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In federalizing law enforcement in the District of Columbia - and potentially beyond - President Donald Trump is pushing Democrats into a politically dangerous position where they have been caught before: trying to stand up for their core values on civil liberties without being tagged as soft on crime.
"I think it's going to be a big, big subject for the midterms, and I think the Republicans are going to do really well. They called it a trap. This Democrat consultant, he said, 'He's put them in a trap again,'" Trump said at a Cabinet meeting on Tuesday.
Democrats say they do indeed recognize the playbook. Their response, many warn, has to go beyond citing statistics that show pandemic-era crime rates are abating, or downplaying the seriousness of nonviolent offenses that erode public trust and the quality of everyday life.
"What Democrats truly need to grasp is, yes, that means defending the rule of law against an authoritarian, [but] it also means ending shoplifting. They're both important," said Rep. Jake Auchincloss (D-Massachusetts), who has been urging his party to regain trust with voters on the issue of law and order.
At the same time, some Democratic strategists say that the president may be opening an opportunity for their party.
"It's important for Democrats to talk about the fact that Trump is using the military against American citizens in a way that would appall the founders, but clearly the conversations can't just end there," veteran pollster Geoff Garin said in an interview. "Democrats understand the game that Trump is playing and also understand they should not play it on his terms."
Among other things, Garin said, Democrats should stress that Trump and the Republicans have undermined public safety by cutting funding to cities and weakening gun laws.
Others argue for a broader message. A presentation Monday at the summer meeting of the Democratic National Committee by Insha Rahman of the liberal Vera Institute of Justice included data she said showed that public safety threats such as carjackings and crime by migrants "don't matter" to many Americans.
But like Garin, Rahman encouraged Democrats to attack Trump's funding cuts and "say we are about safety."
"Don't take the bait, because most Americans are more worried about how we are going to address mental health issues, the visible homelessness that we see on streets, and how do we deal with mental health and other issues that drive the sort of random incidents that scare all of us - that's what you should be talking about," Rahman said. The presentation drew backlash from conservative media - and, in private, hand-wringing by Democrats.
The past few weeks have seen an unprecedented flexing of federal muscle to fight crime in the nation's capital. Trump has deployed National Guard and other troops to patrol D.C., and he has mused aloud about doing it in other cities. The ones he has mentioned, including New York, Baltimore and Chicago, are in states controlled by Democrats.
Such moves amount to an unorthodox stretching of his presidential powers and have been met with pushback from blue-state governors. In Chicago on Monday, flanked by local officials, Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker said that the city is not experiencing an emergency that would warrant such federal action, and he accused Trump of "attempting to manufacture a crisis."
That same day, Trump signed an executive order threatening to withhold federal funding from cities that do not get rid of cashless bail, a policy that allows people to be released from jail while they await trial without paying money.
Democrats - in D.C. and elsewhere - have pointed to statistics showing that the incidence of major crimes has decreased sharply since 2023, bringing homicide rates to their lowest level in decades.
Other measures tell a different story.
Too often, said Anna Harvey, director of the Public Safety Lab at New York University, "most of the conversation about crime is people talking past each other. Nobody is really precise about what they mean when they talk about crime."
She pointed to a report last month by the journal Vital City that found the total number of offenses in New York City had reached an 18-year high - a finding obscured by law enforcement's and the media's focus on seven major crimes historically tracked by the FBI: murder, rape, felony assault, robbery, burglary, grand larceny and grand larceny of a motor vehicle.
"City life is shaped by far more than these serious, relatively rare, offenses," the journal wrote. "For example, in 2024, there were 332 misdemeanor assault complaints for every one murder, and 13.4 petit larcenies for every robbery. Examining 'all crimes' … offers a fuller picture of life on the street and the types of incidents that most often affect New Yorkers' sense of safety."
Democratic strategist Mike Nellis said his party should not "take the bait about arguing about crime statistics."
"If people don't feel safe, they don't feel safe. No amount of yelling at them or lecturing them changes that," Nellis said, crediting Trump with understanding the power of emotion over facts in politics. "He plays right into the heart of the Democratic Party's biggest weaknesses, which is that we care about reality."
For decades, polls have consistently shown that the public trusts Republicans more on the issue of crime. In the 1988 election, Democratic nominee Michael Dukakis, then governor of Massachusetts, was pummeled with an infamous, racially charged ad featuring Willie Horton, a Black convicted murderer imprisoned in the state who was then convicted in the rape of a White woman and the stabbing of her boyfriend that occurred while Horton was released on a weekend furlough program.
In "The Politics of Evasion," a groundbreaking 1989 analysis that propelled the centrist Democratic movement, political scientists William Galston and Elaine Ciulla Kamarck wrote that the ad fed a perception that Democrats are "weaker on crime and more concerned about criminals than about victims."
As president, Bill Clinton was aggressive in showing that Democrats could be tough on criminals. But in retrospect, his 1994 crime bill, which created harsher new sentences and provided federal funding for the construction of prisons, was criticized as accelerating an era of mass incarceration of disproportionately Black inmates. In her 2016 presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton, his wife, expressed regret for having given a speech in the 1990s that supported a debunked theory of "super-predators."
The murder of George Floyd under the knee of a Minneapolis police officer, in 2020, brought about another turn in the racial justice movement, with liberal activists chanting "Defund the police!" The idea was that the money should be reallocated to other uses, such as social services.
Though most Democrats, including Joe Biden, rejected the slogan, Republicans used it as an effective weapon in that year's election, claiming it was an invitation to lawlessness. In 2022, the liberal bastion of San Francisco recalled District Attorney Chesa Boudin, a Democrat who only three years before had been elected on a platform calling for "decarceration" and whose office had eliminated cash bail.
During the coronavirus pandemic, a rise in violent crime brought calls for more policing, but then and now, departments across the country have had difficulty replenishing ranks that were depleted by resignations and retirements. Local departments now compete for recruits with agencies such as U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which is touting signing bonuses of up to $50,000 and assistance with student loan repayments.
What remains to be seen is what impact - if any - the measures that Trump has imposed will have on crime. Chuck Wexler, the executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum, an organization of law enforcement officials, said police chiefs among his members are curiously watching what is happening in D.C. as they ponder what kind of federal involvement could really make a difference.
Trump's authority under the 1973 Home Rule Act gives the president command of D.C.'s police force, but only for up to 30 days without authorization from Congress.
"The real question people should be asking is, will it be effective?" Wexler said of the deployment. "Will it have an impact? And what happens after it leaves?"
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