The Wall Street Journal has a story about how many Washington, D.C., residents agree with Trump about the "chaos" in their city, with some locals wondering why the law enforcement surge hasn't hit their neighborhoods yet.
“We all wanted something to be done,” said Ebony Payne, a 34-year-old neighborhood commissioner who receives messages nightly about "assaults, smashed car windows, break-ins, shootings, and teenagers threatening children or even dogs," reports the Journal.
“It’s just really unfortunate that we are in this situation where there’s a sledgehammer on our city, because we couldn’t get a handle on our crime problem," said Payne.
You might note a lessening of outrage by Democrats over Trump's D.C. takeover of law enforcement in the last few days. Part of that is undoubtedly the growing realization that the Democrats' main argument — that violent crime in the District is at a 30-year low — is based on at least partially cooked data.
It's also the result of D.C. residents' relative quiet. The usual suspects support Mayor Muriel Bowser and the Democratic establishment in the city. But where are the mass protests against the deployment? D.C. residents appear to be at least willing to give the crackdown a chance.
“American soldiers and airmen policing American citizens on American soil is #UnAmerican,” D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser posted on X on Saturday.
Any time a Democrat uses the epithet 'Un-American," you know that politician is in trouble. Not only is the Democrat unable to define what "America" is and thus has no clue what an "Un-American" action would be, but even mentioning "America" as a defense is a sheer act of desperation.
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Byron York, writing in the Washington Examiner, refers to this growing phenomenon as the "Trump is bad but right" effect.
New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd was born and raised in Washington, the daughter of a D.C. policeman. In a recent column, she wrote, “City officials and many liberal residents are outraged about Trump’s painting D.C. as a hellscape and flooding the zone with law enforcement and troops.” A moment later, she added, “It is also true that many D.C. residents are secretly glad to see more uniforms. No matter what statistics say, they don’t feel safe.”
Dowd herself doesn’t. She carries pepper spray, she said, because “I feel more wary walking around the city. It’s disturbing to ask someone to unlock the Claritin at CVS because the police didn’t lock up the smash-and-grabbers.”
Even CNN legal analyst Elie Honig grudgingly admits Trump is right about D.C. crime.
The column includes a conversation with former prosecutor Elie Honig, now a CNN legal analyst. What Honig told Dowd is a classic of a type of commentary you might call Trump-is-bad-but-he’s-right. “Yes, Trump is hypocritical and scattershot on public safety,” Honig told Dowd. “And yes, he’s likely doing this as a flex. But he happens to be within the law here and he happens to be right.”
"We have become inured to feeling unsafe in our own country. 'It's not as bad as it was in the past' is 'defining deviancy down.' It allows us to remain paralyzed by the enormity of the political problem of crime," I wrote last week.
If the Trump federalization of D.C. law enforcement accomplishes nothing else, it will force agreement that "improving" crime stats is not a cause for celebration.
Whether other Democratic-led big cities will learn that lesson remains to be seen.
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