Bulwark Takes - Trump is LYING About the DC Takeover

Episode Date: August 19, 2025

JVL and Andrew Egger discuss Trump’s federal takeover of DC, the administration’s exaggerated claims about crime vanishing overnight, and the way the crackdown is being staged as a law-and-order success while raising serious concerns about authoritarian overreach, particularly by the amateur officers hiding their identities behind masks.

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This is JVL here with my bulwark colleague, Andrew Eger. And we're going to talk about Donald Trump and the crime statistics in Washington, D.C., because our president has some very deep thoughts about his mission to liberate the nation's capital. Andrew, talk to me a little bit. We've got all sorts of stuff. We've got the president truhing out about D.C.'s fake crime statistics and how within just a few hours of him sending militarized forces into the city, it is now the safest city on the planet or something like that, because, sure, that makes sense. What's happening? Yeah, so we're about a week and a half into this crime crackdown.

so-called that the president has put into place in D.C. He has federalized the police department and he has put, you know, D.C. police essentially under the supervision of the drug enforcement agency from the federal government. And in addition to that, he has basically poured an alphabet soup of different federal law enforcement agencies, a bunch of different officers from a bunch of different places, just into the streets of D.C., particularly downtown near the monuments, where, as everyone knows, the crime is always the thickest. You, basically cannot walk from the Smithsonian's to the Washington Monument without getting shot or stabbed or trafficked. So just this morning, Trump is already kind of out, taking a victory lap

and all this stuff. I'll just read the truth social post here. D.C. gave fake crime numbers in order to create a false illusion of safety. This is a very bad and dangerous thing to do, and they are under serious investigation for so doing. Until four days ago, Washington, D.C. was the most unsafe city in the United States, quote, unquote, and perhaps the world. Now, in just a short period of time, it is perhaps the safest in getting better every single hour. People are flocking to D.C. again, and soon the beautification will begin. I mean, it's kind of amazing stuff, given that nothing has happened, right? I mean, truly nothing has happened except that they have put these cops in the streets.

Other than that, life has been going on in the city. Basically, as scheduled, people are weirded out about it. People are freaked out and wondering what's going to happen next. But the life has gone on, you know what I mean? But not according to the president for whom a switch has been flipped. All crime has stopped and D.C. has gone from the worst to the safest. I have so many questions, Andrew, beginning with, could we get child protective services to investigate any parents who ever brought their children to D.C. before Trump's Liberation Day when it was the most unsafe city in the world? Because, I mean, what sort of monsters would do that?

Take their children to the most unsafe city in the world? How would that even be? I guess, I'm sorry, I'm being an asshole here, but it's just because, again, it's the President of the States, he just says all these things which are untrue all the time. And, like, the world doesn't react to it anymore. The world just like, eh, you know, just the President of the United States saying lies. Yeah, there's almost like a microcosm of the, like, first term Trump, second term Trump in all of this. Because, first of all, this is a move that he has used since time immemorial, right? I mean, the classic example of this from the first term was the U.S.-Mexico-Canada trade agreement, which replaced NAFTA, right, that Trump inherited, this free trade system that we had with Canada and Mexico, that he constantly denounced as the worst trade deal and the history of trade deals.

He tore it up. He renegotiated with those two countries, eventually inking a trade deal that was, for all intents and purposes, the exact same trade deal with a bunch of tiny little minor. cosmetic differences that basically like saved face but that was the best trade deal we've ever had right it's like that was like a first term term thing where it's like as soon as i've done it it goes from the worst to the best but that was pretty innocuous right i mean that was just that was just you know tinkering around and creating a bunch of busy work for himself while he did this embarrassing thing that was obviously pathological but basically harmless this uh like we said has not had a lot of like actual impact so far but it is still for reasons we've been talking

about for weeks now, totally alarming and totally, you know, sort of surreal and norm-busting and bizarre and bad, that we just have sort of the streets swimming with a bunch of, you know, militarized federal cops that don't answer to the people that they're around and aren't used to doing this kind of police work, don't have a mission, really, other than to sort of mill about and fight crime. So it's much more sort of, it's the same pathology, but deployed in a much more sort of frightening and bad and norm-breaking. way. So you said that Trump's little, little truth bleat, he mentioned the false crime statistics. Can you talk a little bit about the crime statistics from over the weekend?

Yeah. So this is, this is, I mean, I've had to be in my bonnet about this because ever since the crime rollout started, there has been this drumbeat of New York Post articles and tweets from federal law enforcement and from Carolyn Leavitt, the White House press secretary, all about all of the good law enforcement that these guys are doing. You know, like, ah, we made another. 50 arrests last night. We've made 300 arrests so far in two weeks. I just saw a headline in the post this morning. Nearly 70 more arrested on Saturday night.

