Dear Weekend Jolter,
The Trump critics are statistically correct: Violent crimes in Washington, D.C., are down, if from high levels — including carjackings, which a couple years ago were a scourge of daily life in the capital. What hasn’t changed is the distribution of crimes in D.C.
A carjacking “heat map” operated by the Metropolitan Police Department, which President Trump temporarily took over this week in a show of federal force involving the National Guard, shows virtually all of that crime occurring east of the White House. Sixteenth Street, which extends up from Lafayette Square, is essentially the dividing line — Trump could stand astride it from his roof — between a city where it is safe to drive a car at any hour, and a city where that is much more of a gamble. While nonviolent crime is more spread out, homicides follow the same pattern. The parks are another safe zone.
Apart from basic partisanship, this uneven distribution is one reason why characterizations of crime in Washington can be so theatrically in conflict with one another. Brunch at, say, Nancy Silverton’s new restaurant in Georgetown or a stroll among the monuments is safe. Venturing east of The Wharf is not. Take your pick of two D.C. realities. Chuck Schumer, for instance, says he feels “perfectly safe,” walking around spots near the National Mall with a security detail. For congressional staffers living in Navy Yard, life is much different.
The instigating incident in the current power struggle — an assault and attempted carjacking involving a former DOGE staffer known by a sophomoric sobriquet — took place near the dividing line in the wee hours of August 3. Trump, per custom, dialed his official response up to 11 and exaggerated the stats, while his political and media critics, as Noah Rothman writes, reflexively downplayed D.C. disorder:
Too many Democrats to count insisted that Washington’s violent crime rate had substantially declined, presumably to the point of negligibility. “The crime scene in D.C. most damaging to everyday Americans is at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries wrote, by way of example. Even suggesting that D.C. had a crime problem was evocative of the “racist narratives” promulgated by white supremacists “to shape public opinion and justify aggressive police action,” according to no less a venue than the Associated Press. . . . The argument Democrats don’t seem to know they’re making is that a certain amount of street crime is a quirky feature of the urban scene.
Despite such attitudes, crime in D.C. and elsewhere should elicit alarm from local leaders. Jeff Blehar recalls how D.C. has changed over the decades, from the bloody ’90s to a period of relative safety to this more uncertain era following Covid crime spikes. Overall violent crime is down, but homicides are still higher than they were a decade ago. Rich Lowry writes,
As of 2024, D.C. had the fourth highest homicide rate of major U.S. cities and a higher homicide rate than all 50 states. As Charles Lehman of the Manhattan Institute points out, the city’s homicide rate for young black men has been above the national average for decades now. . . . The carjackings, meanwhile, tend to be carried out by minors.
As NR’s editorial explains, Trump’s intervention amounts to a short-term display: “Whether in a month or in three months, the troops will be sent home. . . . The guardsmen might be able to free up some police resources, but we are likely to see a lot of them standing post outside federal buildings.” Long-term, as the editors and Rich write, D.C. needs more cops, tougher laws for crimes such as shoplifting, and a greater commitment to arrest and prosecute offenders. That includes juveniles; in the case of carjackings, D.C. data show that more than half of those arrested this year are under 18. One was 12! Suspects largely reside in communities hugging the District’s eastern border with Prince George’s County.
Once this particular federal demonstration ends, in D.C., as in many American cities, it will be simple enough to stick by one’s chosen narrative about street crime, based on which part of the capital one lives in or visits. But that won’t change the need to pursue for all residents what was once the slogan championed by a former (and jailed) county executive from next-door Prince George’s: a livable community.
* * *
As this newsletter was going to press, Trump and Putin concluded their Alaska summit — without any public cease-fire deal on Ukraine, at least not yet. But talks evidently didn’t break down either, and the two struck a friendly tone in their brief joint presser. How much of that was show, we don’t know. Mark Wright reads the tea leaves.
NAME. RANK. LINK.
