Trump wandered off topic while talking about Nicolás Maduro and told a claim that is easy to prove false.
During a long and rambling press conference about a U.S. military operation against Venezuela, Donald Trump suddenly stopped listing the crimes he said Maduro had committed and shifted to talking about crime in Washington, D.C. In the middle of this detour, Trump flatly claimed that there had been no killings in the nation’s capital for “six or seven months.” He appeared tired and unfocused as he said it, and the remark had little to do with what he had been discussing moments earlier.
The press conference itself was meant to focus on the dramatic overnight military raid in Caracas, which Trump said resulted in the capture of Maduro and his wife. Trump said Maduro would be brought to New York to stand trial. While describing what he called the Venezuelan leader’s atrocities, Trump abruptly began praising the National Guard and then declared that Washington, D.C. was now a “totally safe city.”
He went on to insist that the city had not experienced any killings for a long time, except for what he briefly acknowledged as a terrorist attack weeks earlier, which he dismissed as “a different kind of threat.” His statement left the clear impression that violent crime, including murder, had essentially disappeared from the capital.
That claim is simply not true. Official police data shows that dozens of people have been killed in Washington, D.C. over the past several months. Since early June of last year, there have been many confirmed homicides in the city, including several within the last month alone. These include shootings that left young adults dead on residential streets, as well as the killing of a National Guard member during Thanksgiving weekend. Trump even seemed to reference that incident indirectly but brushed it aside because it was labeled terrorism.
Trump could have chosen to highlight a real statistic that worked in his favor. Overall, the number of murders in Washington, D.C. has dropped compared to the previous year, with significantly fewer killings during the same time period. Instead, he overstated the improvement and made an absolute claim that does not match reality.
It is not clear why Trump felt the need to bring up the murder rate at that moment. Just seconds earlier, he had been talking about violent gangs he claimed Maduro allowed to spread into the United States, including Tren de Aragua and the Cartel of the Suns. Trump described these groups in graphic terms, accusing them of terrorizing communities and brutally punishing anyone who tried to call the police.
Without warning, he pivoted from those accusations to congratulating the military, the defense secretary, and the National Guard, saying they had done an incredible job not only overseas but also in Washington, D.C. He claimed the city had gone from being one of the most dangerous places in the world to being completely safe.
This moment came shortly after Trump announced that he would withdraw National Guard deployments from several left-leaning cities, including Los Angeles, Chicago, and Portland, following a Supreme Court ruling that blocked the deployment in Chicago. Washington, D.C., where the National Guard remains present in a limited role, was not included in that announcement.
The White House did not respond when asked to explain or clarify Trump’s comments about crime in the capital.
