The White House defended Donald Trump’s remark about domestic violence and crime statistics on Tuesday after the president seemed to downplay the former’s significance on Monday.
On Monday, the president spoke about his federalized occupation of Washington D.C. with National Guard troops, while claiming that he’d turned the city into a “safe zone”. During his remarks, made at the Museum of the Bible downtown, Trump went on a side tangent about what he referred to as “lesser” infractions: “things that take place in the home”, in his words.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt denied that the president was downplaying the importance of prosecuting domestic violence at her briefing on Tuesday, but instead of walking back Trump’s remarks insisted that her boss was somehow making a point that members of the media were using domestic violence incidents to distract from efforts to combat street crime.
“He wasn’t referring to crime. That’s exactly the point he was making,” Leavitt told reporters. “The president is saying, in fact, is that these crimes will be made up and reported as a crime to undermine the great work that the federal task force is doing to reduce crime in Washington, D.C.”
The White House’s latest statement comes as Trump himself has faced pushback from the media and locals on his notion that the District of Columbia has been made crime-free by the deployment of troops on the streets. But Leavitt’s explanation seemed to clash with what seemed to be the intent of Trump’s words a day earlier when the president made a clear definition of domestic conflict and possible spousal abuse, before seeming to suggest it wasn’t a matter for the police.
Crime in D.C., Trump claimed on Monday, was now “virtually nothing”, adding that in crime statistics police and media were counting “much lesser things. Things that take place in the home that they call crime. You know; they’ll do anything they can to find something.”
He continued: “If a man has a little fight with the wife, they say, ‘this is a crime.’ See? So now I can’t claim [to have reduced crime in D.C. by] 100%.”
In the same remarks, Trump repeated his claim that “you can walk to a restaurant” in D.C. without fear, putting aside the fact that D.C. restaurant foot traffic has actually plunged since the deployment of troops and federal law enforcement began across the city.
Even the Museum of the Bible itself admitted to CNN in an email that attendance was suffering amid the takeover, which is now entering its second month.
Shawn Townsend, CEO of the Restaurant Association of Metropolitan Washington which represents hundreds of businesses across the city and runs the popular season D.C. Restaurant Weeks featuring local spots, called the imposition of National Guard troops on the city D.C.’s “pandemic 2.0” in a statement this week to Axios. The Covid pandemic shuttered many businesses permanently, and the slow return of workers to downtown areas was more brutal to those that survived the initial closures.
Last month, Townsend’s group extended D.C.’s summer 2025 Restaurant Week for the first time in years as businessses once again as tourism and local economic activity both declined sharply with the troop deployments.
“I’ve heard from folks that won’t renew leases or even consider D.C.,” Townsend told Axios.
While businesses told news outlets that the flashy imagery and rhetoric of the White House’s focus on crime-fighting in cities was directly impacting their bottom lines and contributed to an inaccurate image of city life even under occupation, there’s no sign that the Trump administration is listening to business leaders in Washington D.C. or anywhere else. No major local business groups have endorsed the president’s efforts in D.C. or his threats to expand the takeover to Baltimore, New York, Chicago or New Orleans.
And on Tuesday, Leavitt’s only words on the matter were to insist that the murder of a Ukrainian immigrant on public transport in Charlotte, North Carolina justified expanding the campaign nationwide — and to tout the administration’s latest arrest numbers in the capital.
By Tuesday, Leavitt said, more than 2,177 people have been arrested in Washington D.C. since the takeover began. A New York Times analysis noted that this represents only a slight increase over the city’s overall arrest rate prior to the occupation.
