Family members whose loved ones were murdered in Washington, D.C., in the months following Donald Trump’s federal troop deployment have blasted the president for falsely claiming that he has rid the nation’s capital of violent crime.
The president has repeatedly said the city hasn’t seen any murders since he called in the National Guard in August, when in fact 28 people have been killed since the federal takeover, The New York Times reported.
In November, 17-year-old Tristan Johnson was shot and killed while walking just a few blocks from the D.C. Armory, which serves as the National Guard’s staging area. Just two weeks later, Trump bragged that, “We haven’t had a murder in six months.”
Tristan’s mother, Juanita Sampler, called the statement “heartbreaking.”
“For the president to say there’s no murders? That’s heartbreaking, that’s devastating to me,” she told the Times. “That’s my son. He is someone. He is somebody. His name was Tristan Johnson.”
Since Trump called in the National Guard, the number of murders in Washington, D.C., has fallen from 12 killings per month on average to seven.
In a statement to the Times, White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said Trump’s efforts “have objectively made D.C. safer for residents and visitors,” and that the president “has done more than any elected official in recent history to address violent crime in cities around the country.”
But Trump has ignored inconvenient truths, including the fact that violent crime was already down this year prior to the deployment, according to the Times.
And as he tries to make the case to expand his federal takeover to more cities, the president has shown a stunning indifference toward most of the victims, including people of color and domestic violent victims.
“They said, ‘Crime is down 87 percent.’ I said, ‘No, no, no—it’s more than 87 percent, virtually nothing,” Trump said in September. “And much lesser things that take place in the home, they call crime. You know, they’ll do anything they can to find something. If a man has a little fight with the wife, they say this was a crime.”
On Oct. 5, a 33-year-old mother of two young daughters, Maurisha Singletary, was killed in a domestic dispute. Her cousin Sherena Singletary denounced Trump’s remarks.
“What I would say is ‘a little fight with the wife’ is an argument that led to him physically taking a gun and shooting her in the head — twice,” she told the Times. “A homicide is a homicide. She doesn’t deserve to be forgotten. And there were many that came after her.”
Trump nevertheless bragged on the day Singletary was found dead in her home, “We’ve got no crime.”
In fact, her killing was the third homicide in three days.
The mother of one of the other victims, Jermaine Durbin, told the Times that she always thought Trump’s deployment was more about clearing homeless people from the streets than about protecting communities of color.
“I want the world to know about my son,” Carlena Durbin said. “He had a family. He was loved. I want his story out so at least Trump can see that too.”
The president has expressed outrage over only one set of victims: two white Virginia National Guard members shot on Thanksgiving.
Specialist Sarah Beckstrom, 20, was killed in the ambush-style attack, while Staff Sgt. Andrew Wolfre, 24, suffered a critical head injury but survived.
During a prime-time address to the nation on the night they were shot, the president vowed to send even more troops to the city, though he suggested the attack was an outlier in “the most successful public safety and national security mission in the history of our nation’s capital.”
The troops, however, have mostly been seen patrolling areas around national landmarks, tourist areas, and metro stations.
Their location has reinforced residents’ concerns that the deployment is aimed at cleaning up the whiter, more upscale parts of Washington, D.C., instead of the parts of the city that would welcome federal assistance, local advocates told the Times.
The Daily Beast has reached out to the White House for comment.
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