Turns out when you put armed soldiers who are actually on the side of law-abiding citizens onto the streets of a crime-ridden city, criminals decide to take a day off. And then another day off. And then 52% of all the days off. Washington D.C. has seen its homicide rate cut in half since President Trump deployed the National Guard last August, and the numbers aren’t even close to debatable.
Who could have predicted this? Oh right — literally everyone who isn’t a progressive criminologist with a PhD in Excusing Bad Behavior. The rest of us figured this out somewhere around kindergarten.
Let’s look at the scoreboard, because the scoreboard is devastating. In the first four months of 2025 — before the deployment — D.C. recorded 42 homicides. Same period in 2026? Twenty. That’s not a rounding error. That’s not a statistical blip. That’s a 52% freefall in murders, and it happened because someone in the Oval Office finally said the obvious thing out loud: deploy force, and criminals retreat.
But wait — it gets better. Homicides aren’t the only number that cratered. Sex abuse cases? Down 48%. Robbery? Down 23%. Motor vehicle theft? Down 56%. Overall crime across the board? Down 25%. The only category that went up was assaults with a dangerous weapon, which — and we’re speculating here — might have something to do with criminals getting increasingly desperate as every other avenue of criminal enterprise dries up around them.
Remember what D.C. looked like before this? In 2024, the nation’s capital recorded 187 homicides. Let that sink in. The city where Congress works, where the President lives, where foreign diplomats send their families — 187 people murdered in a single year. By 2025 it had dropped to 127, and now we’re on pace for something dramatically lower. The trendline isn’t subtle. It’s a cliff.
The soft-on-crime U.S. Attorney who was running the show got replaced. The new one — and this is the key detail the media keeps burying — immediately started actually prosecuting cases. Imagine that. A prosecutor who prosecutes. Revolutionary stuff. Someone alert the Harvard Law Review.
Mayor Muriel Bowser — a Democrat, for those keeping score — is now out there bragging about driving “crime to lowest level in decades” and achieving a “97% rate of 911 calls answered in 20 seconds or less” and closing homicide cases at the highest rate in 13 years. That’s nice, Muriel. Real nice. Funny how none of that was happening before the National Guard showed up. It’s almost like having actual enforcement resources makes every other part of the system work better.
We’re old enough to remember when every progressive pundit in America told us that deploying the military to American cities was “authoritarian.” That it would “escalate tensions.” That it would “militarize our communities.” That the real solution was more social workers, more midnight basketball, more restorative justice circles where criminals get to explain their feelings.
How’d that work out? We went from 187 murders to being on pace for under 80. The social workers can take the rest of the year off.
This is what drives the Left absolutely insane about Trump. He doesn’t overthink it. He doesn’t commission a 400-page study. He doesn’t convene a panel of experts who went to the right schools. He looks at the problem — criminals are killing people — and applies the obvious solution: put uniformed personnel with authority on the streets until the criminals knock it off.
And it worked. Spectacularly. Undeniably. With receipts.
The media will spend approximately zero minutes celebrating this. They’ll find one complaint — probably the assault numbers ticking up — and frame the entire story around that. They’ll interview a civil liberties lawyer who thinks the real crime is the National Guard’s presence. They’ll write think pieces about the “chilling effect on communities of color” without once mentioning that those same communities are the ones no longer burying their children.
Fifty-two percent. That number is a sledgehammer, and no amount of editorial hand-wringing can make it go away. Fewer people are dead because a president decided that protecting American lives was more important than protecting progressive feelings.
That’s not authoritarian. That’s the job description.