EDITORIALS
A roadmap to a possible pact: What an Acceptable Russia-Ukraine Deal Might Look Like
Don’t ignore the signs: Beware the Return of Inflation
An alternative to a Freddie and Fannie IPO: Don’t Repeat the Fannie and Freddie Mistake
ARTICLES
Noah Rothman: The Search for Meaning in Throwing Sandwiches at Law Enforcement
Stanley Kurtz: Newsom vs. Walz on Woke
Haley Strack: City-Backed Kansas City Grocery Store Closes Despite Millions in Taxpayer Funding
John Puri: The Tragedy of the Computer Science Major
Scott C. Mallett: The Elitism of Empathy
Rich Lowry: Donald Trump Is Truly Historic
Corey DeAngelis: How Teachers Can Dismantle the Teachers’ Unions
Dominic Pino: Trump Doesn’t Have as Much Leverage over India as He Thinks
Caroline Downey: Vaccine Skepticism Is at an All-Time High. Here’s a Roadmap to Restoring Public Trust
Neal B. Freeman: It Is Everywhere
Brittany Bernstein: Adam Schiff Approved Classified Russiagate Leaks to Discredit Trump, Whistleblower Told FBI
CAPITAL MATTERS
Marian L. Tupy asks the questions that the International Court of Justice evidently didn’t: Inventing Climate Liability: An International Court’s Big Adventure
LIGHTS. CAMERA. REVIEW.
Brian Allen checks in from beautiful Santa Fe, reporting on the architecture and the O’Keeffe museum: Santa Fe: From Frayed Pueblo to Victorian to Pueblo Revival to Art Draw
Armond White, on the harm of horror: Our Movies Have Been Weaponi-zized
Ellen Carmichael, on a delightful reboot: Still King of the Hill
EXCERPTS HO!
To the backdrop of the Trump-Putin summit, NR’s editorial sketches out a possible framework for a Ukraine deal:
The best that can be hoped for is an armistice with an underpinning firm enough to deter Russia from resuming its war when it is ready. That will mean reiterating Western support for Ukraine and stipulating that the U.S. will participate in that effort, even as Western Europe assumes — as it must — a greater share of responsibility for helping Ukraine out. . . .
Ukraine is not going to join NATO in the foreseeable future, and there is no point in pretending otherwise. Nevertheless, handing Russia a veto over Ukrainian membership of NATO is unacceptable. Ukraine is a sovereign nation, with the right — however theoretical — to make the alliances it wishes. Ukraine’s Western partners must also be free to continue to supply it with weaponry — a disarmed Ukraine is a doomed Ukraine — and to work toward Ukrainian membership in the EU.
The president has floated the possibility of some land swaps. These, if they were to occur, would probably amount to little more than some tidying up around the front line. It is no coincidence that the Russians have lately stepped up their progress in the Donbas, with some success. When it comes to the fine print of any deal, possession will be nine-tenths of the “law.”
Some local horse-trading apart, the U.S. should reject any attempt by Russia to extend its gains. Nor, in the absence of Ukraine’s agreement, should it extend de jure recognition to any of the territorial gains made by Russia at Ukraine’s expense. The U.S. refused to recognize the Soviet occupation of the Baltic states for half a century. If necessary, that is the precedent to follow. For its part, Ukraine must, however reluctantly and unfairly, accept that the existing front line will, absent fresh hostilities, be the de facto border with Russia. The armistice that ended the Korean War was signed in 1953. If any Russo-Ukrainian armistice lasts as long, Ukraine will flourish.
Some other provisions, such as prisoner exchanges and the return of stolen Ukrainian children, ought to be fairly straightforward. Further incentives for Russia to agree to a deal should involve a gradual lifting of some sanctions in exchange for good behavior, perhaps starting with secondary sanctions, especially those on India, which may even be counterproductive anyway. But any relaxation of sanctions, or tentative steps toward some kind of thaw, should be cautious and unillusioned: Russia’s long-term goals will not change.
