Proving the old saw that a conservative is a liberal who’s been mugged, one of The New York Time’s marquee columnists has agreed — grudgingly, stubbornly, kicking and screaming — that President Donald Trump is right: There’s too much crime in the nation’s capital.
And, just possibly, Washington, DC, currently under Democratic control, could benefit from Trump calling in the National Guard and other feds to help restore law and order.
“It’s ridiculous to drag F.B.I. agents from their desks to be cops on the beat. And the tableau of National Guard troops — even unarmed — raises the specter of martial law being normalized and weaponized,” Pulitzer Prize-winning DC-based scribe Maureen Dowd wrote over the weekend.
Then, hold your horses, La Dowd suddenly hit the brakes, skidded, and did a complete 180.
“It is also true that many D.C. residents are secretly glad to see more uniforms. No matter what statistics say, they don’t feel safe.”
This about-face was brought on by her sister’s close encounter with slovenly car thieves. As Dowd tells it, she was having dinner with her sibling Peggy in the upscale Georgetown neighborhood recently when the metaphorical mugging zapped the liberal right out of her: Peg’s beloved Buick vanished from its parking spot by Maureen’s house.
“Two polite officers who responded to our call said they could do little, amid a rash of brazen car thefts by teenagers,” Dowd wrote.
“One officer said that, even if they saw the perp driving in her car, they could not chase him, because of laws passed by the D.C. Council.”
Dowd initially seemed to dismiss Trump’s hard-core stance on juvenile crime as over-the-top payback against two 15-year-olds charged with assaulting and attempting to carjack a former Department of Government Efficiency employee. That is, until Peggy’s Buick showed up in a park in nearby Maryland the morning after it was snatched — still running, nearly out of gas, with a $215 tow charge she was required to pay, Dowd griped.
There was a half-eaten pizza, grape soda cans, fast-food wrappers, a used condom and a pair of debit cards inside, Dowd reported. But cops said they could do nothing to nail the fiends.
Insult to injury, Peggy soon received more than $1,800-worth of speed-camera tickets for driving 70 miles an hour in a 25 mph zone, and had to prove the car was stolen in order to get the summonses tossed.
Dowd’s co-workers haven’t gotten the message. Last week, shortly after the president declared war on DC crime, The Times worked double-time to minimize the threat.
One article refuted Trump’s statement that the 2023 murder rate was the highest “probably ever.” False! crowed the paper. The homicide rate of about 40.4 deaths per 100,000 people was the highest in 26 years, not ever. And in 2024, that number dipped to some 26.6 corpses per 100,000 Washingtonians
But Dowd is not favorably impressed.
“While the district’s homicide rate has fallen,” she writes, “it’s almost as high as New York’s at its most dangerous, in 1990.”
Dowd, whose father was a cop, confesses she packs pepper spray these days to protect her from troublemakers when walking around town, a habit she adopted years ago when her mother drove her to her college dorm with a butcher knife on the seat between them. Her mom also gave her a Chinese letter opener with written instructions on how to find the jugular of an assailant.
Over the weekend, Times reporters visited DC neighborhoods populated primarily with people of color to find out how residents felt about attempts to wipe out crime. Perhaps surprisingly to the Times, not everyone in these communities opposes being safer. Though every attempt was made to find people who said they did not trust the president, others admitted liking to continue breathing.
Dowd summed things up, writing, “But progressives should not fall into Trump’s trap and play down crime, once more getting on the wrong side of an inflammatory issue. As with inflation, they should remember that personal experiences can count more than sanguine statistics.
“Even if Trump is being diabolical, Democrats should not pretend everything is fine here. Because it’s not.”
Finally — all the news that’s fit to print.
This story originally appeared on NYPost
