By Becket Adams
Sunday, August 17, 2025
Democrats and their media allies once again are insisting
that something objectively bad is not actually all that bad, if it’s bad at
all.
In doing so, they’re only further alienating themselves
from voters — and handing President Trump another potentially massive political
victory.
This has been a consistent problem for Democrats during
the Trump era. Whether it’s denying soaring crime rates or shrugging off
unchecked illegal immigration, the Democratic Party’s strategy of
indiscriminate opposition to whatever Trump is doing means they’re routinely
denying or downplaying obvious problems, granting him repeat opportunities to
prove them wrong and contrast himself favorably with the public.
The president, citing the high crime rate in the nation’s
capital, invoked the D.C. Home Rule Act last week to federalize the District’s
Metropolitan Police Department. His administration also deployed federal troops
to the capital.
The Democratic response thus far, much of it echoed by
the press, has yet to rise above the level of an indignant, “What crime?”
“I walk around all the time,” said Senate Minority Leader
Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.), who enjoys the benefit of an
armed security detail. “I feel perfectly safe. They’re full of it.”
“Citing a nonexistent crime crisis,” said the New York
Times’ Peter Baker, “Trump plans to take over the Washington DC
police and put troops in the streets of the nation’s capital.”
He added in reference to a dubious statistic: “Contrary
to his claims, violent crime in DC is at a 30-year low.” (MPD Third District
Commander Michael Pulliam was suspended in May following allegations that he
had been cooking the books to minimize serious crimes.)
“I should note,” CNN’s Dana Bash said, “that the most
violent moment in recent history in D.C. was January 6, and it was an attack on
the United States Capitol by a lot of people who were doing it in the name of
Donald Trump.”
There have been 101 homicides and 536 cases of assault with a dangerous
weapon in D.C. so far this year. There was a shooting on June 9 in which one
person was killed and three were injured. In May, two Israeli embassy staffers
were assassinated outside the Capital Jewish Museum in downtown D.C. The gunman
allegedly shouted, “Free Palestine!” One of the embassy victims, a 26-year-old
Jewish woman named Sarah Milgrim, was not immediately killed after she was
struck and knocked over by the first round of gunfire. The alleged gunman then
patiently walked over to Milgrim as she attempted to crawl away and unloaded
the rest of his clip into her body, according to prosecutors.
“As you listen to an unhinged Trump try to justify
deploying the National Guard in DC, here’s reality: Violent crime in DC is at a
30-year low,” said Hillary
Clinton, who once cited the robbery and murder of a 27-year-old Democratic
staffer in the capital as justification for stricter gun control laws.
Crime? What crime?
What part of the nation’s capital having a homicide rate
that is nearly six times the rate in New York City do these people
not understand? We’re not even treading in new territory here. Trump didn’t
invent D.C. crime from thin air; this is a crisis more than a decade in the
making.
I can attest to this!
In the 15 years that I worked and lived in the capital, I
was mugged at gunpoint, had a knife pulled on me for trying to separate a fight
between two homeless people, and had my car stolen. In 2018, my
then-seven-month-pregnant wife was chased by three preteens, knocked to the
ground, and robbed of her phone. They put what she thought was a gun to her
head. It turned out later that the gun was a toy. Talk about cold comfort.
Our car was broken into numerous times, in different
locations. A team of contractors who were working on a house across the alley
from our home was robbed at gunpoint of their tools, not once but twice. We had
neighbors suffer break-ins. One neighbor was stabbed during a break-in.
I once witnessed a parked motorist beating the daylights
out of his female passenger. He drove away as soon as he saw me approaching. I
tried several times to call 911, but no one would pick up on the other end. As
it turns out, this is a common experience for those who try to call for help in
D.C., as the Washington Post would later report.
Don’t just take my word for it. The data agree,
Democratic claims to the contrary notwithstanding.
Most shocking are the homicide numbers, which first crept
from a low of 88 in 2012 and then rocketed to a 20-year high of 274 in
2023. The numbers came down in 2024, but clocking in under 200 is hardly
reason to celebrate, let alone suggest all is well.
There were 270 reported cases of rape in the nation’s capital last
year, according to FBI crime statistics. Those are just the cases that were
reported.
Next, of course, are the carjackings, which got so out of
hand between 2020 and 2023 that law enforcement officials began handing out free tracking tags to
help future victims locate their stolen cars. It was also around this time that
city officials advised motorists to always “travel with someone whenever possible, especially at night.”
