Some think Donald Trump is ridding us of criminals. Others think Trump is shredding the constitution and turning the USA into a dictatorship. Which one is right?
A huge positive for Donald Trump came out of the mouth of Muriel Bowser, Washington, DC’s Democratic mayor on Wednesday, August 27th. To understand the magnitude of what Bowser said, you have to understand the point of view of Democrats today.
Democrats are certain that President Donald Trump’s flood of riot-suited, often masked National Guard, ICE, FBI, DEA, Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives enforcers, and US Parks Department troops in the streets of Los Angeles, Washington DC, and soon just possibly Chicago, Baltimore, and New York City are the beginning of the end for democracy.
And, say some Democrats, the beginning of the end for the constitution of the United States.
Some Democrats are convinced that President Trump, in a mere six months of his second term, has taken giant steps to turn America into the kind of dictatorship that President Trump’s friends have. Friends like Russia’s dictator Vladimir Putin, China’s dictator Xi Jinping, North Korea’s dictator Kim Jong Un, and even Turkey’s dictator Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Yes, all of these dictators are Trump’s friends.
Some Democrats believe that these dictators are a club, and that Trump has wanted to join that club ever since the Russians first gave him an all-expense paid trip to Moscow in 1987.
In fact, some Democrats argue that sending troops into America’s biggest cities is a way to move those cities off the map of democratic government and to make them subservient to the one true dictator, the “very stable genius” who has said that he is “the only one” who can fix things, President Donald J. Trump, the man who has said that everything his opponents do is a mess, and everything he does is perfect.
Democrats point out that President Trump says that he is “liberating” the cities into which he is sending armed troops. But in the eyes of some Democrats, this is not about liberation. This is about intimidation.
Democrats point out that President Trump is only sending these troops into Democratic cities. Despite the fact that 13 of the 20 U.S. cities with the highest murder rates are in Republican-run states and that Republican cities like Jackson, Mississippi, Birmingham, Alabama, St. Louis, Missouri, and Memphis, Tennessee are for more violent, crime-ridden, and dangerous than Washington, Los Angeles or Chicago.
To repeat, to some Democrats this is not about liberation. It is about turning America into a single-party state like Russia or China.
In fact, in the eyes of some Democrats, the armed invasion of cities by Trump’s troops is one step toward making all of America bow down to Donald Trump. So for Democrats, troops in the streets of the capital city of the United States, Washington DC, is an authoritarian nightmare.
But are Democrats right?
On August 11th, at a press conference announcing his takeover of Washington, Donald Trump said that D.C. is “one of the most dangerous cities anywhere in the world,” arguing that the murder rate in Washington is higher than in Bogotá, Mexico City, Islamabad, and Addis Ababa, and nearly ten times higher than in Fallujah, Iraq.
But on Sunday, August 24th, President Trump posted on Truth Social that under his troops, “After only one week, there is NO CRIME AND NO MURDER IN DC!” Yes, the president said that Washington under his troops has no crime at all.
Is there any validity to that claim? Yes, surprisingly, there is. And it comes from the mouth of a Democrat.
Washington’s Democratic mayor, Muriel Bowser, announced in a press conference on Wednesday, August 27th, that crime under the new, militarized regime, is down.
How far down? Not quite the utter annihilation of crime that President Trump had announced. But, said Bowser, crime was “down significantly in every category,” including an 87% drop in carjackings, a 45% reduction in violent crime, a 38% drop in homicides, a 44% fall in sexual abuse, a 62% plunge in robberies, and a 47% reduction in burglaries.
Is Donald Trump right that troops in the street can reduce crime? Judging from the evidence of Washington, DC’s first 20 days of military occupation, the answer may well be yes.
But will this taming of a city’s crime last? The evidence from research on military takeovers of cities like Cali, Colombia, and Rio de Janeiro in Brazil says the answer may well be no.
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About the author: Howard Bloom of the Howard Bloom Institute has been called the Einstein, Newton, Darwin, and Freud of the 21st century by Britain’s Channel 4 TV. Bloom’s new book is The Case of the Sexual Cosmos: Everything You Know About Nature is Wrong. Says Harvard’s Ellen Langer of The Case of the Sexual Cosmos, Bloom “argues that we are not savaging the earth as some would have it, but instead are growing the cosmos. A fascinating read.” One of Bloom’s eight previous books–Global Brain—was the subject of a symposium thrown by the Office of the Secretary of Defense including representatives from the State Department, the Energy Department, DARPA, IBM, and MIT. Bloom’s work has been published in The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Wired, Psychology Today, and the Scientific American. Not to mention in scientific journals like Biosystems, New Ideas in Psychology, and PhysicaPlus. Says Joseph Chilton Pearce, author of Evolution’s End and The Crack in the Cosmic Egg, “I have finished Howard Bloom’s [first two] books, The Lucifer Principle and Global Brain, in that order, and am seriously awed, near overwhelmed by the magnitude of what he has done. I never expected to see, in any form, from any sector, such an accomplishment. I doubt there is a stronger intellect than Bloom’s on the planet.” For more, see http://howardbloom.net or http://howardbloom.institute
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References:
https://www.governing.com/urban/the-dangerous-impulse-to-militarize-crime-fighting
https://www.justice.gov/usao-dc/pr/violent-crime-dc-hits-30-year-low
https://www.brown.edu/news/2023-06-15/policing
https://news.emory.edu/stories/2020/12/er_military_equipment_police_crime/campus.html
https://www.csis.org/analysis/sending-national-guard-dc-wrong-solution-crime-problem
https://counciloncj.org/crime-in-washington-dc-what-you-need-to-know/
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https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/aug/17/trump-national-guard-police-dc-crime
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/aug/27/january-6-trump-chicago-military
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https://apnews.com/article/d0466bbf98d89b6c4b909cf325ba87cf
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/07/21/trumps-i-alone-can-fix-it
