Crime-Concerned President to Deploy FBI and National Guard to Increasingly Safe Washington, D.C.

By Dave Levitan | August 11, 2025 | 9:20am

Photo via U.S. Northern Command/Wikimedia Commons

Trump Administration U.S. Military

Crime-Concerned President to Deploy FBI and National Guard to Increasingly Safe Washington, D.C.

Historically speaking, it has been a winning maneuver for politicians to fearmonger over rising crime rates even when actual data show the opposite; polling has consistently shown much of the public believe crime to be rising even as it drops dramatically. Also historically speaking, that tactic has largely been deployed to try and win elections, or perhaps win a misguided funding battle. Also historically speaking, the country hasn’t had an aspiring dictator in office all that much.

According to reporting from Reuters and then other outlets, the Trump administration is planning to deploy “hundreds of National Guard troops” to the streets of crime-ridden Washington, DC — wait, sorry, that’s “safer than it has been in decades” Washington, DC. The ostensible reason for the deployment, echoing the absurd crackdown in Los Angeles earlier in the year, is that violence in the nation’s capital is “totally out of control,” according to the president. “If D.C. doesn’t get its act together, and quickly, we will have no choice but to take Federal control of the City.”

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That chilling threat is, obviously, based on a complete lie. In fact, it will be interesting to see how long a January 3, 2025 DOJ press release remains available on its website: “Violent Crime in D.C. Hits 30 Year Low.” That’s right — in 2024, homicides were down 32 percent compared to the prior year, robberies were down 39 percent, and armed carjackings were down 53 percent. “The strategy this Office began to employ shortly after I came into this role has been to work with our law enforcement partners to focus on the drivers of violence,” said US Attorney Matthew Graves at the time, which sure sounds like a different strategy to “send in the troops.”

And according to DC’s Metropolitan Police, this has actually gotten even better in the months since then. As of August 8, homicides to this point in 2025 are down 12 percent compared to the same period last year; all violent crime is down 26 percent, and all crime, in total, is down seven percent. By basically any measure, DC is safer than it has been, and the idea that it is in desperate need of military intervention is on-its-face absurd.

Deploying troops (and FBI agents, for some reason) to Democrat-run and majority-minority cities, though, is a right-wing fever dream of the highest order. In Los Angeles, it was supposedly to deal with spiraling protests; in DC, out-of-control crime; in Philadelphia, or Baltimore, or Denver, or Seattle, or wherever is next, they’ll pick one of those or any other meaningless and overblown excuse, and hope that enough of the troops themselves are on board or at least not embarrassed enough to participate in the skull-cracking they so desperately want to watch on TV.