When President Trump spoke of a murdered alumnus of his first administration, his press conference on Monday about crime in the nation’s capitol suddenly seemed like more than just another episode of Anything But Jeffrey Epstein.
“I lost a very good person a while ago, was shot waiting for his wife,“ Trump told reporters five minutes into the 77 minute session in the White House briefing room. “He was in the car. They robbed his car. They shot him. They killed him like it was nothing to it.”
The person in question was Mike Gill, a 56-year-old father of three and onetime chief of staff at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. “They” was in fact a single individual, 28-year-old Artel Cunningham.
“She was walking to the car,” Trump said of Gill’s wife, Kristina. “She was—it’s a horror show.”
He continued, “This issue directly impacts the functioning of the federal government, and is a threat to America, really. It’s a threat to our country. We have other cities also that are bad, very bad.”
Trump blamed lax laws and liberal coddling of criminals, but made no mention of a common denominator in the violence that results in thousands of deaths each year. That includes the killing that Trump spoke of again two minutes later. He described Gill as a “fantastic person, [who] was murdered last year in cold blood in a carjacking blocks away from the White House.”
“We all knew him, great person, waiting for his wife as she was walking to the car,” Trump added.
The common denominator: Guns.
After fleeing the scene of the shooting on foot, Cunningham fatally shot a 35-year-old father-of-two named Alberto Vasquez in a carjacking. Cunningham was subsequently shot and killed by police officers in New Carrollton, Md. who initially thought he was armed with two pistols, but discovered one was a BB gun.
But Vasquez had no connection with the Trump administration and the president made no mention of him.
Trump did speak with seemingly genuine feeling about 19-year-old Edward Coristine, a former DOGE operative also known as “Big Balls.” Coristine was assaulted by a group of juveniles, reportedly when he attempted to defend a woman friend from an unarmed carjacking. A radio car happened to be nearby and two 15-year-old suspects were arrested, a boy and a girl.
“He thought he was dead with a broken nose and concussion,” Trump said of Coristine. “Can’t believe that he’s alive. He can’t believe it.”
Timing suggests that the battering of “Big Balls” was what triggered Trump to implement measures he is said to have contemplated since his first term. He announced on Monday that he would he taking over the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) and flood the streets with federal agents in a city that already has a falling crime rate and the highest ratio of cops to civilians in the country.
But to justify all that, Trump needed victims who had suffered more than “Big Balls’” bloody nose and scare. He needed people who actually had been killed, and were not just another carjack victim like Vasquez. One had a political connection.
“In June, a 21-year-old Congressional intern was tragically killed after being hit by a stray bullet in a drive-by shooting,” Trump said, referring to the death of Eric Tarpinian-Jachym.
Another gun violence victim, little Honesty Cheadle, was brought up during the press conference.
“Horrifically, last July 4th weekend, a three-year-old girl was shot in the head and killed while sitting in a car near the Capitol,” Trump said.
He went on, “It’s becoming a situation of complete and total lawlessness. And we’re getting rid of the slums too. We have slums here. We’re getting rid of them. I know it’s not politically correct. You’ll say, oh, so terrible. No, we’re getting rid of the slums where they live.”
Trump was again using “they,” though now to denote a whole group of people. He was declaring himself prepared to rid the nation’s capitol of entire neighborhoods.
But he made no mention of what this and all cities need to get rid of, what was also the common denominator in the killings he cited: easily available illegal guns.
A sense of the MPD’s ongoing effort to address the problem is afforded by weekly reports of firearm recoveries, complete with photos of the weapons and details about the seizures. A tally posted on Monday detailed 60 gun seizures between July 21 and July 27. Two dozen of the weapons had an illegal high capacity magazine, officially described as a “Large Capacity Ammunition Feeding Device’.”
Those arrested on gun charges were as young as 14, in that instance a 9 mm ghost gun. A 26-year-old man was charged with unlawful possession of a machine gun. A 28 year-old man “of no fixed address,” actually had two guns, both high end, a Glock 19 and a Glock 43.
Even the homeless in our nation’s capital can pack $900 in firepower.
At 6:56 pm, on the evening of Trump’s declaration of war on crime in the nation’s capital, police arrived at the scene of a gunshot victim at 1220 12th Street NW. That is just under a mile from The White House.
“Third District Officers responded to the listed location for a shooting,” the public incident report reads. “Once on scene, Officers located V-1 (victim one) suffering from gunshot wounds to the body. He was transported to a local hospital, where he was pronounced deceased at 2044 hours.”
The weapon was listed as a rifle. Police identified the victim as 33-year-old Tymark Cocheasa Wells of 1730 7th Street NW. Wells had noted—prophetically—on Facebook the District’s homicide tally just after his 30th birthday in May of 2022.
“200 homicides DC count ya f—-n’ days its more to come.”
Homicides spiked in 2023, but declined in 2024. Wells joined this year’s death toll, the first on Trump’s watch.
But not the first killed by the one preventable factor Trump said nothing about: A gun.
The post The One Fact About Crime in D.C. Power-Mad Trump Won’t Admit appeared first on The Daily Beast.
