Trump's determined to undermine Black leadership — not cut crime
President Donald Trump’s deployment of the National Guard to Washington, D.C., has focused the nation’s attention on the city’s plummeting rate of violent crime.
The other cities Trump falsely labeled as "crime-ridden" — Los Angeles, New York, Baltimore, Chicago and Oakland — have seen similar declining crime rates.
While the cities Trump is so quick to malign don’t have out-of-control rates of violent crime, what they do have is something he is much more eager to suppress than crime: exemplary Black leadership.
Washington Mayor Muriel Bowser’s emphasis on prevention, intervention and enforcement strategies has brought violent crime to a 30-year low. Her success in creating new homes earned her the chair of the National League of Cities’ America’s Housing Comeback advisory group. Under her leadership, Washington has been recognized as the fastest-improving urban school district in the country.
By any measure, all of the cities Trump singled out — like most of the nation — are safer from crime than they were in February 2020 — the last month of Trump’s first term before COVID-19 ravaged the nation.
Baltimore has seen a record low of homicides, thanks to Mayor Brandon Scott’s Group Violence Reduction Strategy, grounded in community engagement and public health. Mayor Brandon Johnson’s emphasis on early childhood education, youth employment and mental health access has coincided with a significant decline in gun violence in Chicago. In Los Angeles, Mayor Karen Bass is advancing housing-first strategies to address homelessness and has resisted federal efforts to criminalize urban poverty and the unconstitutional attempted U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement takeovers in June.
It is these accomplishments — not public safety — that have drawn Trump’s chagrin. The successes of Black leaders in government, business, academia and the arts undermine the foundation of his administration’s anti-diversity, anti-equity and anti-inclusion crusade.
The accomplishments of America’s Black mayors should be celebrated and applauded. But that would mean celebrating the societal reforms that broke down the barriers to their advancement: the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act and initiatives to eliminate systemic racism and unconscious racial bias — initiatives the administration and its allies denigrate as "woke" — an extremist euphemism for acknowledging inequity.
Trump’s White House has openly bragged about the many ways the 2026 federal budget undermines racial and cultural equity. He’s ended "woke" programming at the Kennedy Center and eliminating "woke" exhibits from Smithsonian museums. He pulled the U.S. out of UNESCO, the United Nations cultural arm.
When Trump says he wants to "take back" Washington and other Black-led cities, from whom does he mean to take them?
Trump’s law enforcement overreach won’t make urban communities any safer. On the contrary, as the Congressional Black Caucus pointed out, "militarized overpolicing will inevitably lead to increased fear and mistrust among communities that have too often been treated as occupied populations, rather than as citizens who deserve to be served and protected."
If the Trump administration truly were concerned about safety, it might turn its attention to Mississippi, where lax firearm safety measures and draconian restrictions on reproductive rights have resulted in the highest rate of both gun deaths and maternal deaths of any state in the nation.
Instead, as Maryland governor and combat veteran Wes Moore noted, Trump "is simply using honorable men and women as pawns to distract us from his policies, which continue to drive up unemployment and strip away health care and food assistance from those who need it most."
Marc H. Morial is president and CEO of the National Urban League and was mayor of New Orleans from 1994 to 2002. He writes a twice-monthly column for the Sun-Times.