by April Ryan, Washington Bureau chief and White House correspondent, BlackPress U.S.A.
“Washington, D.C. is safe,” President Trump declared from the Oval Office on Tuesday. Those words came while Trump was hosting Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. During the question-and-answer session, which primarily focused on a peace deal in the Russian-Ukrainian war, Trump said: “You did that in four days.” He was speaking of how fast the National Guard quelled the violence in what was once called Chocolate City.
The president deployed the National Guard to D.C. a week ago, to a city with reduced crime rates over the previous year. Violent crime had dropped by 26%, marking the lowest level in 30 years. Homicides had also fallen by 11%.
President Trump, who typically travels with a full contingent of high-level protection, insinuated that he finally felt safe enough to go to dinner in the District of Columbia. “My wife and I went out to dinner last night for the first time in four years,” said the nation’s 47th president.
Trump reinforced his claim about the newly acquired safety in D.C. by relaying that a friend’s son is attending dinner in D.C., something he would not have done last year.
After the president finished his comments, a reporter/commentator in the room with close connections to Marjorie Taylor Greene jumped into the high-level conversation to affirm the president’s comments, saying: “I walked around yesterday with MTG. If you can walk around D.C. with MTG and not be attacked, this city is safe.”
That reporter was the same person who chastised President Zelenskyy months ago during his first Oval Office meeting with Trump for not wearing a business suit. Zelenskyy, a wartime president, has been clad in less formal attire to reflect the country’s current war stance against Russia.
Without any sourcing, President Trump also said: “People that haven’t gone out to dinner in Washington, D.C., in two years are going out to dinner, and the restaurants the last two days have been busier than they’ve been in a long time.”
The increase in policing in Washington, D.C. is because a 19-year-old former Doge employee was carjacked in the early hours of the morning recently.
