Washington at the centre of a Trump maelstrom as National Guard troops arrive
WASHINGTON (AP) — The questions came fast to the mayor of the nation's capital, many of them designed to get her to say something harsh about Donald Trump — in particular, the president's freshly announced plan to take over the Metropolitan Police Department and call in the National Guard.
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But, for the most part, third-term Washington, D.C., Mayor Muriel Bowser didn't take the bait. She calmly laid out the city's case that crime has been dropping steadily and said Trump's perceived state of emergency simply doesn't match the numbers.
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She also flatly stated that the capital city's hands are tied and that her administration has little choice but to comply. 'We could contest that,' she said of Trump's definition of a crime emergency, 'but his authority is pretty broad.'
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Toward the end, the mayoral composure slipped a bit when Bowser made a reference to Trump's 'so-called emergency' and concluded, 'I'm going to work every day to make sure it's not a complete disaster.'
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While Trump invokes his plan by saying that 'we're going to take our capital back,' Bowser and the MPD maintain that violent crime overall in Washington has decreased to a 30-year low after a sharp rise in 2023. Carjackings, for example, dropped about 50 per cent in 2024, and are down again this year. More than half of those arrested, however, are juveniles, and the extent of those punishments is a point of contention for the Trump administration.
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Bowser, a Democrat, spent much of Trump's first term in office openly sparring with the Republican president. She fended off his initial plans for a military parade through the streets and stood in public opposition when he called in a multi-agency flood of federal law enforcement to confront anti-police brutality protesters in summer 2020. She later had the words 'Black Lives Matter' painted in giant yellow letters on the street about a block from the White House.
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