President Trump lashed out angrily Monday night at a report published by the Center for American Progress (CAP), a liberal think tank, that said that his National Guard deployments to U.S. cities have largely failed to reduce crime even as it could cost taxpayers more than $1.7 billion.
The report was published nearly a month ago, but in a 10:31 p.m. post on his social media site last night, Trump attacked its author, Chandler Hall, the associate director for public safety at CAP. Why the delayed response? Hall had appeared on C-Span earlier in the day and detailed the report’s findings that violent crime and murder were already declining in cities where Trump sent or threatened to send National Guard troops. The report argued that the pre-existing trends were more than likely to continue without any of Trump’s actions.
“I think it’s unfortunate that the president is continuing to still choose to boast that these deployments, these very costly interventions, are showing any results to try to convince voters that they should sign on for more of these kinds of interventions and federal overreach, when again, there’s no proof that they have any effect,” Hall said on C-Span.
Responding on Truth Social, Trump challenged Hall and the report’s findings.
“Chandler Hall, representing, on Television, the foolish Center for American Lack of Progress, stated that adding the National Guard to Cities, including our now Great Again, Washington, D.C., had ‘NO impact on Crime.’ How crazy is that,” he wrote.
Trump called the CAP report “just another Radical Left SCAM” and, true to his playbook, threatened to bring a lawsuit against the think tank and, potentially, some of its donors. He included a long list of individuals and companies, from George Soros and Bill Gates to Google, Apple, Bank of America, Walmart and more.
“Liars, at this level, must be held accountable!” he wrote before signing off.
What about Washington, D.C.? The National Guard deployment and broader federal crackdown on crime in the nation’s capital started exactly one year ago and was recently extended through January 2029, with the extended mission estimated to cost an additional $1.4 billion. Trump has repeatedly touted the results of the deployment and claimed that he has eliminated crime in Washington and made it “one of the safest” places in the United States and capitals in the world. But a new analysis by The Washington Post concludes that Trump’s claims “oversimplify and overstate the impact of the federal intervention.”
Jeff Asher, a crime data analyst, told the Post that rates of violent crime have been falling across the country since peaking in 2023.
“If you want to argue that there was an additional decline on top of that due to all these interventions, you could plausibly make that argument,” Asher told the Post. “But you can’t make the argument that the intervention caused that decline or even was a major factor in those trends turning over.”
The Post reports that another analysis conducted by Thaddeus Johnson, an assistant professor at the Andrew Young School of Policy Studies at Georgia State University, found that property crimes and auto thefts had fallen to levels lower than expected, but the picture from the troop surge on violent crimes was somewhat mixed.
“One would be hard-pressed to say that it didn’t play a role,” Johnson told the Post, “but you would also be hard-pressed to say it was the only or primary reason why we’ve seen reductions.”