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For decades, Washington, D.C. has been synonymous with crime, murder, and more recently vagrancy, but this week, President Donald Trump is taking a page from an ancient political playbook and looking to finally clean up our nation’s capital.
“Salus Populi Suprema Lex Est,” wrote Marcus Tullius Cicero over 2,000 years ago. It roughly means, “the safety of the people should be the supreme law,” and the safety of the ancient Roman citizen, at least for a while, was almost unquestioned.
Trump wants Americans to feel just as safe as they live in or visit the seat of our great democracy.
Democrats’ immediate reaction to Trump’s common-sense plan to fight crime in D.C. by surging federal resources and approaches was to play deaf, dumb and blind to the plight of residents, citing statistics that show a recent drop in an already sky-high crime rate.
Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., perhaps from his Whites only beach club, took to X to claim that this use of the Home Rule act was only triggered by an assault on a DOGE team member. He conveniently left out the two Israeli embassy staff workers recently murdered in cold blood, the congressional aide killed by mistake in a drive-by, and the rise of 15-year-old carjackers.
Meanwhile, Rep. Eric Swalwell, D-Calif., taking time off from his TikTok movie productions, posted several examples of crime in D.C. this week with the insane comment, “Trump owns it.” One of these crimes, a murder, took place on Monday, just hours after Trump’s anti-crime announcement.
Setting aside the congressman’s heartless glee in snarking at the president over the murder of an innocent, his ridiculous attack on Trump at least admits that, yes, crime is a big problem in Washington, D.C., one that will finally be tackled.
Nobody likes crime, and nobody likes being told they are just imagining it.
This is yet another example of Trump’s incendiary common sense, by which he does something outlandish, like taking over the D.C. police department, to outrage from opponents who a day later have to admit, OK, yeah, crime is bad.
Public safety is a gut issue, and it is also the foundation of all other blessings of good government. This is why Cicero called it supreme. Everyone in D.C. either knows, or has been, a victim or witness of a crime. You can’t show them statistics and pretend everything is fine.
Opponents of crime prevention display graphs that say the crime rate is down 30 percent this year, but from an already staggeringly high level that has been ignored for years.
This is like a guy who loses his entire year’s salary playing blackjack. He can likely circle a few weekends when he won big, but he still needs to call Gambler’s Anonymous.
The obvious model for Trump’s anti-crime action in D.C. is the success of Rudy Giuliani in the 1990s in New York City, who slashed violent crime with almost impossible speed.
He accomplished this by embracing new police tactics like Compstat crime computing, stop and frisk, and broken windows policing that focuses on smaller quality of life crimes.
And the benefits of this miraculous turnaround were not limited to Gotham. Indeed, other cities across America used these innovations to lower crime nationwide.
Trump and his administration have the chance to do the same thing with their D.C. efforts, by actually punishing juvenile crime, by seeking to end cashless bail, and by clearing out drug users and vagrants from D.C. parks, national trends could be set.
One Democrat who has taken the high road, more or less, amid this takeover by Trump is D.C.’s Mayor Muriel Bowser, who knows exactly how bad crime in D.C. is, having put in place a juvenile curfew just this week, and she has shown an open mind to the endeavor.
Traditionally, the Latin word “salus,” in the famous quote from Cicero above, means safety, but the word, derived from the Goddess Salus, can also mean health, well-being and prosperity, because, as the ancients knew, all of these are of a piece.
Donald Trump envisages a gleaming capital city where even at 2 am one can walk freely, admiring the moon atop the Washington monument in the big skies of D.C., and not just in D.C., but in all American cities.
So, let the Democrats hoot and holler a little more if they must. Most Americans are hopeful about this move by the president. Nobody likes crime, and nobody likes being told they are just imagining it.
Salus Populi Suprema Lex Est, the primacy of safety is as true today as when it was coined in the days before Christ, and whether he succeeds or fails, Donald Trump is going to try to provide that safety.
It should be an effort we can all get behind and support.
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