Robert J. Shapiro writes:

Last week, Donald Trump claimed the authority to deploy the country’s military to the streets of Washington, D.C. to help fight crime. Yet, hard data show it’s not about crime in the nation’s capital. Instead, the evidence points to other, more troubling reasons and aspirations, especially the president’s personal sense of entitlement to power, MAGA’s approach to partisan politics, and an implied threat to public opposition to his exercise of power in the future.

Trump is not the first president to deploy armed soldiers to the streets of Washington. James Madison did it to fight the British military in the War of 1812, and Abraham Lincoln did it throughout the Civil War. Stationing troops in a country’s capital is also routine in military dictatorships, including today those in Libya, Iraq, Sudan, Yemen, and Myanmar facing domestic uprisings, and those in places such as Cuba, Laos, Chad, Botswana, and Burkina Faso that fear future unrest.

More notably, civilian dictatorships today use soldiers in their capitals to keep order and discourage dissent, an unsavory group that includes China, Russia, North Korea, Egypt, Turkey, and Afghanistan.

The United States does not face a foreign army or armed domestic forces that threaten the District of Columbia and our political system. Instead, the Trump administration’s rationale for deploying troops in Washington are the city’s crime statistics from 2023. The claim is wholly fallacious. As Washington Mayor Muriel Bowser and others have noted, the city’s violent crime rate in 2023 was an outlier that was followed by a decline of 35 percent in 2024 and another 26 percent in the first half of 2025. [Continue reading…]