To Understand What Trump Is Doing in DC, Look Back to 1989

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For journalists, one of the problems with covering Donald Trump is the disconnect between the president's statements and reality. The reason Trump says that something is happening might not be the actual reason it's happening . Sometimes, the reason he says he's doing something changes on a day-to-day basis . Sometimes he says he's doing something but isn't doing it at all ! It's a lot of fun, and this week we have a new twist on the game: Trump's explanation for what's going on in Washington wouldn't even make sense if he were telling the truth about it (which he isn't).

Here's the BBC's attempt at a straightforward description:

President Donald Trump said he was deploying the National Guard to Washington DC and taking control of the city's police force as he pledged to crack down on crime and homelessness in the city.

Trump declared a “public safety emergency” on Monday, deploying 800 National Guard troops to bolster hundreds of federal law enforcement officers who were deployed over the weekend.

The Guardian provides some context, noting that Trump justified the need for the emergency by photographing (or having someone else photograph) three instances of public homelessness that his motorcade encountered on Sunday along a route between the White House and the Trump National Golf Club in northern Virginia . The president has additionally cited an alleged carjacking involving an administration staffer who goes by the nickname “Big Balls” as an impetus for the guard decision.

So, because of carjackings and homelessness , the city needs to be occupied by the military . Does this make sense? How are 800 members of the National Guard, one for every 54 acres of city space , supposed to make a significant impact on random car theft, much less on homelessness? Even assuming that there are advisable uses of military force in domestic situations—a questionable assumption, given the guard's own history —those would presumably involve violence (rather than property theft or vagrancy) that was ongoing and centralized (rather than scattered in thousands of semi-random locations). Homeless people are homeless because they lack the ability to find or the capacity to maintain a dwelling, not because they are insufficiently afraid that someone with a helmet on might shoot them. Carjacking and homelessness in the District of Columbia are also going down , not up , and while you could argue that the US's baseline level of violence itself is unacceptable, what good are small one-by-one deployments to individual cities going to do about that ?

It doesn't make a lot of sense. But an aside in Trump's Monday press conference might provide a clue as to what is actually going on:

You look at Chicago, how bad it is. You look at Los Angeles, how bad it is. We have other cities that are very bad. New York has a problem. And then you have, of course, Baltimore and Oakland. We don't even mention that anymore, they're so—they're so far gone. We're not going to let it happen. We're not going to lose our cities over this.

As I am not the first person to observe , Trump generally behaves as if the current year is somewhere in the late 1980s or early '90s. At that time, cities like New York, Oakland, Washington, Chicago, and Baltimore were in fact experiencing record levels of crime . (Hell, George HW Bush went on TV holding a big old bag of crack !) This is no longer true. Overall crime rates are much lower than they were at that time, and in some of the cities that Trump tends to single out, they've fallen even faster than the national average. Compare the national decline in the homicide rate since its 1991 peak to Washington's decline as documented in this post ; for its part, New York is now about as dangerous as Omaha .