The Situation: My Dangerous City

The Situation on Wednesday called garbage on Attorney General Pam Bondi’s latest announcement related to the Russiagate investigation.

Today, President Trump declared a “crime emergency” in my hometown of Washington, D.C.

His proclamation is too dumb to argue with. The statistics it cites absurdly compare crime in D.C. to the crime rate in states—areas with complex mixes or urban, suburban, and rural populations. D.C. is just a city.

The order ignores the fact that crime is falling here. And it ignores the fact that the D.C. murder and violent crime rates are dramatically lower than they were when I was a teenager and the murder rate here was so high that tourists used to buy t-shirts that looked like this:

So yeah, I’m not going to spend any time arguing with the claims in the president’s order that we live in an especially violent period here in Washington.

Especially because in an important sense, Trump is right that there’s a crime spree going on here that isn’t going on elsewhere in the country. He’s right that a lot of people feel unsafe as a result of it. He’s right that this crime spree “has consequences beyond the individual tragedies that have dominated media coverage” and that “such lawlessness also poses intolerable risks to the vital Federal functions that take place in the District of Columbia.” He’s right that the culture of impunity that is developing in this city undermines “critical functions of Government and thus the well-being of the entire Nation, and erode[s] confidence in the strength of the United States.” He’s right that it’s disgraceful to have tolerance for “Government workers [being] violently attacked by mobs or fatally shot close to the Federal buildings where they work.”

Consider some of the constituent elements of this very real D.C. crime spree:

• A president who pardons 1,500 criminals for participating in a violent mob that attacked and menaced government workers in federal buildings where they work.

• A senior Justice Department official who lies to Congress during his confirmation hearing to be a federal judge and gets confirmed anyway.

• A senior Justice Department official who instructs departmental lawyers that they may have to be prepared to tell a federal judge “fuck you” and defy the court’s orders.

• A senior Justice Department official who strikes a deal with a criminal defendant and drops a merited case against him in exchange for policy support, an arrangement about which a federal judge wrote: “Everything here smacks of a bargain: dismissal of the indictment in exchange for immigration policy concessions.”

• Rampant cryptocurrency schemes enriching the family and friends of the president and filling his own pockets without even a pretense that this is something other than self-dealing—gratuities and bribery law be damned.

• Solicitation of luxury aircraft from foreign governments, notionally for the government itself but which will ultimately convey with the president when he leaves office.

• Instructing giant American companies to feel free to defy a law duly passed by Congress and upheld by the Supreme Court.

• Shaking down law firms and universities for money, for pro bono work, and to intimidate them out of the exercise of their First Amendment rights.
  

I could go on—and on and on and on—but you get the point. There is a real out-of-control crime situation in Washington, but it is not the one referred to in the president’s executive order. It is the one he is leading.

It is the one whose perpetrators Trump is pardoning and shielding from investigation and prosecution in the first place. It is the one for which his own accountability is blocked by presidential immunity. And it is the one of which he is a leading beneficiary.

Unfortunately, this is not a crime spree that deploying the National Guard or a federal takeover of the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department is going to deter.

This is a crime spree that will only abate when this president is out of power, when the country has an attorney general (of either party) with a conscience and a remotely apolitical sensibility about criminal activity by the powerful, and when the country’s investigative apparatus has been wrested from the conspiracy theorists who run it now and turned back towards flagrant abuses of power and away from those who had the temerity to offend the powerful.

I say all this now because Trump’s ability to change the subject, to misdirect, is truly awesome. And I do not put it past the man who turned the phrase “fake news” from meaning news that wasn’t true about his foes and designed to help him to meaning news that was true and disparaging about him to change what the public means when it thinks of “crime” in Washington, D.C.—from a public corruption binge that really is happening before our eyes to a street crime spike that actually isn’t happening at all.

So yeah, I’m not going to rebut Trump’s claims that crime is out of control in my hometown. That’s what he wants me to do. I’m going to agree with him, and talk about the real crime spree that actually is going on every day under leadership.

The Situation continues tomorrow.