President Donald Trump on Sunday continued his series of pronouncements about safety in the city of Washington, saying he will hold a Monday morning news conference to talk about fixing the city’s problems
“The Press Conference on Crime and ‘Beautification’ will be held tomorrow,” he posted on Truth Social, “at 10:00 A.M. EST, in the Press Briefing Room, and it will not only involve ending the Crime, Murder, and Death in our Nation’s Capital, but will also be about Cleanliness and the General Physical Renovation and Condition of our once beautiful and well maintained Capital.”
Trump has been harping on what he sees as the dangerous nature of Washington in recent weeks; he has had FBI agents deployed to fight crime and threatened to take over the city. His deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller recently said the city was “more violent than Baghdad, it is more violent than parts of Ethiopia.”
FBI crime statistics show that the city experienced a surge in violent crime in 2023 (though with homicide numbers far below the worst years from 1989 to 1993), but the numbers have dropped significantly since then in a range of categories, including homicides, violent crimes and carjackings.
“It is true we had a terrible spike in crime in 2023, but this is not 2023, this is 2025,” Mayor Muriel Bowser said Sunday on MSNBC’s “The Weekend.” “We’ve done that by working with the community, working with the police, working with our prosecutors, and, in fact, working with the federal government.”
She added: “Any comparison to a war-torn country is hyperbolic and false.”
The District of Columbia Home Rule Act provides the legal framework for the city’s self-government, its elections and its administration of day-to-day functions. It was passed by Congress in 1973 by wide margins and signed by President Richard M. Nixon. In Feburary 2025, however, Rep. Andy Ogles (R-Tenn.) and Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) offered legislation to repeal the law.
Trump’s Truth Social post did not say exactly what the president had in mind, but he made it clear he planned to act in some manner.
“The Mayor of D.C., Muriel Bowser, is a good person who has tried, but she has been given many chances,” Trump’s Truth Social post said, “and the Crime Numbers get worse, and the City only gets dirtier and less attractive. The American Public is not going to put up with it any longer.”
