When Donald Trump decided to deploy National Guard troops to the streets of Washington, D.C., the purported rationale was straightforward: There’s a “public safety crisis” and “public safety emergency” in the District of Columbia, the president claimed, generated by “rising” and “out of control” crime rates in the nation’s capital.
None of this was true, of course, but the week after Republicans peddled the discredited claims anyway, the White House pressed GOP governors to help out by deploying National Guard troops from their states to D.C.
Three Republican governors — Ohio’s Mike DeWine, South Carolina’s Henry McMaster and West Virginia’s Patrick Morrisey — quickly complied, and as The Associated Press reported, three more soon followed.
Three more Republican governors authorized the deployment of National Guard troops to Washington on Monday, part of President Donald Trump’s escalating show of force that he says is designed to crack down on crime and boost immigration enforcement in the nation’s capital. The announcements by Mississippi, Tennessee and Louisiana brought the number of state troops detailed to the president’s effort to more than 1,100 — and the number of states to six.
For what it’s worth, Vermont’s Republican governor, Phil Scott, politely declined both of the White House’s recent requests for deployments.
At this point, we could talk about how there is no actual crisis in Washington, D.C. Or we could talk about the dangers of Trump’s radical militarization efforts. We could even have a conversation about how wrong it is for six GOP governors (and counting) to disrupt the lives of these troops and their families for a pointless, performative exercise.
But as important as those details are, there’s another dimension to this that shouldn’t get lost in the shuffle: Crime is actually lower in D.C. than it is in the states these Guard troops are leaving.
Philip Bump, who wrote a data-driven political column for The Washington Post for many years, explained this week, “If there really is an emergency in D.C. that necessitates the use of the National Guard and other federal agencies, that would suggest that crime in D.C. is exceptional. … Data released by the FBI earlier this month, though, shows that a lot of other places … had higher rates of violent crime and homicide than did D.C.” This includes cities in — you guessed it — Ohio, Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee, South Carolina and West Virginia. In fact, focusing specifically on homicides, Jackson, Mississippi, has the nation’s highest murder rate, with conditions far worse than in D.C. In other words, we’re dealing with a situation in which Republican governors are deploying National Guard troops to the nation’s capital to address a crime crisis that doesn’t exist, while overlooking the inconvenient fact that crime rates are worse in their own home states. Since Trump announced this policy, the president’s critics have argued that the entire endeavor has nothing to do with actually addressing crime or keeping Americans safe. These governors are helping to prove the critics right.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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