Was Trump's Washington takeover justified?

Donald Trump is once again mobilising troops to deal with a phoney "emergency", said W.J. Hennigan in The New York Times. In June, he deployed nearly 5,000 soldiers to Los Angeles after protests broke out over his immigration policies. Last week it was the turn of Washington DC, to which Trump sent 800 National Guard troops and 500 federal agents.

The US capital, he declared, had been "overtaken by violent gangs and bloodthirsty criminals, roving mobs of wild youth, drugged-out maniacs and homeless people". He vowed to rescue it from "bedlam and squalor" and to let the police "do whatever the hell they want".

Never mind that recent data shows that violent crime in the city is at a 30-year low. It's a classic piece of "fearmongering", laced with bigotry, said Melissa Gira Grant in The New Republic. Trump is now threatening to send troops into other "very bad" cities, such as Chicago, New York, Baltimore and Oakland. Is it just a coincidence that these are all Democrat-run cities with Black mayors?

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There are good reasons to be suspicious of federal overreach, said Robby Soave in The Hill, "so I understand a certain level of reflexive distrust at what Trump is doing here". But there's no denying that Washington has a problem with crime, from gangland shootings to "flash mobs of teenagers stealing cars and vandalising convenience stores". It's telling that DC's mayor, Muriel Bowser, while critical of Trump's rhetoric, seems keen to work with him. DC's police union outright welcomed his intervention.

Critics may paint it as an authoritarian power grab, said Charles C.W. Cooke in National Review, but it's entirely within the bounds of the constitution. While DC was granted home rule in 1973, making it akin in some ways to a state, it's officially a federal enclave where the president has every right to assert his authority.

Crime has decreased in DC over the past couple of years, said Heather Mac Donald in The Boston Globe, but it's still at an unacceptable level. The city's homicide rate last year was 27.3 deaths per 100,000 residents. By comparison, New York City's equivalent figure was 4.1; London's in 2023 was 1.2. "Anywhere else in the industrialised world, the DC crime situation would constitute a national emergency."

The problem is concentrated among certain poorer areas and demographics, said Charles Fain Lehman in The Atlantic. In 2023, the last year for which full data is available, 3.4 out of every 1,000 young Black men between the ages of 15 and 24 in Washington died by homicide. That's on a par with the mortality rate of US combatants in Iraq.

There's a problem all right, said Marc Fisher in The Washington Post. But it's hard to see how anything will be much improved by having a few hundred National Guard troops standing around on street corners. If the president really wants to make a difference, he should take more practical steps such as addressing the city's "breathtaking truancy rate": almost a third of DC schoolchildren routinely skip school. More federal funding for counsellors, truancy officers and vocational training would pay dividends. Instead, this funding has been cut.

Trump has an "uncanny knack for identifying the problems that really bother voters", but he rarely follows up with helpful solutions, not least because he hasn't the patience to push tricky reforms through. Washington would benefit from a concerted campaign to address the root causes of its crime and disorder. Sadly, it's getting just another of Trump's "made-for-TV stunts".