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Trump claims DC is now ‘safe’ and more people are dining out since his crackdown. The numbers tell a different story

President Donald Trump on Monday declared Washington, D.C., safe again, a week after he announced a federal crackdown amid claims about crime in the nation’s capital.

“It’s safe,” Trump said inside the Oval Office during a White House meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. As evidence of his claims, the president told reporters he received several calls from others, including Democrats, who shared that they were dining out in D.C. after previously avoiding doing so due to crime in the city.

Now, they feel safer, the president claimed, as a result of Trump declaring a public national emergency and deploying 800 D.C. National Guard troops onto the streets.

“We went from the most unsafe place anywhere to a place that now people, friends are calling me up, Democrats are calling me up, and they’re saying, ‘Sir, I want to thank you. My wife and I went out to dinner last night for the first time in four years, and Washington, D.C., is safe, and you did that in four days,” said Trump.

The president claimed that another person told him, “What you’ve done is incredible, and I think the people realize it, but the press says ‘he’s a dictator. He’s trying to take over.’”

Trump continued, “No, all I want is security for our people. But people that haven’t gone out to dinner in Washington, D.C., in two years are going out to dinner, and the restaurants the last two days were busier than they’ve been in a long time.”

Despite Trump’s claim that D.C. restaurants have been “busier” since his administration announced its federal crackdown on law enforcement, recent data shows the opposite.

WASHINGTON, DC – AUGUST 16: A DC National Guard Humvee is stationed near the White House on August 16, 2025 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Andrew Leyden/Getty Images)

According to data from OpenTable, restaurants in D.C. have seen a 25% drop in diners since Trump’s Aug. 11 announcements, including invoking the D.C. Home Rule Act to federalize the city’s local police department. WUSA9 reports that restaurant reservations were 27% below their 2024 levels the day after the president’s announcement. On Wednesday, Aug. 13, reservations dipped by 31%.

On Monday, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser again dismissed Trump’s claims about crime in the nation’s capital, and the recent deployments of additional national guard troops by the Republican governors of West Virginia, South Carolina and Ohio.

“The facts on the ground don’t support this,” she told reporters during a news conference. “This is not about something that fits into logic…the question is really not for us. It’s for why the military would be deployed in an American city to police Americans? That’s the question, and it’s not for me.”

Democratic strategist Joel Payne told theGrio that President Trump’s “militarization” of D.C. law enforcement is a “series of stunt tactics in search of a crisis.” According to data from D.C.’s Metropolitan Police Department, the city’s violent crime declined to a 30-year low.

“The political theater was bad faith and transparently serves as a predicate to try and put military on the streets in other places to pursue other authoritarian overreach,” said Payne.

He added, “If Trump and Republicans wanted to help D.C. in a sustainable way that actually netted results, they could reverse the cuts that he bullied Republicans into making into the city’s budget, or, better yet–he could just help spearhead an effort to make D.C. a state.”

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