Neal B. Freeman, in keeping with publication tradition, calls for confronting antisemitism:
Last month, I attended a mini-reunion with Yale friends. My aging classmates may be a bit fuzzy on what they had for lunch yesterday, but they remember with clarity the mad meritocratic dash through which we all had churned those many years ago. To a man, across the spectrum from the hard left to, well, me, we were disgusted by reports from campus that Jewish students have been harassed. For being Jewish, that is. That’s not the place we knew and loved. (I should also note that there is a general sense of relief that, under our new president, Yale seems to be losing the competition with Harvard and Columbia for the distinction of being the nation’s most antisemitic campus. Boola, boola.) The wheel has turned, almost 180 degrees. . . .
Week before last, I Zoomed in with a heavily credentialed group of national security experts. (My own clearances have long since lapsed, but I maintain a lively interest in the subject matter.) The group — analysts, retired military, a handful of shadowy intel types — conducted a tour d’horizon of the international situation, a magisterial review of who is doing what to whom and with what consequence for the rest of us. (I almost characterized that review as “Kissingerian,” but nobody really does “Kissingerian” like Kissinger, the centerpiece of a dozen Buckley dinners over the years.) As we wrapped up the conference, this influential assemblage concluded that, in a world bristling with Kims and Putins and Khameneis and Xis, the real troublemakers — the state actors so problematic that they must be accosted, like, now — were two men: one named Netanyahu, who, it was reported a few days earlier, isn’t feeding enough people in enemy territory; and the other named Zelensky, who in the middle of a war for national survival had tried, briefly and unsuccessfully, to suspend the work of his government’s anti-corruption unit. To my eye, these bad actors have only three things in common. They are both democratically elected. They both watched in horror as their people were attacked by brutal cross-border forces. And they are both Jewish. As a Yankee fan might say, what’s not to like?
These are anecdotes, not much more. But we have had the data for some time, and I seem to have needed the anecdotes to confirm emotionally what I had already accepted intellectually. I don’t know whether it’s that the ADL has stopped issuing screechy alarms or that I have stopped paying any attention to them. Whichever the case, the hour is late. The hardened reality is that antisemitism is everywhere now and the obligation falls to us to confront it.
ICYMI, Rich Lowry took a 30,000-foot look at the Trump presidency to date:
Trump may be on the path to the most consequential presidency since Ronald Reagan’s.
We don’t know how it will end — there may be some terrible crack-up, or an unforeseen crisis could upend everything — but the emphasis has been on governing ambition from Day One. Even if Trump’s second term ended tomorrow, he would have left a significant mark.
Consider his signature issues of trade and immigration.
For all the talk about how he doesn’t have core convictions, Trump has favored tariffs for decades and has instituted a tariff regime that — absent discrediting economic turmoil — is likely to endure whether he is succeeded by a Republican or a Democrat.
This alone is a momentous achievement, and one that would have seemed almost unthinkable when Trump descended the elevator in 2015 and a relatively free-trade consensus prevailed in U.S. policy.
He’s brought border crossings to a historic low, and it could be that the U.S. experiences negative net migration for the first time in 50 years. Again, this is a big change, and one that it’s hard to imagine anyone besides Donald Trump effecting.
He’s dealt a blow to DEI programs in the federal government and is making it harder for colleges and universities to pursue race-conscious policies. His election coincided with the beginning of a pullback from DEI in the private sector, one that his administration has encouraged and accelerated. . . .
Steve Hayward called his volumes on the Republican giant of the 1980s The Age of Reagan (and Arthur Schlesinger wrote both The Age of Jackson and The Age of Roosevelt). The equivalent of Hayward or Schlesinger decades from now will probably be justified in continuing the trope.
All indications are that we are living in The Age of Trump.
CODA
I’ve been captivated lately by a semi-recent album from Canadian musician Devin Townsend called Empath. Part prog, part metal, part . . . opera and Broadway? . . . the record simply defies description, so consider this attempt unreliable. Every play unlocks something new. But to pick just one song: This track is strangely beautiful, and goes to prove that the man has range.
Thanks for reading, and enjoy the summer weekends while they last.