A week that began with President Donald Trump hosting eight world leaders ahead of potential peace talks to end the war in Ukraine ended with him touring a new White House gift shop, reviewing marble samples for a renovation project at the Kennedy Center and taking credit for Washington’s drop in crime.
The night before, Trump visited a federal police command center in southeast Washington, handing out pizza to some of the National Guard troops he activated as part of a crime crackdown in the nation’s capital.
His heightened focus on local crime, not to mention potential improvements to Washington’s streets and parks, was more typical of a mayor than a president.
After touring the gift shop at “The People’s House” museum across from the White House Friday morning, Trump told the reporters following him around that his recent focus on municipal matters was part of a two-pronged effort to improve the nation’s capital by focusing on reducing crime and beautification projects.
“We are going to make D.C. totally safe,” Trump said. “When people come from Iowa, Indiana, all of the beautiful places … they’re not going to go home in a body bag.”
Trump’s interest in municipal matters and hands-on approach to specific projects hearkens back to his career as a Manhattan property developer and even his years as the star of The Apprentice, supervising a number of projects with a production crew in tow.
His breezy demeanor on the ground at various sites served to obscure the brazen expansion of his executive authority and a deployment of the military within the United States that is without precedent and far beyond constitutional precedent. Earlier this month, he placed the Washington police department under federal control, the first time a president has done so.
The president boasted that there have been “no murders” since he made the move. He has described Washington as home to rampant crime despite statistics showing a drop in violent crime since 2023.
“D.C. is a miracle, what’s happened,” Trump said. “D.C. was a hellhole and now it’s safe.”
The president said city officials were “under investigation because they fudged the numbers” and that Mayor Muriel Bowser is “a nice woman … but she’s got to get on the ball.”
Of course, the president has outsized authority over Washington because it is not a state and has no voting representation in Congress. Before 1973, Congress and a commission chosen by the president ran the city. The Home Rule act took that power away from the feds and allowed District residents to elect a mayor.
On Friday, he said he expects Congress to approve $2 billion in federal funding to beautify Washington.
“Congress is happy to do it and we’re going to wisely spend the money,” Trump said. “We’re doing it with Clark Construction. We’re going to head out right from the Capitol and the White House and look at a circle and go about three miles out. It’s going to be beautiful, all those lightbulbs. You see the poles, they’re rusting and they’ve got different lenses on top.”
The president said the capital would be “beautified in 12 months,” reiterating plans to even repave the city’s streets with better asphalt.
“We’re going to take off the asphalt and put beautiful, well-done asphalt,” he said. “You know, if you have a good asphalt worker, it’s the most beautiful thing you could have.”
Trump’s quotidian comments about various construction specs also served to divert attention away from the FBI’s Friday morning raid on the home of former Ambassador John Bolton, who served as Trump’s national security adviser during his first term.
The president claimed not to have known about the raid, although he betrayed that he understood what investigators were looking for — information that might show Bolton leaked classified material in a tell-all book that was critical of Trump — when he said that Bolton “could be a very unpatriotic person. I mean we’re going to find out.”
