signalmankenneth
Verified User
On Monday morning, President Donald Trump said something was “out of control” and that “we’re gonna put it in control very quickly.… I’m announcing a historic action to rescue our nation’s capital from crime, bloodshed, bedlam, and squalor, and worse.” Trump wasn’t wrong that crime, bedlam, and squalor have lately engulfed the nation’s capital. It was only the “bloodshed” part that struck a false note.
As The Washington Post documented in advance of Trump’s declaration of what looks a lot like martial law within the District of Columbia, violent crime spiked in 2023 but fell sharply in 2024, and since the start of 2025 it’s stood lower than during nearly all Trump’s first term as president (when Trump paid D.C. crime little heed). This is part of a national trend; according to the Post, homicides are down 30 percent nationwide, as are burglaries and robberies. Trump’s federal takeover of the D.C. police and his deployment of the National Guard therefore have no justification in observable reality. Even Trump’s own FBI director, Kash Patel, in a hilariously off-message statement at the press conference announcing the deployment, said that “the murder rate is on track to the be lowest in U.S. history.”
Regrettably, after the Post got finished showing “what the data shows,” someone (I’d bet an editor) added this sentence: “Not captured in statistics, though, is the grief, pain and shattered sense of safety that follow each crime.” Oh, please. In the context of an imminent and deeply troubling federal takeover of the city’s police force, I put that statement somewhere between rationalization and abject surrender. Similarly craven was the Post’s subsequent framing of the matter as a dispute between a president who thinks violent crime is going up and a D.C. mayor who thinks it’s going down. Mayor Muriel Bowser doesn’t think it’s going down. It’s going down.
Glenn Kessler, who until recently was the Post’s fact-check columnist (he took the buyout), reported last week that the Post’s publisher, Will Lewis, last year asked him: “What should the Post do to appeal more to Fox News viewers?” Reporting the facts and then telling readers that facts don’t matter—or that any disagreement over them is just a matter of opinion—would seem an excellent start. The introduction of federal troops into Washington based on false information calls on Washington’s preeminent news source to demonstrate bravery. Early signs are not encouraging.
The real “crime,” “bedlam,” and “squalor” engulfing the capital emanate not from D.C.’s not especially mean streets but from the White House itself. Don’t let’s forget that the president was convicted a mere 15 months ago on 34 felony counts of fraud related to the 2016 election; in January, the judge in that case sentenced Trump to something called an “unconditional discharge” that allowed Trump’s crimes to go unpunished. That sort of résumé would make most of us reluctant to inveigh publicly against lawbreaking impunity. Not Trump.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/biggest-criminal-d-c-now-212757073.html
As The Washington Post documented in advance of Trump’s declaration of what looks a lot like martial law within the District of Columbia, violent crime spiked in 2023 but fell sharply in 2024, and since the start of 2025 it’s stood lower than during nearly all Trump’s first term as president (when Trump paid D.C. crime little heed). This is part of a national trend; according to the Post, homicides are down 30 percent nationwide, as are burglaries and robberies. Trump’s federal takeover of the D.C. police and his deployment of the National Guard therefore have no justification in observable reality. Even Trump’s own FBI director, Kash Patel, in a hilariously off-message statement at the press conference announcing the deployment, said that “the murder rate is on track to the be lowest in U.S. history.”
Regrettably, after the Post got finished showing “what the data shows,” someone (I’d bet an editor) added this sentence: “Not captured in statistics, though, is the grief, pain and shattered sense of safety that follow each crime.” Oh, please. In the context of an imminent and deeply troubling federal takeover of the city’s police force, I put that statement somewhere between rationalization and abject surrender. Similarly craven was the Post’s subsequent framing of the matter as a dispute between a president who thinks violent crime is going up and a D.C. mayor who thinks it’s going down. Mayor Muriel Bowser doesn’t think it’s going down. It’s going down.
Glenn Kessler, who until recently was the Post’s fact-check columnist (he took the buyout), reported last week that the Post’s publisher, Will Lewis, last year asked him: “What should the Post do to appeal more to Fox News viewers?” Reporting the facts and then telling readers that facts don’t matter—or that any disagreement over them is just a matter of opinion—would seem an excellent start. The introduction of federal troops into Washington based on false information calls on Washington’s preeminent news source to demonstrate bravery. Early signs are not encouraging.
The real “crime,” “bedlam,” and “squalor” engulfing the capital emanate not from D.C.’s not especially mean streets but from the White House itself. Don’t let’s forget that the president was convicted a mere 15 months ago on 34 felony counts of fraud related to the 2016 election; in January, the judge in that case sentenced Trump to something called an “unconditional discharge” that allowed Trump’s crimes to go unpunished. That sort of résumé would make most of us reluctant to inveigh publicly against lawbreaking impunity. Not Trump.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/biggest-criminal-d-c-now-212757073.html