And like this is all sort of in service of we're finally getting serious on crime. We're finally doing it. You know, the buck stops here. You're not going to get away with it anymore, all that stuff. If you look, and the New York Times had had something about this the other day, if you look at sort of just normal baseline median DC policing, the average number of people that the D.C. Metropolitan Police arrests in an average day is 68 people. That's the, that's the average. And that is the exact number that, again, the New York Post wrote up this

morning. Carolyn Levitt dunked the football, or sorry, dunked the basketball, spiked the football on social media this morning. So it's, it's, it is completely. But didn't she say 70 arrests? The headline said nearly 70. But when you read the post, okay, nearly I was going to say, because maybe they got two extra. No, they didn't get two extra arrests. Yeah, you know, there's always a couple of gotaways, right? But it is completely just in the realm of, of narrative and spin and, and just the fact that we're now apparently going to, like, highlight every arrest that ever happens going forward in D.C. as, like, the president's agenda working. Whereas before, you know, it was just, it was just city crime, right? And then arrests happen. It's good

when they do, if there's criminal behavior and all that stuff. But it's a complete, like, spun up out of nowhere. It's cotton candy, this whole thing. Well, cotton candy with maybe some arsenic laced into it, because the whole idea is to do this as a dry run for, can we get away with deploying National Guard in cities against their will? We did out in Los Angeles, and it kind of worked. We did it here. Maybe we do a little bit of this in Philly the week before the election, right? Try to dissuade people from maybe turning out to vote in midterm elections. I think they could, I don't see any reason why they couldn't shave a couple tenths of a point in turnout off by doing this sort of thing. Do you? Yeah, yeah. I think there's

basically like two tracks of this here. The one track, which is sort of like the, the hard power track is like the test run that you're talking about. It's the how much of this can we get away with here? How much can we get people acclimated to it? How much can we sort of sell people on the idea that it works? And then, you know, there's the tiny little hang up that the Constitution lets us do a lot more in D.C. than it would let us do elsewhere, because D.C. is a federal city, the only one we have, and all these other cities are run by their respective states. So, you know, there would be that additional barrier to getting over, but, you know, the more he kind of sells it as working here, the less anybody is likely to particularly care if and when

he sort of tries to push beyond that in some of these other cities, as he has routinely promised over the last couple of weeks that he wants to and indeed plans to do. The other side of this whole thing, and I wrote about this in morning shots this morning is that sort of persuasive element. It's the salesmanship thing. And that matters, right? I mean, it actually matters quite a lot how well he sells this to his base in particular. Obviously, he doesn't care what we think or what the libs think or what, you know, the mainstream media thinks. And he's obviously assisted in that by a humongously compliant right-wing media and all these influencers as he is in everything. But I think it's important to kind of drill down on what he is

really trying to do, which is that it is true that the crime numbers were already followed. And it is true that so far, you know, despite this, this big influx, it's not like we have seen a massive spike in new arrests, as we were just talking about before. It's kind of like business as usual, but with a much greater side of overreach and risk in terms of, you know, the likelihood of possible confrontations and things like that. But the other side of this whole thing is, and this is what I wrote about this morning, is how how this stuff is supposed to kind of percolate into the maga mind, which is that it's not. not like your typical MAGA voter was sitting around before, like, pouring over lists of the various crime stats of the various American cities and being like, huh, D.C. is interestingly, disproportionately, you know, they have too many carjackings. They're doing better on assaults, but the carjackings are out of control. And somebody's really got to get on that, you know,

that kind of thing. No, it's very much this kind of social media and right wing media generated sense in the id that things are spiraling out of control and it's which is fed by the algorithms it's like oh i i see you like to watch teenage gang crime content on your on your social feeds here's a bunch more of that forever for like always now i mean and and these are the kinds of like things that happen that then you know create this sense for a lot of people that that crime is still spiraling out of control in america when you know if you look at the data it really isn't And if you're Donald Trump, it's not like you can, even if he wanted to, to, like, teach these people the truth that actually crime has, like, been getting better in America. And, you know, the rates are down and things like that. Even if you wanted to do that, he, he, like, down in his lizard brain knows you actually can't, like, just throw statistics at people who are, like, emotively invested in that narrative. So what he is basically doing is he's out here like a film producer, right? He's like, I need to give these people the crackdown cop video content to go along with the kind of criminal. video content that's been making them mad. And, you know, if I, if I can get that in their

