On Monday morning, President Donald Trump said something was “out of control” and that “we’re gonna put it in control very quickly.… I’m announcing a historic action to rescue our nation’s capital from crime, bloodshed, bedlam, and squalor, and worse.” Trump wasn’t wrong that crime, bedlam, and squalor have lately engulfed the nation’s capital. It was only the “bloodshed” part that struck a false note.
As The Washington Post documented in advance of Trump’s declaration of what looks a lot like martial law within the District of Columbia, violent crime spiked in 2023 but fell sharply in 2024, and since the start of 2025 it’s stood lower than during nearly all Trump’s first term as president (when Trump paid D.C. crime little heed). This is part of a national trend; according to the Post, homicides are down 30 percent nationwide, as are burglaries and robberies. Trump’s federal takeover of the D.C. police and his deployment of the National Guard therefore have no justification in observable reality. Even Trump’s own FBI director, Kash Patel, in a hilariously off-message statement at the press conference announcing the deployment, said that “the murder rate is on track to the be lowest in U.S. history.”
Regrettably, after the Post got finished showing “what the data shows,” someone (I’d bet an editor) added this sentence: “Not captured in statistics, though, is the grief, pain and shattered sense of safety that follow each crime.” Oh, please. In the context of an imminent and deeply troubling federal takeover of the city’s police force, I put that statement somewhere between rationalization and abject surrender. Similarly craven was the Post’s subsequent framing of the matter as a dispute between a president who thinks violent crime is going up and a D.C. mayor who thinks it’s going down. Mayor Muriel Bowser doesn’t think it’s going down. It’s going down.
Glenn Kessler, who until recently was the Post’s fact-check columnist (he took the buyout), reported last week that the Post’s publisher, Will Lewis, last year asked him: “What should the Post do to appeal more to Fox News viewers?” Reporting the facts and then telling readers that facts don’t matter—or that any disagreement over them is just a matter of opinion—would seem an excellent start. The introduction of federal troops into Washington based on false information calls on Washington’s preeminent news source to demonstrate bravery. Early signs are not encouraging.
The real “crime,” “bedlam,” and “squalor” engulfing the capital emanate not from D.C.’s not especially mean streets but from the White House itself. Don’t let’s forget that the president was convicted a mere 15 months ago on 34 felony counts of fraud related to the 2016 election; in January, the judge in that case sentenced Trump to something called an “unconditional discharge” that allowed Trump’s crimes to go unpunished. That sort of résumé would make most of us reluctant to inveigh publicly against lawbreaking impunity. Not Trump.
The ironies ricochet in every direction. The only reason we don’t see Trump referred to regularly in print as a convicted felon is that the word felon offends civil libertarians; the nation’s most powerful scourge against wokeism turns out, preposterously, to be its greatest beneficiary. Trump is nobody’s idea of a Jean Valjean, not even his own: Trump recently stated he didn’t know whether to identify with Valjean or with his villainous nemesis, Inspector Javert. His 34 felony counts don’t make him a person who made a mistake once, or even 34 times, and deserves a second chance. He’s someone who made a mistake once, or 34 times, then got a second chance, and is using it to commit more crimes. That he’s able to do so demonstrates a lenience on the part of the Supreme Court and an impeachment-shy Republican Congress that puts the District of Columbia Superior Court to shame. Where’s Inspector Javert when you really need him?
The gaudiest of Trump’s latest D.C. crimes involve personal enrichment, in apparent violation of the Constitution’s emoluments clauses. Qatar gave Trump a $400 million aircraft that’s being retrofitted (at a cost of another $400 million) into a replacement for Air Force One; when Trump leaves office, the aircraft will transfer to Trump’s presidential library. Qatar also agreed to allow Trump to build a golf resort there. If these twin agreements don’t violate the foreign emoluments clause (which reads, “No Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under them, shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State”), then it’s hard to imagine what does.
Nobody expects Trump will be called to account anytime soon because the Supreme Court last year gave the president ludicrously broad and ahistorical immunity from prosecution in connection with his official actions. It’s much the same with Trump’s various crypto scams, which two months ago prompted Harvard political scientist Steven Levitsky to tell The Guardian, “I have never seen such open corruption in any modern government anywhere.” By comparison, we have seen violent crime before in the District, back in the 1990s, when the joke was that “D.C.” stood for “Dodge City.” I was here. Believe me, it was much worse then.
D.C.’s other white-collar crime spree is Trump’s extralegal expansion of presidential authority. Even the Supreme Court will probably rule eventually that Trump’s invocation of emergency powers to impose reciprocal tariffs violates federal law, but in the meantime a federal appeals court has allowed the tariffs to remain, causing economic havoc. Meanwhile, the Government Accountability Office’s comptroller general keeps declaring Trump impoundments to be in violation of federal law, prompting White House budget director Russell Vought to tell GAO to fuck off (“These are non-events with no consequence”), and congressional Republicans to move to halve GAO’s budget.
I could go on. According to Lawfare’s Trump litigation tracker, there are 321 active cases against Trump administration actions, including 23 in which judges (appointed by both Democrats and Republicans) have ruled against Trump and seven in which judges have upheld him. But the Supreme Court increasingly finds itself, in the words of Stanford political scientist Adam Bonica, “at war with its own judiciary.” In June, Bonica observed that over the previous month, “federal district courts have ruled against the administration 94.3 percent of the time. The Supreme Court, however, has flipped that outcome, siding with the administration in 93.7 percent of its cases (15 out of 16).”
District court judges, Bonica noted, “see the evidence firsthand and hear directly from those affected.” They “overwhelmingly find the administration’s actions unlawful.” Appellate judges “split more evenly but still lean against the administration.” But “the Supreme Court—furthest from facts, closest to power—reverses almost automatically.” Thomas Edsall of The New York Times, who last week flagged that quotation, calls the high court “a key enabler of President Trump’s agenda.” By “agenda” he means Trump’s illegalities.
Even the precipitating event for Trump’s takeover of D.C. law enforcement hearkens back to the bedlam emanating from Trump’s own White House. Look, I’m very sorry that Edward Coristine, a special employee at the Social Security Administration, got beat up at 3 a.m., August 3, in Logan Circle, allegedly by a pair of 15-year-olds who were attempting to steal his car. There’s no excuse for violence, and these kids, assuming they’re guilty, should be punished.
But what was Coristine doing there in the first place? I don’t mean Logan Circle at 3 a.m. (It’s every American’s right to party-hearty come Saturday night.) I mean in Washington, D.C.
Social Security Administration special employee Edward Coristine is all of 19 years old, and his LinkedIn username is “Big Balls.” He graduated only last year from Rye Country Day School (that’s a private high school in Westchester County) and was enrolled earlier this year as an engineering and physics major at Northeastern, where he should have remained.
Instead, Coristine took a detour into Elon Musk’s DOGE team, where he closed diplomatic offices and fired overseas employees twice his age, all in apparent violation of civil service laws, according to a letter that Elizabeth Warren and other Senate Democrats sent Vought earlier this month. (I assume the overseas employees were twice his age because it’s hard not to be.) According to Bloomberg, Coristine’s previous work experience included an internship at a data security firm, from which he got fired for allegedly leaking proprietary information to a competitor. It looks like he got his DOGE gig through a more successful internship at Musk’s Neuralink.
I don’t mean to be too hard on the kid. After all, he’s only 19. But pretty clearly he’s gotten mixed up with the wrong crowd, and I don’t mean 15-year-old would-be carjackers. I mean those thugs in the Trump White House. It isn’t too late. Coristine should go back to Northeastern and keep some distance between himself and D.C.’s real crime problem.
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