What’s The Matter With Washington, D.C.?
What’s happening in the capital and the reaction to it from all quarters is emblematic of everything wrong with the country.
Earlier this month, President Donald Trump brought law enforcement in the nation’s capital fully under federal control. Beginning with an emergency declaration on August 11, federal law enforcement officers, augmented by National Guardsmen, now patrol the streets of D.C., much to the chagrin of the majority of Americans, along with strong opposition from the Left, as to be expected. The Trump administration’s measures to curb crime in the capital are set to last only 30 days, to be extended only with Congressional approval.
How did this all start, anyway? It might be a stretch to say it precipitated the decision, but it definitely preceded it, providing the perfect backdrop against which to implement new policy. Early morning on August 3, Edward Corsitine, former member of the DOGE anti-government waste commission, known by his nickname “Big Balls,” was assaulted during a carjacking attempt, suffering serious injuries.
Two teenagers were arrested in connection to the attempted carjacking of a former Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) staffer known as “Big Balls.”
Authorities said the 15-year-old suspects, who were charged with unarmed carjacking, were among several teens who allegedly approached the victim, Edward Coristine, and a woman police identified as his significant other near a car around 3 a.m. EDT Sunday in Washington’s Logan Circle neighborhood.
The group allegedly made comments about taking the car, before Coristine pushed his significant other into the vehicle for safety and prepared to confront the group, according to police.
Law enforcement officials said Coristine turned to face the teenagers, and several of them attacked him until police patrolling the area intervened. The group fled on foot when police approached, authorities said.
This was the extent of Corsitine’s injuries [WARNING: GRAPHIC]:
A lot has happened since then. What hasn’t happened are the Left’s fever-dreams, their worst-case scenarios of martial law and pandemonium triggered by attempts to make the capital, of all places, safer. Nobody, besides criminals, maybe, have died. It’s amazing how leftists and liberals genuinely believe that trying to reduce crime makes things more dangerous, and simply ignoring it, minding your own business, is the proper response to crime. It’s all a part of city living, anyway, and besides, you don’t want to be racist, right?
Which is the popular attitude on crime in America, unfortunately:
When libs say there is no ‘crisis’ what they mean is that they have become completely inured to crime rates in black neighborhoods that rival some of the most violent places on earth.
They can’t say it that way but that’s what their ‘knowingness’ is predicated on. ‘Why do you even care?’, ‘Oh are you scared?’, ‘I don’t see what the big problem is!’, etc., all those lib takes are a euphemism for the awareness that violent crime primarily won’t affect white people, particularly if they’re affluent.
Now, there is some empirical validity to libs’ attitude, but it is a cynical and sociopathic one, it is not, as libs would have it, a ‘moral high ground.
You can’t rationalize stupidity, I’m afraid. Crime is a politicized issue, though it shouldn’t be. It’s a big part of the story of how crime, homelessness, and uncleanliness have become normalized in America to the point that any attempt to actually address the problem will court greater backlash than the problems themselves. What’s happening in the capital and the reaction to it from all quarters is emblematic of everything wrong with the country. We have all these problems, everyone agrees on some level these are problems, but nobody actually wants to do anything about it for the stupidest reasons imaginable.
Cries of how Trump’s actions are “authoritarian” and “un-democratic” ring hollow, as usual. Perhaps Trump is willing to wield power more liberally (no pun intended) than a lot of presidents might be comfortable with, but while he may not be fully in compliance with the law, there’s nothing he’s done that’s blatantly illegal or extra-judicious. He’s utilizing the authorities available to him to enforce the law. Call it authoritarian if you’d like; as I said not too long ago, I prefer my political leaders to actually enforce laws and be authoritative. It doesn’t make him a dictator, someone who’d be unconstrained by laws.
The thing is, concerns about Trump’s actions are warranted, as any action by a politician is fair game for reasonable scrutiny. However, if one is going to criticize Trump’s “overreach,” as it were, one must also be honest enough to concede that he’s merely responding to a problem the Left has created.
