President Donald Trump’s militarized crime crackdown in Washington, DC, is a clarifying political moment.
It’s again exposed Democrats’ struggles to combat Trump’s hardline law-and-order rhetoric and splits within their party that the president exploited to win two elections. Party leaders who keep citing statistics showing crime coming down are hardly consoling residents of a relatively small city that has seen 100 homicides this year.
Trump might be better at recognizing fears of violent crime. But as usual, he’s adopted an extreme position, declaring a state of emergency when one doesn’t exist. He has few ideas to tackle the underlying causes of crime. He demonizes the homeless, but his economic policies could make the problem worse. Like his peace deals and trade agreements, his crime purge may be mostly for show.
Residents of the District of Columbia, meanwhile, have a right to feel unsafe. Trump’s surge of federal officers and soldiers onto the streets might fill personnel shortages in the police department. But the move is likely temporary, and the same dangers will return once the city is no longer Trump’s prop.
This all points to a big problem with the vicious politics of the Trump era. Every issue gets boiled down to partisan fights that forestall solutions and good governance.
The fight against crime is nuanced. Three things can be true at once. Namely, that Democrats are hopeless at coining winning messaging; Trump’s drastic measures do fit into an increasingly chilling turn toward authoritarianism; and while crime may be down, DC can be dangerous. The city in many ways falls short of what Americans might want for the capital of a great nation.
Democrats can’t compete without a figurehead
Trump’s bombastic White House press conference on Monday, when he announced his takeover of DC’s Metropolitan Police Department, was characteristic demagoguery designed to appeal to his hard-core voters.
It also underscored how Democrats are hampered by the lack of their own powerful figurehead. Nine months after the last election and 14 before the next one, the party has no one with the skill to parry Trump’s flood-the-zone presidency.
Once-in-a-generation communicators like presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama had the capacity to shape language and positions appealing to multiple constituencies at once. Party lawmakers and candidates then adopted the messaging as their own. Great politicians are teachers; they intuit the electorate’s emotions and fears and shape persuasive arguments and policy.
But such linguistic dexterity was missing in initial Democratic reactions to the Trump crime surge. Most party leaders raced to proclaim yet another power grab by a wannabe dictator rather than touching on the perils of violent crime.
“For all the talk Republicans give about giving their localities their rights, where are they now?” Senate House Minority Leader Chuck Schumer wrote on X, saying the crackdown was merely an attempt to detract from Trump scandals. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries wrote on the same site that “the crime scene in D.C. most damaging to everyday Americans is at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.” Maryland Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin told CNN’s Kasie Hunt on Monday that Trump wasn’t reacting to a “real emergency” but was instead trying to deflect from his past ties to accused sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. “He doesn’t want to release the Epstein files. So, he wants everybody to look in another direction,” Raskin said.
And a group of Democratic lawmakers from Maryland and Virginia warned of the “soft launch of authoritarianism.” They noted that crime was still too high for those victimized in the final sentence of a long statement.
None of these arguments are necessarily wrong. But by focusing first on Trump’s repressive motives, they do not immediately address voter concerns over safety. This recalls the last election. When Democrats failed to meet Americans’ worries about high immigration rates and high prices, they opened a lane for Trump and his extreme solutions. Saving democracy is great. But people need to feel secure first.
Some Democratic strategists want their party to do better. “Democrats, listen to me, please. Talk about wanting a safe street and lean into wanting safe neighborhoods, while at the same time saying we shouldn’t have federal officers in our streets,” Chuck Rocha, one Democratic consultant, told Audie Cornish on “CNN This Morning.”
Democrats have long struggled to make convincing arguments on crime and justice — issues that tease out divisions between the party’s right and left flanks and societal and racial themes that are central to its heritage and ideology. The most recent example was over the murder of Minnesota man George Floyd in 2020 by a police officer. Nationwide protests pushed the party to the left amid outrage at police brutality and a justice system that often fails Black Americans. But when some progressive activists demanded the defunding of the police, they handed a priceless political weapon to Republicans and alienated many moderates and independents.
Members of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) patrol the National Mall area on August 12, 2025, in Washington, DC. – Win McNamee/Getty Images
The Democrats’ long struggle for a convincing message on crime
This is not a new problem.
President Bill Clinton and then-Sen. Joe Biden seemed to have found the answer to the left’s vulnerability on law and order in the 1990s by writing crime bills that boosted law enforcement funding, expanded the death penalty and mandated life in prison for criminals with three or more felony convictions. This insulated Democrats from conservative claims that they were weak on crime.
But the bills had unintended consequences. They ushered in an era of mass incarceration in which Black Americans were disproportionately condemned to life in overcrowded prisons for comparatively minor offenses. The political impact was corrosive, haunting then-candidate Hillary Clinton in her 2016 primary campaign and Biden in his 2020 White House bid.
This week is a reminder that Democrats are still vulnerable to the classic GOP law-and-order gambit deployed by Presidents Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, and most ruthlessly by Trump. It’s far easier to demonize criminals than to produce real solutions. But Democrats need to come up with something before 2028.
Their position is similar to that of former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, a political communicator on the same plane as Bill Clinton. As opposition leader, Blair needed to win over Britons who wanted more law enforcement while reassuring core Labour Party voters concerned with the socioeconomic origins of crime. He became known for a slogan — “tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime” — that positioned him as a new kind of progressive politician with a strong appeal to the critical center. It stole the Conservative Party’s tough-on-crime mantra and helped win the 1997 election.
The Democrats’ best hope of a similar act of triangulation might lie with its governors, some of whom may run for president in 2028, and who are already experienced at the executive level of the nuances of addressing crime.
One of their number, Maryland Gov. Wes Moore, told CNN’s Anderson Cooper on Tuesday that Trump was using the military “as a cudgel and as a tool to be able to advance his political purposes.” Moore said Trump should emulate methods which he said had reduced homicides and other violent crimes in Baltimore.
“I did it without ever having to once operationalize our National Guard to do municipal policing,” Moore said.
Trump isn’t offering serious solutions
While Democratic responses to Trump were politically ineffective, they were often based in truth. Raskin, for instance, pointed out that the Trump’s claim to be a champion of the law was absurd. The largest mass crime event in recent years in Washington, DC, was precipitated by the president — the mob assault by supporters he incited against the US Capitol on January 6, 2021. The Maryland Democrat argued that if Trump were serious about law and order, “he would not have pardoned 1,600 insurrectionists and violent cop beaters.”
By sending National Guard soldiers into the streets in the absence of a crisis, Trump really is adopting the intimidatory tactics of strongman leaders. Some critics worry that his federalization of the capital police force is a test run for a later authoritarian takeover of the city. And the president may also foment lawlessness with his warning that cops could “do whatever they hell they want.”
If Trump really wanted to improve conditions in Washington, he might reverse the GOP-led Congress’s $1 billion budget cut to the city that local officials warn will hit public schools, public safety and an overstretched police department.
And does the White House have any long-term plans beyond window dressing and shows of force?
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt on Tuesday said that homeless people in the city had a choice of shelters, addiction and mental health services, “or jail.” She had no specifics on any new administration housing or social services options or long-term care and solutions.
But Trump already has what he wants.
Military vehicles lined up Wednesday night near the Washington Monument in a striking image that captured his obsession with military projection and the challenges to US founding values his actions represent.
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