President Trump Fights Crime, Democrats Fight Him

by Newt Gingrich

This week, President Donald J. Trump tackled crime in the nation’s capital.

The Democrats expressed outrage that the President of the United States would take public safety in DC seriously. It was the latest expression of their radical pro-criminal, anti-police stance.

The dichotomy drove home how different the two political parties have become.

Most people who live in the DC area know that crime is out of control.

John Heubusch, former director of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, captured this in his recent newsletter.

“Half a lifetime in Washington taught me one thing. Criminals get VIP treatment, and victims get in line,” he wrote. Heubusch was so disgusted he suggested that DC stands for “District of Criminals” and that MPD stood for “Mostly Pretend to Do” rather than Metropolitan Police Department.

While some Democrats, including DC Mayor Muriel Bowser, claim that crime is going down, Steve Moore noted in his Unleash Prosperity newsletter that last month that DC police have been cooking the books to make the city seem safer.

As NBC 4 Washington reported, Police Commander Michael Pulliam was suspended for allegedly altering crime statistics to manufacture a dramatic drop in violent crime. The Washington D.C. police union is accusing the whole department of meddling with crime data.

Fraternal Order of Police Chairman Gregg Pemberton told the news station:

“When our members respond to the scene of a felony offense where there is a victim reporting that a felony occurred, inevitably there will be a lieutenant or a captain that will show up on that scene and direct those members to take a report for a lesser offense… So, instead of taking a report for a shooting or a stabbing or a carjacking, they will order that officer to take a report for a theft or an injured person to the hospital or a felony assault, which is not the same type of classification.”

As Moore wrote, Pemberton, “calls the district’s crime reports ‘preposterous.’ And even the official numbers show Washington has the third-highest gun homicide rate among U.S. cities with populations over 500,000.”

Further, Moore pointed to a May poll by the Washington Post wherein half of the respondents said the crime problem was “extremely serious” or “very serious.” “Many people no longer report some crimes because they believe police will do nothing or they are intimidated by their criminal neighbors,” Moore wrote.

President Trump is operating from two principles. First, Washington is the capital of all the American people. They have the right to visit their nation’s capital without fear.

Second, America is about to celebrate its 250th anniversary. The American people should expect their capital to be a beautiful showplace of freedom and accomplishment.

The DC city government has abjectly failed on both of those counts.

Yet, when President Trump recognized this reality and intervened, the Democrats’ immediate reaction was to attack him for trying to make the capital safe and beautiful.

Consider these comments from Democrats:

  • Rep. Jamie Ruskin of Maryland said, “Donald Trump now wants to militarize the District of Columbia… this is a phony manufactured crisis if I have ever seen one.”
  • House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries said: “The Trump administration has consistently broken the law and violated the Constitution to further the personal and political agenda of a wannabe king. Meanwhile, Donald Trump and cowardly Republicans have done nothing to make life more affordable for everyday Americans.”
  • The Democratic Mayors Association asserted: “If Trump actually cared about our communities, he’d be working to protect them, not vilifying them. But the truth is Trump doesn’t care – he only wants to create yet another political charade to serve his own interests and distract Americans from his failures.”
  • California Gov. Gavin Newsom, seeking to burnish his anti-Trump credentials as a prelude to a 2028 presidential race, piled on with a post on X:

    “While @realDonaldTrump needlessly deploys the National Guard in DC — where crime is at a 30-year low — California continues to bring down crime in nearly every major category. No one should look for advice from a felon who pardoned 1,500 insurrectionists on Day One.

    “What Trump’s doing in DC is the same playbook he used in Los Angeles. His authoritarian orders are a hit to the foundation of our nation and a slap in the face to democracy as we know it.”
  • Washington’s amazing long-term Delegate of the House Eleanor Holmes Norton (first elected in 1990) posted on X:

    “Pres. Trump based his DC Police takeover and deployment of the DC National Guard on a fiction he’s pushed since the campaign trail. DC has not been ‘overtaken by violent gangs’ as he said yesterday. The opposite is true: Crime is the lowest it’s been in 30 years.”

Anyone who lives in Washington knows that crime is not at a 30 year low – or that DC relatively safe. Yet, virtually every Democrat repeats this lie to justify their opposition to President Trump’s effort to restore public safety.

This fight over crime in DC is just one more reminder that the Democrats simply do not understand how the rest of America thinks. They do not see the gap between the realities most Americans face and the modern left’s fantasy world.

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