Nicole Gelinas explains in Unherd:
In 2024, Donald Trump flipped tens of thousands of city dwellers from The Bronx to Philadelphia who were frustrated by lenient crime policies in blue cities and states. It’s understandable that the president wants to reward this emerging GOP constituency by showing instant progress. On Monday, the White House issued an executive order to punish jurisdictions that release criminal suspects without requiring them to post cash bail, and a separate order to prepare the National Guard for “rapid nationwide deployment,” including to cities beyond Washington, DC.
But just because urban crime is a real problem doesn’t mean that Trump can fix it by decree. Trump is exceeding his constitutional authority in attempting to circumvent the frustratingly iterative process of federalist democracy, which rarely offers political or practical shortcuts.
As with many things Trump, we are here because of abject Democratic failures. During the pandemic, much of America endured a rupture in personal safety and order. Reported homicides rose by a third between 2019 and 2022. Cities that seemed to have vanquished the bad old decades disintegrated in full national view: New York City’s murder level spiked 53 percent from near-record lows between 2019 and 2021, the sharpest increase in recorded history.
It’s important to understand that Washington, D.C. is one city which never really got to enjoy the nationwide decline in crime over the last 30 years. Like most of the country, crime has gone down. But even in better days, it was still well above that of the national average. Despite the declines, Washington still remains the 10th most dangerous city in America, according to USA Today. It’s homicide rate is also fifth-highest in the country. It’s all driven by the city’s high concentration of Blacks, a feature common in all of America’s most dangerous cities.
As I so often say, the numbers never tell the whole story and should never end the discussion. It cuts both ways. One of the reasons why the media’s “fact-checking” of Trump, if you can even call it that, is no irritating is that it works off the premise that Trump or some other right-wing figure is wrong and will look for any reason to say they’re wrong. Trump isn’t an exact person when he speaks and is hyperbolic. But is he wrong in principle when he says Washington is a dangerous city?
A perfect example of this form of bad-faith, malicious fact-checking:
Translation: Trump isn’t telling the whole story because he left out the part about how the U.S. is more dangerous than many other countries throughout the world. When you’re determined to find something wrong in what someone’s saying, you’ll find it. Even the most insignificant thing which changes nothing about whether the person is at least pointed in the right or wrong direction.
Even Joe Scarborough on MSNBC on August 13th admits: Democrats will apparently privately say there is a crime problem in D.C. and that what Trump is doing should have been done long ago, but they publicly attack Trump. “You know Washington should have gotten involved years ago. This place is dangerous, it is a mess, it is a wreck, and whatever. But then they will go a on Twitter and ‘this is the worst outrage of all time.’ . . . But man, I don’t care what the crime statistics say, crime has been a problem in this city for the 32 years I have been living inside and outside of the city.”
He’s not the only media personality to feel this way. Kyra Phillips, formerly of CNN and now on ABC News, said much the same:
ABC News anchor Kyra Phillips on Monday recounted a harrowing encounter she had with a “half-dressed” homeless man who mugged her in downtown Washington, DC, as she noted that many in the nation’s capital are experiencing crime “firsthand” despite what official statistics show.
“I can tell you firsthand here in downtown DC where we work, right here around our bureau, just in the past six months, you know, there were two people shot, one person died, literally two blocks down here from the bureau,” Phillips explained.
“It was within the last two years that I actually was jumped walking just two blocks down from here,” she revealed.
“And then, just this morning, one of my co-workers said her car was stolen, a block away from the bureau,” Phillips added.
Media figures aren’t known for their warmth towards Trump. These remarks prove that there exists an objective reality independent of how one feels about the Orange Man. It’s good to see that at least a few of our country’s public voices understand this, that you can dislike Trump but also see that crime is real and bad. For the most part, however, people are allowing their dislike of Trump to override their better sense.
Here’s an example which made the rounds on social media:
That’s right - this woman was once the victim of a carjacking and spent years talking about it. But when an opportunity exists to really do something about crime, the same thing happens as always. Their ideology doesn’t allow them to admit that something more drastic may need to be done to make America a safer place to live. This, right here, in the biggest part of the problem.
The operative question is this: are we okay the level of crime in America? Are we fine with it never going down much further than it currently is? Is it okay for the capital of the world’s lone superpower to be one of America’s most dangerous cities?
