Trump likens DC to ‘worst places on Earth’ as military takes over nation’s capital: ‘Wild youth, maniacs and homeless’
President Donald Trump on Monday invoked a never-before-used authority to seize control of the Washington, D.C. police department and hand it over to one of his own appointees as he simultaneously ordered the city’s national guard to begin patrolling the streets, casting the unprecedented move as needed to “rescue” the city from “crime, bloodshed, bedlam and squalor and worse.”
Flanked by a group of cabinet and law enforcement officials as he stood before reporters in the White House briefing room, Trump declared the day “Liberation Day in DC” as he said he was invoking a section of the decades-old home rule charter for Washington that allows the president to demand the services of the Metropolitan Police Department to deal with “special conditions of an emergency.”
“Our capital city has been overtaken by violent gangs and bloodthirsty criminals roving mobs of wild youth, drugged out maniacs and homeless people, and we’re not going to let it happen anymore,” Trump said as he compared the situation in Washington to the country’s southern border.
He claimed his administration’s actions to federalize and militarize law enforcement in the capital could produce a situation similar to the standstill in the border region, where in his rendering of events “nobody comes” on account of his crackdown on irregular migration from South and Central America into the U.S.
Trump said the unprecedented escalation and undermining of the elected Washington, D.C. government is necessary because of what he described — inaccurately — as record crime levels akin to some of the world’s most violent cities even as the American capital has seen year-over-year declines in murder and other violent crime for the past two years.
The previously-unused section of the 1973 D.C. Home Rule Act Trump invoked in an executive order allows the president to use the Washington police department for federal purposes for a 30-day period. It was intended for use during periods of civil unrest like the riots that gripped the city and left parts of it burnt out and in ruins after the 1968 assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., but in practice there is no constraint on the president’s ability to make use of the law so long as he “determines that special conditions of an emergency nature exist which require the use of the Metropolitan Police force for federal purposes.”
Although Washington’s murder rate hit levels not seen since the crack cocaine epidemic of the 1980s and 1990s just two years ago, the period since has seen a steep decline under the leadership of Chief Pamela Smith, who was named to her role in 2023 after two years leading the U.S. Park Police.
Statistics made public by the DC government and the Department of Justice show other violent crimes having declined during the same period. But Trump told reporters he was moved to take over the department in part by an assault on a young former Department of Government Efficiency staffer last week, who he said was “savagely beaten by a band of roving thugs after defending a young woman from an attempted carjacking” and “left dripping in blood” with a broken nose and concussion.
He also noted that a House of Representatives intern had been killed by a stay bullet two months ago, and recalled how a former official from his first term, Mike Gill, had been “murdered last year in cold blood in a carjacking, blocks away from the White House.”
“It’s becoming a situation of complete and total lawlessness,” Trump said, adding for good measure that his administration would be “getting rid of the slums” where he described criminals as living and cracking down on “caravans of mass youth” who “rampage through city streets at all times of the day” on various small motor vehicles.
The president placed blame for what he called a “dire public safety crisis” on “the abject failures of the city’s local leadership,” including the city’s elected city council’s decision to abolish cash bail as part of efforts to reduce racial inequities in the wake of the 2020 murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis, Minnesota police officer.
“We’re going to change the statue, and I’m going to have to get the Republicans to vote, because the Democrats are weak on crime. Totally weak on crime,” he said.
Another Trump appointee, U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro, complained that D.C. law makes it too hard for her to prosecute young offenders because it only allows the U.S. Attorney’s office to handle a small set of violent crimes by youth while leaving most juvenile prosecutions to the city’s elected attorney general, who prosecutes those cases in family court.
“I see too much violent crime being committed by young punks who think that they can get together in gangs and cruise and beat the hell out of you or anyone else. They don’t care where they are. They can be in Dupont Circle, but they know that we can’t touch them. Why? Because the laws are weak,” Pirro said. “I can’t arrest them, I can’t prosecute them. They go to family court and they get to do yoga and arts and crafts.”
