Democrats around the country are test driving different responses to President Trump’s (quite successful) crime crackdown in Washington, DC — which he is threatening to impose elsewhere, albeit under different authorities and jurisdictional constraints, given the capital’s unique status as a federal district. In DC itself, Mayor Bowser surprised many last week by acknowledging the dramatic reduction in crime and sounding positive about the federal-local partnership achieving those results. She enraged leftists in the process, but adopting a ‘plummeting crime is good’ position is typically very safe terrain for a politician. California Gov. Gavin Newsom has been trolling Trump for weeks, so when he rolled out new anti-crime squads in his state, he had to do so with all sorts of requisite criticisms of the president. But his action alone was something of a nod to the reality Trump has been highlighting: Crime remains far too elevated in large swaths of the country, very much including on the West Coast. It has been the Democrats of Illinois who seem to have planted their heads in the sand as aggressively as possible, shouting resistance slogans into that dust while rampant crime rages around them.
Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson, who has achieved historic, breathtakingly low approval ratings, repeatedly refused to answer whether thousands of more local police on the beat would help reduce crime in his city (which has led the nation in murders for more than a dozen years running). He’s against what he calls an unconstitutional Trump intervention and “military occupation,” you see, but he’s also against more local enforcement.
Hellbound and Down 