“When you are coming to a stop,” they added, “leave
enough room to maneuver around other cars, especially if you sense trouble and
need to get away [and] DON’T stop to assist a stranger whose car has broken
down.”
It’d be funny if this weren’t roughly the same operating
procedure for U.S. convoys in Iraq.
“One way we could make DC safer and cleaner without using
the national guard would be to restore the $1b in cuts to the city budget that
was passed into law with Trump’s signature—which Trump and Republicans were
supposed to reverse but never got around to,” quipped MSNBC’s Sam
Stein.
The D.C. council last year passed a $21 billion budget. In July, it approved a $22 billion budget for 2026. The city’s total state
expenditures in 2024 were $18.7 billion. For context, this exceeds the total amount
spent that year by Nevada, Alaska, Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, North Dakota, South
Dakota, Nebraska, Delaware, Vermont, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, or Maine. In
some cases, D.C. spends more than several states combined.
Was it a lack of budgetary spending that saw an Uber Eats
driver get dragged to death in 2021 after he attempted to stop two teenage
girls from stealing his car? Should we have simply spent more to prevent a Washington
Commanders running back from being shot twice in the leg during an
attempted robbery in 2022? What about that Rand Paul staffer who was stabbed in the head and lungs in the middle of the
afternoon in 2023, or the Congressman Ron Estes intern who was murdered in 2025 during a drive-by
shooting?
Maybe $23 billion is the magic number to achieve a
somewhat normal crime rate.
The problem with the smug, reflexive opposition, aside
from the sheer pigheadedness of it all, is that it blinds Democrats to what
people mean when they talk about the type of lawlessness seen in cities such as
D.C., Los Angeles, and St. Louis. They’re talking about the high crime rate, but
also the things that go hand-in-hand with it: the loss of trust, pervasive
dirtbag behavior, and a general culture of disorder. There are murders, rapes,
and assaults — and also societal breakdown, and an invasive sense of danger,
disregard, despair, and insecurity.
In the capital specifically, there’s the everyday scene
of Metro riders who pay nothing to ride the rails, choosing instead to hop the
turnstiles and enjoy “free” transportation courtesy of those who are apparently
sucker enough to keep paying. There are the omnipresent homeless encampments;
open sewers and open wounds. There are the tweakers outside bus and Metro
stops, either in the process of injecting high-octane narcotics or surrendering
mind and body to the “fenty flop.” There are boarded-up stores, out-of-business
signs, and random gangs of truants roaring around on motorbikes and ATVs,
choking traffic both in the street and on the sidewalk. There’s the casual
shoplifting. There are the locked plexiglass cases in stores across the city,
where everything from diapers to toothpaste to cellphones has been hidden away
in response to a culture where theft has become as normalized as drinking a
glass of water. There’s also the fact that Walmart abandoned its original plans
to open six stores in the District, choosing instead in 2023 to shutter its H Street location in favor of a consolidation
strategy.
Between the actual crime and the culture of disorder, the
capital clearly has a problem. It’s impossible not to notice. It’s
baffling, as a matter of practical politics, that Democrats have adopted this
dismissive and even denialist attitude, especially when their position is so
easily disproven. It’s even more baffling that Democrats keep doing this,
reflexively contradicting the president and caviling, when he’s clearly right
and an overwhelming majority of voters agree with his position.
The Democratic Party better hope Trump’s approach to crime in the nation’s
capital fails. Otherwise, this will end up as great a disaster for them as
unchecked illegal immigration, where Trump proved in the opening months of his second
administration that, contrary to Democratic assurances and assessments, the
federal government can, in fact, do something about it.
It’s also befuddling that journalists and pundits —
people who supposedly know a thing or two about messaging — keep affirming this
self-destructive Democratic tendency. Everyone involved in the effort this past
week to downplay D.C.’s unacceptable level of crime looks, frankly, ridiculous.
Meanwhile, as they continue to self-immolate and beclown themselves, Trump
marches forward, making headway with voters who agree with him on principles as
basic as “crime is bad.”
My family and I no longer live in the capital, and not
just because of its outrageous cost of living or the fact that the most
incompetent people alive run what that city calls a “government.”
We left because it’s not fun playing Russian roulette
every day with our lives and property. And we didn’t leave so much as we fled.
Things are not great in the seat of American power.
Anyone with eyes and access to crime statistics can tell you that.
No comments:
Post a Comment