It seems liberals think government is capable of making life better for everyone, except when it comes to crime. It can stop mass shootings through policy changes, apparently, but crime is something the government absolutely cannot and shouldn’t try to eliminate. Again, it’s nonsense. It’s one thing to say that there’s no way to get crime down any lower than it is. It may be wrong, but it’s at least an honest argument. What liberals are suggesting is that it’s not worth it to even try to make America safer.
I talk about crime all the time here, so I’ve explained many times before why the Left is so anti-anti-crime. It’s stupid, again, but it’s not irrational, either. Leftists are pro-crime out of both a psychotic sense of social justice and the belief that crime hurts the “right” people - Whites, the “privileged,” conservatives, whomever they view as responsible for America being a horribly unequal society. They’re not wrong, but they forget, for every White, privileged, and/or conservative person crime hurts, it hurts many more Black or otherwise non-White, under-privileged people of all political persuasions.
Trump is now saying he intends to take this new clean-up act on the road, eyeing Chicago as his next tour stop. This is where we’re going to see what the limits of the law truly are. I don’t know how effective these policies have been, and while I’m generally all for doing more to make America safer, it may not be possible to do here what they did in El Salvador or Singapore, at least on a country-wide scale. As a federalist, I firmly believe it’s really is up to state and local governments to make this happen. If neither they nor their citizens want it, I don’t see any reason why the federal government should do their jobs for them.
That’s probably the biggest factor of all - desire. No matter how effective Trump’s policies might be, if Americans don’t want it - and they don’t - then they won’t work, because someone else will reverse those policies in the future. There’s a much deeper problem here, one which transformed the “Silent Majority” from viewing law and order as a default necessity for any civilized society to one where they view it as unnecessary unless the situation gets completely out of control or something, at which point even heavy-handed methods would be ineffectual.
Something to remember is that our cities became dangerous long ago. This isn’t a recent debate, something which only surfaced in the last 10 to 20 years. While what happened in the 1960s has relevance today, the point here is though a certain level of crime in even the safest of societies is inevitable, the amount of crime we see in America is a policy choice.
From Steven Malanga’s excellent 2019 essay in City Journal:
Urban America began falling apart in the 1960s, with skyrocketing crime and worsening disorder. Vagrants and drug dealers colonized streets, parks, and other public spaces. Many once-vibrant city neighborhoods collapsed. The crisis had many causes, including the flight of industrial jobs from northern and midwestern cities. But profound changes in attitudes and government social policy played major roles, too. Crucial adjustments to welfare programs, spurred by liberal policymakers’ belief that the poor were victims of an unjust system, discouraged work and undermined families. The 1960s cultural revolution, which endorsed experimentation with drugs, brought more addiction—and more drug-fueled crime. And as the crisis intensified, policymakers lowered penalties for many crimes, seeing lawbreakers, too, as victims of society, so crime got worse still. Though such policies, championed nationally by President Lyndon B. Johnson and locally by mayors like New York’s John Lindsay, were well-intentioned, they helped produce an urban netherworld.
Today’s arguments over crime are part of a much longer story about how America became a dangerous place, became less dangerous, but still cannot find the confidence to take that final step to become a truly safe place to live. If anything, it seems to want to regress, as though a truly safe society will feel so boring and sterile to the point it’ll drive everyone crazy.
The nihilist in me says that maybe some excitement is what people need to get their heads straight again. It’s just that the cost we’ll pay for everyone learning the lesson the hard way might be beyond our price range.
Numbers Lie And Liars Use Numbers
We’ll close on two items. First, on the contentious topic of crime statistics, it appears, at least in Washington, D.C., there’s credence to accusations that government numbers cannot be trusted.
Two lawsuits from former Metropolitan Police Department officers accusing the department of suppressing violent crime numbers are getting another look during the political rumpus over President Trump’s deployment of troops to fight crime in the District of Columbia.
The Justice Department opened an investigation into the suspected manipulation of crime statistics by police brass to make the city appear less dangerous. The investigation also revived interest in the lawsuits from former officers who said they witnessed the malfeasance up close.
The lawsuits challenge the argument of the D.C. political class and congressional Democrats that violence is at a 30-year low in the city. In one lawsuit, an officer said the department downgraded violent crimes to lesser offenses. In the other, an officer said police leaders classified some homicides as accidental deaths.
