As a part of the White House press pool, I crammed into a frigid van on Saturday morning, toward the back of President Trump’s motorcade en route to his Virginia golf course. We passed a grimy tent encampment on our way out of the city, and I wondered to myself whether Trump was peering out the window.
My question seemed to be answered the following day. On Truth Social, the president posted pictures likely taken from the motorcade that morning or the next, as he returned for another round of golf. Alongside images of roadside tents and trash, Trump wrote, “We’re having a News Conference tomorrow in the White House. I’m going to make our Capital safer and more beautiful than it ever was before.” Sure enough, at a marathon briefing on Monday morning, Trump announced that he was placing the DC police force under federal control and deploying the National Guard to secure streets long blighted by disorder — and bloodied by the fourth highest homicide rate in the nation.
At first, I hardly noticed the encampment. My parents dropped me off for college at Foggy Bottom 14 years ago this month, and as far as I can remember, tents have dotted that part of the city ever since. But rumors were swirling that a federal takeover of DC was imminent, so I spent the ride thinking back on the last decade.
Washington, DC, is like most other major American cities: dirty and crime-ridden in some pockets, idyllic in others. But it isn’t just another city. It’s the center of American power and the seat of American democracy. It’s the gateway to America. Trump himself illustrated this well by reflecting on something his father, Fred, had told him when he was young. “Son, when you walk into a restaurant, and you see a dirty front door, don’t go in, because if the front door is dirty, the kitchen’s dirty also.” The president added: “Same thing with the capital. If our capital is dirty, our whole country is dirty, and they don’t respect us. It’s a very strong reflection of our country.”
This is the deepest tragedy of the capital city. It really does reflect the country. It reflects our class dynamics, our inability to end cycles of poverty and crime, our aborted ambitions.
Trump’s critics are correct that Washington is lovely and, like many cities, much improved since a nadir in the Nineties and early Aughts. True, Covid ravaged the city, to the point where downtown streets sometimes resembled surreal scenes from dystopian fiction. That is no longer the case, though there are more empty storefronts than there should be; fentanyl visibly haunts the homeless community; and heinous violence still visits multiple corners of the city every week.
The place feels better than it did amid the riots and lockdowns of 2020, but that’s a low bar. While city statistics show the population is growing again and crime is falling, the police union accuses leadership of manipulating data on the latter. “To evade public scrutiny, MPD leadership is deliberately falsifying crime data, creating a false narrative of reduced crime while communities suffer,” the union’s chairman said in a May news release. Allegations of data tampering are under investigation in the police force.
Perhaps most important, the school system is crumbling. A sweeping Washington Post investigation this summer found that the number of students in the public school system “who missed at least two weeks of class in a school year increased 110 percent over the past decade”; and that “more than 18,000 reports of truancy went uninvestigated in the last three full school years.”
“Downtown streets sometimes resembled surreal scenes from dystopian fiction.”
Just this spring, local media reported that “the number of juveniles arrested in DC has gone up each year since 2020. More than 2,000 were arrested in 2023 and 2024.” The report, from NBC Washington, continued: “Juveniles also accounted for 51.8% of all robbery arrests in 2024, according to the police department. About 60% of all carjacking arrests made to date in 2025 are juveniles,” and “nearly 200 juveniles arrested in 2024 for violent crimes had prior violent crime arrests.”
In April, Metropolitan Police Chief Pamela Smith warned: “We have seen an increase in fights in our schools and more serious criminal offenses outside of our schools. And we have seen an increase in juvenile suspects involved in criminal offenses district-wide.”
Just days later, the Navy Yard neighborhood experienced the first of several violent teen takeovers that have rattled the city. “In just a matter of weeks, our neighborhood has witnessed yet another teen crime… terrorization — for lack of a better word — of our neighborhood,” a commissioner recounted to residents assembled at a May community meeting. He described the event as “a planned attack on our community orchestrated by youth from across the region.”
Hillrag reported, “Hundreds of teenagers have converged on Navy Yard twice over the past month, first on April 18 and again May 17,” during which the commissioner said (and much video evidence confirmed) the kids “entered communal spaces of private residential buildings, fought in public spaces, robbed adults exiting local bars, and yelled at police officers positioned at metro stations.”
This crisis has persisted through the summer months. As in many other cities, each week brings more horrifying anecdotes of murder and assault. Of course, apologists for the existing state of affairs remain unbending. An Associated Press report in January asserted that, overall, “experts say most cities are seeing a drop in crime levels that spiked during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic. But they say misleading campaign rhetoric in the runup to the November elections and changes in how people interpret news about crime have led to a perception gap.”
In DC, at least, the police union seems to believe perceptions of a steady crime rate are more accurate than the city’s figures. Regardless, the low bar set during the apocalyptic days of the pandemic explains why Trump’s bluster is being met with scorn and mockery in the press corps. He’s obviously not right about everything. DC has been worse. Many American cities have been, too. But perhaps the most important message Trump sent on Monday isn’t about the data, it’s about refusing to tolerate what every single American knows is a vicious cycle of crime and poverty in the nation’s greatest cities. The public reaction of DC journalists will be much cooler than the public’s, inside DC and out.
To be sure, the success of Trump’s intervention isn’t guaranteed. The roots of the problem are clearly planted deep in the city’s failing schools and shattered familie s. Conservatives will point to dependence on government programs, and liberals will argue those programs are underfunded. But the National Guard won’t fix these underlying problems, though a posture of intolerance for crime and enforcement of the law will surely help. If the plan succeeds, hundreds of kids in DC will be spared from the trauma of being victimized by crime and also the trauma of participating in it.
The problem is worse than it should be in this historic center of global wealth and power. Quibbling over the data isn’t unimportant, but it risks obscuring the bigger picture. Washingtonians, and Americans, can do much better. That isn’t really up for debate.
