President Donald Trump, when explaining why he made a move to deploy the National Guard to handle crime in Washington, D.C., used a simple lesson he learned from his dad: Would you go into a restaurant that looks like a rat-hole on the outside?
Trump announced Monday that the federal government was taking control over D.C.’s Metropolitan Police Department and deploying the National Guard to help reduce crime.
The move came after an administration official was bloodied and beaten during an attempted carjacking earlier in the month; according to The Hill, Trump said he was looking to “rescue” the nation’s capital from “bloodshed, bedlam, and squalor” and noted that D.C.’s murder rate was higher than other cities — including Bogotá, Colombia, not exactly known as the Singapore of South America.
Local officials protested that crime rates are down significantly in Washington (not really true, but we’ll get to that later), but it’s the president’s prerogative to take emergency control of D.C. police for a short period of time under the Home Rule Act of 1973, which devolved some of the District’s power to local officials, who haven’t exactly done a bang-up job of running the place since, especially when it comes to crime. (At least local officials, most notably — but definitely not only — former Mayor Marion Barry have managed to get themselves locked up for their behavior with solid regularity, but the same can’t be said for the rest of the city’s miscreants.)
However, the Aug. 3 viral beating was enough — especially since this was the former Department of Government Efficiency staffer known as “Big Balls,” 19-year-old software engineer Edward Coristine, who’s now with the Social Security Administration and lived up to his moniker during the encounter — and 800 National Guard troops will be helping local law enforcement clean up the streets.
Asked why during a media briefing, Trump gave an explanation for it via a metaphor from his father, Fred Trump.
“My father always used to tell me — I had a very wonderful father, very smart — and he used to said, ‘Son, when you walk into a restaurant and you see a dirty front door, don’t go in.’
“‘Because if the front door is dirty, the kitchen is dirty also.’ Same thing with the capital,” Trump continued.
“If our capital is dirty, our whole country is dirty, and they won’t respect us.”
President Trump : “My father always used to tell me…’Son, when you walk into a restaurant & you see a dirty front door, don’t go in. Because if the front door is dirty, the kitchen is dirty also.’…If our capital is dirty, our whole country is dirty.” pic.twitter.com/HNvwZkcJqV
— JOSH DUNLAP (@JDunlap1974) August 11, 2025
Is the principle behind Fred Trump’s wisdom right?
This, by the way, is essentially the “broken windows policing” model that helped bring New York City back under former Mayor Rudy Giuliani until it got thrown out during the 2010s based on woke piffle. We’re now charging people who restrain mentally ill criminals threatening strangers on the New York City subway with murder thanks to the social justice warriors’ hold over how New York polices itself. Great work, gang.
But you probably heard a lot of people talking about the “historic lows” that D.C.’s crime is at:
President Trump announces he is seizing control of DC’s police force as he rolls out a series of false and misleading claims about crime in the city, which is actually at historic lows.
— Ken Dilanian (@DilanianMSNBC) August 11, 2025
From The Hill:
Police statistics, however, show that crime rates in the District have fallen sharply over the past two years. Violent crime is down 26 percent when compared year-to-date against 2024. Last year, in turn, saw a 32 percent drop in homicides and a 35 percent drop in overall violent crime compared to 2023.
However, two things here. First, as the Daily Caller noted, the Metropolitan Police Department only measures four crimes when looking at “violent crimes”: homicide, sexual abuse, assault with a dangerous weapon, and robbery. Aggravated assault and felony assault without weapons are left out.
The FBI’s data, which includes a wider range of crimes, shows that there was only a 10 percent decrease in 2024 — hardly historic lows, especially when you consider it remains higher than in 2018, and much higher than it was earlier in the 2010s.
Historic lows?
The murder rate has roughly doubled in the past 12 years.
The murder rate in 2012 was 13.9. The murder rate in 2024 was 27.5. That’s a 97.8% increase.
I think we need remedial math at MSNBC. https://t.co/vJbEOf6e2R
— Alex Pfeiffer (@Pfeiffer47) August 11, 2025
And that’s the second problem: We’re measuring this against incomplete pandemic data from a city not known for its safety record before COVID-19, the Summer of Floyd, and the concomitant rise in crime ushered in by both events.
As someone who has once resided in the District of Columbia, let’s just say that this is like Boeing telling us all that 737 Max incidents are down from those two deadly crashes caused by that problematic software system to only having that emergency door blow out mid-flight on that Alaska Airlines plane last year. Look, everybody survived! I don’t get what the big deal is!
The door has looked dirty on the D.C. restaurant for a while. Its leaders are either incapable of stopping crime or unwilling to stop it, and its citizens won’t vote them out. It’s high time someone cleaned it up — and now’s as good a time as any, as the president’s dad might have said.
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