President Donald Trump said Wednesday that he may take control of the police force in Washington and dispatch National Guard troops to the city after a young staff member of his administration was assaulted over the weekend.
Trump told reporters that the city is unsafe, though violent crime last year fell 35 percent from 2023 and is at a 30-year-low, the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia reported in January.
The president said his administration was on a mission to "make it the best run place in the country" and said White House lawyers were studying the possibility of ending home rule, which enables district residents to elect their local officials
"We want to have a great, safe capital," he told reporters. "And we're gonna have it. And that includes cleanliness and it includes other things."
Mayor Muriel Bowser's office declined a request for comment from POLITICO.
Trump's comments came in response to questions about the assault of Edward Coristine, a 19-year-old man known as "big balls" who played a prominent role in the administration's efforts to slash government under the leadership of Elon Musk.
Coristine, who now works for the Social Security Administration though Musk has left the government and DOGE has been scaled back, told police he was attacked by a group of juveniles as part of an apparent attempted carjacking about 3 a.m Sunday in Northwest D.C.
"We just almost lost a young man, a beautiful, handsome guy that got the hell knocked out of him the night before last. I'm gonna call him now, we wanted to give him a little recovery time," Trump said. "He went through a bad situation, to put it mildly. And there's too much of it."
Trump also railed against what he sees as other elements of disrepair throughout the city: "The graffiti you see, the papers all over the place, the roads that are in bad shape, the medians that are falling down."
In March, he signed an executive order that called for the restoration of city monuments and removal of graffiti as part of a "coordinated beautification plan" for the district.
This isn't the first time Trump has flirted with the idea of asserting greater control over the city. He pushed to federalize Washington during the Covid-19 pandemic in his first term. In February, he suggested the federal government should "take over" governing Washington.
His administration also sent about 4,000 National Guard troops and 700 Marines to Los Angeles in June in response to protests of increased immigration enforcement.
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