“A nightmare of murder and crime,” Donald Trump called Washington DC during the 2024 election campaign, adding that the US national capital was “a dirty, crime-ridden death trap, that must be taken over and properly run”.
The president’s animus against Washington continued after he returned to office, when he charged that Washington’s elected local officials were “not doing the job – too much crime, too much graffiti”. On Feb 19, while returning to Washington from Mar-a-Lago, Trump suggested a federal takeover of the capital city’s municipal governance to address its many woes.
