'This will go further': Trump says DC crime crackdown may spread to other cities

Emily Goodin, Miami Herald on Aug 11, 2025

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President Donald Trump warned on Monday that cities throughout America could see National Guard troops patrolling their streets as part of his crackdown on crime.

The warning came as he announced a federal takeover of Washington D.C., claiming the nation’s capital has been “overtaken by violent gangs and bloodthirsty criminals, roving mobs of wild youth, drugged out maniacs and homeless people.”

He was clear he saw his action as a test run for other American cities, saying “if our capital is dirty, our whole country is dirty.”

Specifically, Trump focused his ire on the blue cities that didn’t vote for him, naming New York, Los Angeles, Baltimore, Oakland and Chicago while ignoring the crime rate in red cities like St. Louis and New Orleans.

He offered no metrics or measurements for what would result in troops on the nation’s streets and the White House offered no additional details.

But the move was part of Trump’s long war on liberal areas of the country that welcomed Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 and Occupy Wall Street encampments in 2011.

Painting the portrait of a dire situation, Trump described how his goal was to fight crime and tackle homelessness.

He compared the situation in Washington D.C. to that of Bogotá, Colombia and Mexico City, charging that the murder rate in America’s capital was higher than those Latin American metropolises.

“We’re not gonna lose our cities over this. And this will go further. We’re starting very strongly with D.C.,” he said at a press conference at the White House with federal law enforcement officials.

Trump advised local officials across the country to watch closely for guidance on how to clean up their own cities.

“We’re going to take back our capital. We’re going to make it beautiful again, but we’ll make it, more importantly, safe again. It’s going to be so safe, it’s going to be a model. And then we’ll look at other cities also, but other cities are studying what we’re doing,” he said.

He also used his hour-long press conference to frame the issue as a political one, painting Republicans as tough on crime and Democrats as “weak.”

“Democrats are weak on crime, totally weak on crime,” he said as he announced a plan to deploy 800 National Guard troops on the streets of the nation’s capital.

Despite Trump’s insistence that crime is on the rise in Washington, figures from the Justice Department show total violent crime in the District of Columbia is down 35% from 2023 and is the lowest it has been in over 30 years.

Washington D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser said on Sunday she wanted to work with the president to make the city a safer place. But “any comparison to a war-torn country is hyperbolic and false,” Bowser told MSNBC.

Washington D.C. is unique in that it’s already subject to significant federal control and oversight. Still, for Trump to keep control of D.C.’s police force for more than 30 days, he will need approval from Congress.

With his Republican Party in charge of both chambers, he will likely get it.

Trump put on a show of force at his announcement, where he was flanked by Attorney General Pam Bondi, U.S. Attorney for DC Jeanine Pirro, FBI Director Kash Patel, Defense Sec. Pete Hegseth, Interior Director Doug Burgum, and Army Secretary Doug Driscoll.

Democrats, meanwhile, accused him of using the matter to distract from other issues in his administration.

“Donald Trump delayed deploying the National Guard on January 6th when our Capitol was under violent attack and lives were at stake. Now, he’s activating the DC Guard to distract from his incompetent mishandling of tariffs, health care, education and immigration — just to name a few blunders,” wrote Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi on social media.

Pelosi was speaker of the House the day Trump’s supporters rushed the Capitol building to try and stop the certification of Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 election.

It’s not the first time Trump has turned the National Guard into a domestic police force.

In his first term, he dispatched National Guard members in Washington D.C. to calm the protests that sprang up in the wake of the murder of George Floyd, a black man, by a white police officer in Minnesota.

Two months ago, he federalized the 5,000 National Guard members to curb protests over immigration raids in Los Angeles.

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