President, police chief, social worker. Trump a man of many hats
"I'm announcing a historic action to rescue our nation's capital from crime, bloodshed, bedlam and squalor and worse," he said at the beginning of a freewheeling news conference that stretched for more than an hour. "This is Liberation Day in D.C., and we're going to take our capital back."
Why now?
That wasn't entirely clear, especially at a time crime in Washington is on a significant slide.
In January, The U.S. attorney's office announced that violent crime in Washington in 2024 was at a 30-year low, down 35% from 2023. So far this year, DC's Metropolitan Police Department said that as of Aug. 10, violent crime has dropped another 26%.
Except for a spike during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2022 and 2023, violent crime in the District of Columbia has been steadily declining since 2012.
Trump was clearly unconvinced, depicting a dystopian landscape outside the White House gates. "Our capital city has been overtaken by violent gangs and bloodthirsty criminals, roving mobs of wild youth, drugged out maniacs and homeless people," he said.
He mentioned in particular the beating of a former staffer from the Department on Governmental Efficiency during an attempted carjacking. He suggested the reporters in the room, many of whom live in Washington, should be grateful that he was moving to protect them.
Can Trump do that? Yes. Should he?
Trump declared a public safety emergency in Washington - seizing control of the police department and sending 800 national guardsmen on the streets and another 120 FBI agents on night patrols. While critics argued that it wasn't necessary or wise to take these steps, they generally didn't argue that he lacked the power to do them.
"He's doing this because he can," city councilman Charles Allen said.
To be clear, standing on the side of law-and-order doesn't usually require a profile in courage. It has been a Republican trope since Richard Nixon and before. In recent years, it has been stoked by demands by Democrats and others for social-justice reforms in the wake of notorious cases of police brutality.
Trump depicted crime as a failure of Democratic leaders and a consequence of their policies. He warned other Democratic enclaves - New York, Chicago, Los Angeles - that he just might consider taking similar steps to impose order on their streets.
What particularly irked his fiercest critics was the contrast with Trump's action, or his lack of it, during what was undeniably a law-enforcement crisis in Washington on Jan. 6, 2021. Thousands of his supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol, disrupting the ceremonial count of Electoral College ballots in an election he had lost and sending senators and representatives scrambling for safety.
Then, Trump didn't deploy the National Guard. Afterwards, more than 1,575 people were charged with crimes. At least 600 were charged with the felony of assaulting or impeding law enforcement. Trump himself was also indicted on criminal charges for trying to overturn the results of the 2020 election that he lost - a prosecution he managed to avoid facing trial on by winning the presidency again.
On the first day of his second term, Trump granted a blanket clemency to the Jan. 6 defendants.
Durban: 'Political theater' to draw attention from Jeffrey Epstein
This time, Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin called Trump's actions "political theater" and "a typical move by this president to create chaos and uncertainty, and to draw the attention from other issues like Jeffrey Epstein." Trump was "trying to change the subject," said Durbin, one of the top Democrats who oversees the Justice Department.
Trump did answer questions from reporters about the traditional business of the presidency. He discussed his vision of a "land swap" he might negotiate with Russian President Vladimir Putin during their scheduled meeting on Aug. 15 in Alaska to end the war in Ukraine. He said he would soon decide whether to reclassify marijuana as a less dangerous drug, and he teased the ongoing trade negotiations with China.
Then, yes, there was Epstein, whose case had broken back into the headlines just before Trump walked out into the White House briefing room. A federal judge denied the Trump administration's request to release testimony in the grand jury that indicted Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein's former partner who is serving her own 20-year prison sentence on sex trafficking charges.
The request was part of the tamp down swirling controversy among Trump's MAGA base about whether powerful people were being protected from disclosure.
As he left the briefing room, the president ignored shouted questions about the case - though like the new crackdown on crime, that topic isn't likely to go away anytime soon.
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