps even all, of its functions directly under central government control. He has not specified exactly what form that measure could take. Altering Washington’s limited self-government, in place since 1973 under the District of Columbia Home Rule Act, would require congressional approval and could also face legal challenges.
In recent days, however, Trump has suggested that “federalisation” would involve direct command of the capital’s police force, deploying the National Guard to maintain law and order, and prosecuting suspected criminals as young as 14 as adults. He has also suggested that the Home Rule Act could be repealed, potentially ending Washington’s half-century experiment in self-government altogether. This week, the White House ordered federal law enforcement to increase its presence in the city for the next seven days.
Trump’s latest invective against Washington DC’s chronically bad local government was touched off by a brutal attack last weekend on Edward Coristine, a 19-year-old tech entrepreneur-turned-government employee who worked as a senior adviser to Doge and at other agencies before joining the Social Security Administration. According to reports, in the early hours of Sunday morning, Coristine was severely beaten by a group of assailants in the city after they threatened to carjack the couple’s car.
Trump referenced the story in a post to his Truth Social platform, accompanied by a photo of Coristine beaten and bloodied in the aftermath of the incident. “If DC doesn’t get its act together, and quickly,” the president declared, “we will have no choice but to take federal control of the city … If this continues, I am going to exert my powers, and FEDERALISE this city”.
The assault on Coristine follows a series of notable attacks on professionals in Washington’s political world. In June, just days before the national July 4 holiday, Eric Tarpinian-Jachym, a 21 year-old university student working as a congressional intern, was killed less than a mile from the White House by gunmen who were apparently targeting other individuals in his close vicinity. Trump sent a personal note of condolence to Tarpinian-Jachym’s family.
In March 2023, Senate staffer Phillip Todd was stabbed by a random stranger while collecting his takeaway in Washington’s popular downtown “restaurant corridor”. Todd nearly died, but recent reports suggest his attacker will never go to trial.
A few weeks earlier, Minnesota Democratic Representative Angie Craig was attacked in an elevator in her apartment building. In October 2023, Texas Democrat Henry Cuellar was carjacked by three armed assailants in Navy Yard, a gentrified area known for its entertainment and nightlife. These are only a handful of numerous violent incidents targeting Washington’s political class in recent years, alongside the city’s continuing general blight.
Violent crime overall has fallen in the capital, registering a 26 per cent decline so far this year over the 2024 figure. But that decline comes from historically high levels. Washington crime rates in 2023 were the worst in a generation, with some categories, such as carjackings, showing an annual increase exceeding 100 per cent. Baseline crime levels have thus remained significant. In March 2024, Washington’s police union declared a law enforcement “crisis” in hearings before Congress, noting that it had lost about one-third of its officers to resignations or retirements over the previous four years.
More recently, as Trump noted in his post about Coristine’s victimisation, crime patterns affect the entire city, and now implicate juvenile assailants who under prevailing Washington law are less likely to face serious penalties for their crimes. In 2021, two teenage girls convicted of murdering an Uber driver during an attempted carjacking were sentenced to juvenile detention until they reach age 21 and had their identities withheld from the media.
Trump is fed up, and added to his post that “Washington DC must be safe, clean, and beautiful for all Americans and, importantly, for the world to see”. If he wants to govern a rejuvenated superpower that commands global respect, he should stop giving feckless Leftists any more chances to befoul its potentially majestic capital and do all he can to clean it up.