President Donald Trump on Wednesday touted his takeover of Washington, D.C., as a success and floated the idea of launching a similar crackdown on crime in New Orleans.
Speaking to reporters from the Oval Office, Trump cast D.C. as a crime-ridden city up until he declared a public safety emergency in the nation’s capital and federalized the city’s police force three weeks ago. “Now it’s considered a totally safe zone,” he said. City data showed that violent crime in D.C. was already falling significantly before the Administration’s operation, but does indicate a further decline in crime during the takeover. Taking credit for the recent drop, Trump suggested sending National Guard troops to other major cities, too.
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“I could do that with Chicago. We could do that with New York. We could do it with Los Angeles,” Trump said. “We’re making a determination now—do we go to Chicago, or do we go to a place like New Orleans, where we have a great governor, Jeff Landry, who wants us to come in and straighten out a very nice section of this country that’s become quite tough, quite bad.”
He said New Orleans “has a crime problem” and that his Administration could “straighten that out in about two weeks,” adding that it would be “easier than D.C.”
New Orleans was considered the “murder capital” of the U.S. in 2022. But the city—like D.C., Chicago, and many others across the country—has experienced a decline in violent crime in recent years.
Trump has previously indicated that he would tackle crime in other cities beyond D.C., including Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, Baltimore, and Oakland—all in Democratic-run states. Louisiana, however, is led by a Republican governor and the GOP controls both chambers of its state legislature. Gov. Jeff Landry, who the President praised on Wednesday, was endorsed by Trump during the 2023 gubernatorial race. After Trump launched his takeover of D.C. last month, Landry was among several Republican governors who deployed National Guard troops to the city to aid in the operation.
The President’s remarks come as tensions rise between him and local leaders in Illinois. Trump said a couple weeks ago that Chicago would likely be the “next” city his Administration turns to in its efforts to crack down on crime. Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker and Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson—both Democrats—have rejected the idea of federal intervention. Over the weekend, Johnson ordered city departments not to cooperate if Trump deploys the National Guard to Chicago. But on Tuesday, Trump dismissed local leaders’ objections: “We’re going to do it anyway,” he told reporters in the Oval Office.
He continued to slam local officials on Wednesday, calling Pritzker an “incompetent governor.” He went on to criticize California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat and vocal Trump critic. The President claimed that he “saved” L.A. after sending in the National Guard earlier this summer, bypassing Newsom. The move sparked widespread outrage among state leaders and the public, and has drawn pushback from the courts. On Tuesday, a judge ruled that the Trump Administration’s deployment of troops to L.A. violated a longstanding federal law.
Still, Trump painted the operation as a success, even claiming that the 2028 Summer Olympics wouldn’t be held in L.A. as planned if he hadn’t stepped in.
“If we didn’t go into Los Angeles with our soldiers, with our National Guard, you wouldn’t even be having the Olympics there,” he said. “We saved Los Angeles and we saved the Olympics.”