Donald Trump told law enforcement officials his administration will buy new grass for parks in Washington DC so they resemble his golf courses, during his visit to a US park police facility on Thursday – an event ostensibly scheduled to tout his crackdown on crime in the city.
The president had indicated earlier in the day he would join police and national guard troops on something resembling a patrol, but his remarks at park police’s Anacostia station was his lone stop on his excursion from the White House.
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Flanked by the secretary for homeland security Kristi Noem, attorney general Pam Bondi, and interior secretary Doug Bergum, Trump declared his takeover of the Metropolitan police department to be a success because people were eating out again, despite restaurants reporting a drop in reservations.
Trump also vowed that his administration would lay down new grass in DC’s parks and green spaces, as part of a wider ambition to clean up the nation’s capital.
“One of the things we are going to be redoing is your parks. I’m very good at grass, because I have a lot of golf courses all over the place. I know more about grass than any human being I think anywhere in the world,” Trump told the officers.
“And we are going to be re-grassing all of your parks, all brand-new sprinkler systems, the best that you can buy. Just like Augusta. It’ll look like Augusta. It will look like, more importantly, Trump national golf club, that’s even better,” he said, comparing his own golf course in Virginia to the venue for the Masters.
“We’re going to have all brand-new, beautiful grass. You know, like everything else, grass has a life. Do you know that? Grass has a life. You know, we have a life, and grass has a life. And the grass here died about 40 years ago,” Trump added.
The freewheeling remarks from Trump also touched several other topics unrelated to DC crime, and basked in his legal victory of a New York state appeals court throwing out a $500m judgement against him in the civil fraud case brought by the New York attorney general Letitia James in 2022.
The excursion came a day after JD Vance, the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, and Trump’s deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, visited national guard troops posted at Union Station and pledged to expand the crackdown.
The group’s impromptu stop at a Shake Shack in Union Station drew boos, insults and epithets that echoed around the cavernous entrance hall of the Beaux Arts-style train station.
Trump has long complained about perceived crime rates in DC and the declaration gave him an opening to invoke a legal justification to bring the Metropolitan police department under the administration’s control, and deploy national guard troops from several states.
Falsely painting DC as an urban hellscape overrun by “bloodthirsty criminals”, Trump authorized the deployment of law enforcement units across the city – both in areas with high rates of recorded crime, as well as popular nightlife and tourist spots, including near the White House and Union Station.
Since then, the White House has also tied its immigration enforcement agenda to reducing crime in DC, deploying US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agents and other federal law enforcement on local police patrols to detain immigrants in moped traffic stops.
The surge of law enforcement agents has corresponded to a higher number of daily arrests, which the administration has used to argue Trump’s move was reducing the number of undocumented immigrants and take credit for bringing down crimes such as carjackings and shootings.
Speaking to reporters on Thursday morning, DC’s mayor, Muriel Bowser, said the city had previously had drops in violent crime before Trump took it over, adding an order from the US attorney general, Pam Bondi, compelling DC police to cooperate with federal officials focused on immigration and homeless enforcement.
