Trump’s “Crackdown On Crime” in DC is Backwards and Racist
On 11 August 2025, President Donald Trump announced at a White House press conference that he will be enacting a federal takeover of Washington D.C.’s Metro Police Department, appointing DEA head Terry Cole as commissioner and will be deploying the National Guard to the capital in an alleged effort to crack down on crime and specifically, in his words, “rescue our nation’s capital from crime, bloodshed, bedlam and squalor and worse.” By the following afternoon, roughly 800 National Guard members were mobilized.
These actions come in response to the assault of former Department of Government Efficiency operative Edward “Big Balls” Coristine by a group of juvenile delinquents in Washington D.C.’s Logan Circle neighborhood during the early morning hours of 3 August 2025.
Trump also warned that he would similarly intervene in New York City, Oakland, Chicago and Baltimore. Oddly enough, in 2024, the U.S. murder rate decreased by 15 percent while crime overall in the US fell by five percent. Data for that year also indicates that in Oakland, compared to 2023, violent crime fell by 19 percent. During the same timeframe, violent crime in Chicago dropped by 15 percent and in Baltimore by 17 percent. Though New York City only saw a three percent drop in crime, robberies fell off by 27 percent and murder by four percent.
Very tellingly, these same cities Trump condemned have not only predominantly voted against Trump on a consistent basis, they each have a sizable black population. This gives the awful impression that Trump is indulging a racist vendetta, as Republicans have long denigrated major cities as crime-ridden, ostensibly in response to nonwhite populations moving to these cities seeking work opportunities and protection from racial discrimination, especially the state-sanctioned variety, and have been clamoring for more police crackdowns therein, dating back to at least the Watts uprising in Los Angeles in 1965, which erupted in response to police brutality.
Amid this pointless, farcical, and wasteful political posturing, none of the 320 mass shootings in 2025, in which a total of 358 people were killed and 1,326 wounded, have received anywhere near the same level of concern from the Trump regime.
Meanwhile, a 2024 report by the center-left think tank Third Way has reported that the average murder rate in states that voted for Trump has been 24 percent higher than in blue-voting states since 2000. States that staunchly support Trump like Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana have consistently had the highest murder rates in the United States since 2016.
For all Trump’s vapid bluster about cracking down on crime, we can see that all this is really about punishing his political enemies and encouraging racial violence.
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