feed, if I can, like, here, here are some videos of crimes happening, but then here are some videos of, of, you know, Trump's military police in D.C. Exactly. Exactly. And that's, like, what, what triangulates out to law and order, uh, if you're, if you're a MAGA guy today. So I don't think it's a risk like that, I don't think it's like downside risk that there could be these kinds of confrontations and have started to be a few of these confrontations already. I kind of think that's the point of the end of right. That is the, I'm so glad you said that. Because it struck me the, I was just thinking about this over the weekend, there is a responsible way that you could have gone about this program. So I don't mean like a wise way. I think it is

pernicious and malevolent to try to send federal forces in to do law enforcement in Washington, D.C. But let's just pretend that you have a pernicious malevolent president who was going to do that, but they decided to do that in a way that was responsible, meaning that no. minimize the potential for conflict between citizens and cops, and that maximized the ability to actually target places where crimes were happening. And I would say that what the administration is doing is almost the opposite of that. They're doing in the most irresponsible way, the way in which is designed to create the maximal chances of conflict. and the maximal chances of winding up with protesters coming to blows with agents of the state

who are not conducting themselves the way agents of the state typically do. And that suggests to me that, like, it's probably not an accident, right? They're doing it in the most irresponsible way possible because they want something to happen. Yeah, yeah. And this as well is kind of operating on two tracks, right? like they are they are sort of trying to to do part of it has to do with like the the sort of immigration enforcement stuff that they're doing everywhere so that's that is sort of like you know targeting uh you know Hispanic people uh and and you know working working people like that's one side of these confrontations so we've seen some of that in dc already but the other side of this is is the stuff that is completely just sort of like instigated by the crackdown itself that they're leaning into as well and the the the prime example of that we've seen so far bar is that Department of Justice lawyer who hit that ice agent with a sandwich last week. I mean, like, that is such a bizarre story, right, in so many different ways.

But I think it's really illustrative of one of the stories that they really want out of this crime crackdown is liberal DC, kind of like upscale liberal DC reacting against the authoritarian push and cracking down on that and putting that forward to the mega base as as another part of it. I mean, like they arrested that guy in real time, right? And then they were like, well, that wasn't kind of theatrical enough. So they re-arrested him, right? They sent a bunch of FBI agents and U.S. Marshalls. After he offered to come down and surrender at the police department. And they're like, no, no, no, don't come down here and turn yourself in.

We're not going to send a squad car. We're going to send like an MRAP. Right, right. And they march into his building and Frog March him out of there and they're taping the whole thing and they release a sizzle reel about it. And like supposedly this is like the crime crackdown is arresting the guy who hit you take you with a sandwich because of your crime crackdown? I mean, it's totally circular and bizarre, but it creates this kind of like, like I said before,

sort of the content that they're trying to get in people's feeds out of all this. That's the point. And the fact that I don't know if you saw, but over the weekend, Andrew, some of the, one of the tapes that was out of police acting badly is, you know, an onlooker saying something to the effect of, you know, you guys are destroying the city and some masked purported agent of the state. And again, who knows, because nobody knows who these people are, says the Liberals already ruined it. Oh, you guys are ruining this contract. You know that, right? Liberals already ruined it. There's another video of agents of the state tearing down a sign, which was an anti-ice sign.

When the agents of the state begin identifying with the regime, isn't that typically a trouble sign? Yeah, it's sure not great, right? I mean, I, I, you could, you could spend a lot of time teasing out, you know, how far down various slippery slopes you are when you see that sort of thing. But I feel like we should all at least be able to agree not awesome. And not only is it happening, but it's happening and the regime itself sees it as the case that it wants to make. I mean, that instance of the sign being pulled down in the Mount Pleasant neighborhood of D.C., it was just a sign that said Mount Pleasant melts ice, right? It was just somebody that hung a banner. And ICE itself posted on X a video of, you know, this operation of eight ice agents.

I guess they're all ICE agents. It takes eight guys to do this. They're all massed. They're all like full tactical gear and everything. They're like gathering around the sign and then they pull it down. And then one of them balls it up and he says, we're taking America back, baby. We're taking America back, baby. This is for America.

Los States Unis is number one. That isn't just some like psychos goofing off. And that's the that's the thing ICE then wants to package as video content and put out to, you know, through official channels, through official government channels to, to an audience of the entire country. And I think that you would have to be quite willfully blind not to take the obvious lesson from that, which is that they want you to know, this is the policy of the United States, to do all of these things now. So it's, yeah, it's, it's quite, quite grim. Guys, we'll be back with more of this. Andrew, thanks for joining me. Good luck, America.

Book club on Monday. Gym on Tuesday. Date night on Wednesday. Out on the town on Thursday. Quiet night in on Friday. It's good to have a routine. And it's good for your eyes too. Because with regular comprehensive eye exams at Specsavers,

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