The officers’ lawsuits bolster Mr. Trump’s claim that crime is out of control in the nation’s capital as he exercises federal power to help police in the city. However, a judge blocked a full takeover of the police department.
The 2020 lawsuit filed by former Sgt. Charlotte Djossou said police leaders regularly downgraded violent offenses in official reports because “districts compete against each other to get the largest reduction in the crime statistics.”
We’ll have to pay close attention to this story. It’s also a good time to remind everyone, once again, no matter the season: when it comes to crime, trust your gut, not the government.
Lastly, we’ll address one more critic of the federalization of law enforcement in D.C.:
You are more likely to DIE IN A CAR CRASH than you are to be randomly carjacked or shot. Manufactured fear.
Would I rather be mugged (still a low likelihood for the average American at 3.6% in any given US city) than have a full-blown police state? Yes.
Protect yourself.
This isn’t something a serious person would say. Traffic laws are among the most strongly enforced laws in America for that very reason. Even then, as this person says, the risk of dying in a car crash is still high. Yet, not a single person out there would suggest we enforce traffic laws less stringently.
Not only are we not living under a full-blown police state, the low likelihood of something occurring is no reason not to take measures to prevent it from happening, because likelihood is just one consideration in overall risk management. The only reason why the likelihood isn’t any higher is because we’ve taken measures to prevent such crimes from happening in the first place. More importantly, someone who says something like “I’d rather be mugged” is making a political statement - to say such a thing means you’re willing to put your life into the hands of a total stranger, someone who clearly sees your life as expendable, a mere obstacle to be brutally cast aside of needed. Someone who says they trust their life in a criminal’s hands deserves what they get in the end.
Protect yourself? Don’t kid yourself. The commenter, a woman, later said:
DC allows concealed carry and guns aren’t the only way to protect yourself
Remember what I was saying about how women, especially young urban women, don’t take personal safety seriously? This is an example of it. Does she understand what it means to take someone’s life? The strings that come attached? As for guns not being the only way to protect yourself, whichever method you choose, you must pose a credible threat of violence. The would-be mugger must be convinced you’re capable of causing death or great bodily harm. Is she capable of sending that message? I think not.
That’s enough for this one. It’s your turn - what are your thoughts on the Trump administration’s actions in Washington, D.C.? Is this a long overdue measure? Or is Trump in the wrong here?
Discuss it in the comments section.
Max Remington writes about armed conflict and prepping. Follow him on Twitter at @AgentMax90.
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Another aspect of Trump sending the national guard into places like Chicago, is that it is only one one-hundredth of what the federal government did to the South during the civil war. They will cry about Trump deploying Troops to the national capitol for less than a month in order to have crime go down, but they would never even think to criticize Lincoln for waging war against part of America's heartland or anything that happened during reconstruction. Not necessarily saying that what Lincoln did during the war between the states was completely unjustified. However, Trump is doing barely what Lincoln or reconstruction did to Blue areas, and leftists are having a whiny meltdown. Trump is only a hundredth as authoritarian as Lincoln was. Not necessarily bad, but leftists loved the civil war & reconstruction because those more or less punished southerners (leftists hate southerners), but when that same thing barely happens to a northern blue state, they are suddenly indignant now. If you look at Illinois, what you see is an otherwise great state that is ruined by a dysfunctional city - Chicago. Urban American relishes in exploiting and punishing rural America. There are several States that would be conservative if it weren't for one large city full of libtards - New York, Illinois, Washington, Oregon, Michigan, Virginia, Colorado, etc. So now, I don't feel sorry that Blue cities are getting a mini-reconstruction, I am going to enjoy it rather.
Here’s an idea: in a normal city, wealthy donors and private enterprise serve as a restraint on the type of left wing activists that would normally be elected. I recall watching the Homicide series way back and it was always an emergency when a tourist was killed.
In DC, there isn’t much private enterprise and the federal government isn’t going anywhere. So there are no restraints. It is more like a situation of Gary or East St Louis where there are no restraints.
I understand that DC didn’t always have mayoral elections and Congress appointed managers. That would be the best approach and the only one that would work.