Trump orders federal takeover of Washington DC after declaring emergency

TOI Correspondent from Washington: US President Donald Trump on Monday placed Washington DC, a heavily Democratic city, under federal control, citing "out of control" crime in the city even though government statistics show violent crime has fallen across the country including in the nation's capital.

Trump and his administration officials cited episodic crime, including the carjacking and mugging of prominent former DOGE executive Edward Coristine, nicknamed "big balls," to take over the city that votes 92 per cent Democrat.

"If the capital is dirty the whole country is dirty and (foreign visitors) won respect us," Trump said as he talked up episodes of violent crime, drug use, graffiti, and poor roads that afflict parts of the city and declared a public safety emergency and signed executive orders for the takeover. He also pledged to clear the city of homeless people, many of whom shelter within blocks of the White House.

“I’m announcing a historic action to rescue our nation’s capital from crime, bloodshed, bedlam and squalor and worse. This is Liberation Day in D.C., and we’re going to take our capital back,” Trump told reporters at a White House presser.

Divided into quadrants, the northwest part of the city, which is where most of its elites live, is relatively clean and safe. But there are parts of lower-income southeast, with a majority black population, that are viewed as avoidable going back to the Reagan, Clinton, and Bush era. About 40 per cent of Washington DC's population is black or African-American.

But Trump and his MAGA associates portrayed the episodic crime as a Democratic failure due to lax enforcement as they flooded the city over the weekend with hundreds of personnel from agencies such as FBI, ATF, Secret Service, and National Guard, even though he argued that DC's 3500 police force was a big as an army and should have been more than enough to take care of crime.

"The city is dirty, disgusting, and unsafe," Trump raged, saying it was embarrassing for him to even talk about it when he heading out to meet Vladimir Putin in Alaska. In an unguarded moment that betrayed the optics behind the move, the US President people from states like Iowa and Indiana -- majority white Republic states in middle America -- should feel safe coming to the US capital.

Trump has long lashed out at Democrat-run cities such as Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York, all of which have large black and minority population, where opportunity crime is relatively high in less-policed areas. But Trump and his associates argue that the influx of illegal immigrant in the so-called sanctuary cities run by Democrats has resulted in a spike in crime even though government statistics show immigrants commit less crime than US citizens.

MAGA principal Jeanine Pirro, the US attorney for Washington, railed against a court system that freed juveniles so that they could go and do yoga and learn arts and crafts, as she argued changing the law to bring charges against criminal defendants in their early teens. "These people are never going to be reformed," Trump said, backing her.

Local polls show a majority of DC residents (77 percent) are “extremely” or “very” concerned about Trump’s take over of the city. Asked about actions the Trump administration was taking in general, a 72 percent majority said they felt “angry,” and 64 percent felt “scared.”