John Bowden
Tue, September 9, 2025
The White House defended Donald Trump’s remarks about crime statistics on Tuesday after the president seemed to downplay counting domestic violence incidents among those numbers a day earlier.
On Monday, the president spoke about his federalized occupation of Washington D.C. with National Guard troops, while claiming that he’d turned the city into a “safe zone”. During his remarks, made at the Museum of the Bible downtown, Trump went on a side tangent about what he referred to as “lesser” infractions: “things that take place in the home,” in his words.
“Things that take place in the home, they call crime,” Trump groused. “They’ll do anything they can to find something. If a man has a little fight with the wife, they say, ‘This was a crime scene.’”
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt denied that the president was downplaying the importance of prosecuting domestic violence at her briefing on Tuesday, but instead of walking back Trump’s remarks insisted that her boss was somehow making a point that members of the media were using domestic violence incidents to distract from efforts to combat street crime.
“He wasn't referring to crime. That's exactly the point he was making,” Leavitt told reporters. “The president is saying, in fact, is that these crimes will be made up and reported as a crime to undermine the great work that the federal task force is doing to reduce crime in Washington, D.C.”
Karoline Leavitt claimed that Donald Trump was not downplaying the seriousness of domestic violence when he dismissively called ‘thinks that take place in the home’ an example of a ‘lesser’ infraction (AP)More
The White House’s latest statement comes as Trump himself has faced pushback from the media and locals on his notion that the District of Columbia has been made crime-free by the deployment of troops on the streets. But Leavitt’s explanation seemed to clash with what seemed to be the intent of Trump’s words a day earlier when the president made a clear definition of domestic conflict and possible spousal abuse, before seeming to suggest it wasn’t a matter for the police.
Crime in D.C., Trump claimed on Monday, was now “virtually nothing”, adding that in crime statistics police and media were counting “much lesser things. Things that take place in the home that they call crime. You know; they’ll do anything they can to find something.”
He continued: “If a man has a little fight with the wife, they say, ‘this is a crime.’ See? So now I can’t claim [to have reduced crime in D.C. by] 100%.”
In the same remarks, Trump repeated his claim that “you can walk to a restaurant” in D.C. without fear, putting aside the fact that D.C. restaurant foot traffic has actually plunged since the deployment of troops and federal law enforcement began across the city.
Even the Museum of the Bible itself admitted to CNN in an email that attendance was suffering amid the takeover, which is now entering its second month.
D.C. Democratic Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton delivers a speech opposing President Donald Trump's threat to deploy National Guard troops and federal law enforcement officers to combat crime on the streets of Chicago, Baltimore, and other American cities, at the Capitol on Sept. 3. (AP)More
Shawn Townsend, CEO of the Restaurant Association of Metropolitan Washington which represents hundreds of businesses across the city and runs the popular season D.C. Restaurant Weeks featuring local spots, called the imposition of National Guard troops on the city D.C.’s “pandemic 2.0” in a statement this week to Axios. The Covid pandemic shuttered many businesses permanently, and the slow return of workers to downtown areas was more brutal to those that survived the initial closures.
Last month, Townsend’s group extended D.C.’s summer 2025 Restaurant Week for the first time in years as businessses once again as tourism and local economic activity both declined sharply with the troop deployments.
“I've heard from folks that won't renew leases or even consider D.C.,” Townsend told Axios.
While businesses told news outlets that the flashy imagery and rhetoric of the White House’s focus on crime-fighting in cities was directly impacting their bottom lines and contributed to an inaccurate image of city life even under occupation, there’s no sign that the Trump administration is listening to business leaders in Washington D.C. or anywhere else. No major local business groups have endorsed the president’s efforts in D.C. or his threats to expand the takeover to Baltimore, New York, Chicago or New Orleans.
And on Tuesday, Leavitt’s only words on the matter were to insist that the murder of a Ukrainian immigrant on public transport in Charlotte, North Carolina justified expanding the campaign nationwide — and to tout the administration’s latest arrest numbers in the capital.
By Tuesday, Leavitt said, more than 2,177 people have been arrested in Washington D.C. since the takeover began. A New York Times analysis noted that this represents only a slight increase over the city’s overall arrest rate prior to the occupation.
Trump downplays domestic violence in speech about religious freedom
Mel Leonor Barclay/The 19th
Tue, September 9, 2025
Trump in the White House Sept. 2. (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)
This story was originally reported The 19th.
President Donald Trump on Monday downplayed the severity of domestic violence crimes, saying that were it not for “things that take place in the home they call crime,” the administration’s deployment of National Guard troops in Washington, D.C., would have resulted in a bigger statistical reduction in crime.
“They said, ‘Crime’s down 87 percent.’ I said, no, no, no — it’s more than 87 percent, virtually nothing. And much lesser things, things that take place in the home they call crime. You know, they’ll do anything they can to find something. If a man has a little fight with the wife, they say this was a crime. See? So now I can’t claim 100 percent but we are. We are a safe city,” Trump said.
The president’s comments were part of a speech he delivered at the Religious Liberty Commission’s meeting at the Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C.
Domestic violence has long been recognized by the federal government as a national public health and safety crisis. A national survey by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that 4 in 10 women and 1 in 4 men have experienced physical or sexual violence or stalking by an intimate partner.
Next month marks the 25th annual Domestic Violence Awareness Month, which coincides with the 2000 reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act. The law increased federal funding to combat domestic violence and other crimes that disproportionately affect women, recognizing the matter as a public health and safety issue, not a private domestic matter.
The federal government is by far the biggest source of funding for anti-domestic violence efforts, and since taking office, the Trump administration has sought to restrict nonprofits’ access to federal domestic violence grants. They have also laid off a top official and several teams working on the issue, threatening to destabilize domestic violence services and prevention efforts nationwide.
In a statement to The 19th, the White House said the president wasn’t “talking about or downplaying domestic violence.”
“President Trump’s Executive Order to address crime in DC even specifically took action against domestic violence,” said Abigail Jackson, a spokesperson for the White House. The order urged the Department of Housing and Urban Development to investigate housing providers who don’t comply with requirements to “restrict tenants who engage in criminal activity,” including domestic violence.
The White House also pointed out that the administration barred transgender women from women’s domestic abuse shelters, a move that advocates warn makes trans women less safe.
“While President Trump is making America safer, the Fake News is whipping up their latest hoax in real time to distract from the Administration’s tremendous results,” Jackson said.
Some groups focused on combating domestic violence criticized the president’s comments.
“The DC Coalition Against Domestic Violence believes that intimate partner violence is a crime and more than a ‘little fight with the wife’ as President Trump stated earlier today. Per federal and local statute, domestic violence is a crime and one that is not only a precursor to domestic violence homicides, but also a common factor in community violence, including mass shootings, where perpetrators often have a history of committing domestic violence,” said Dawn Dalton, the coalition’s executive director.
“The idea that domestic abuse is serious and criminal is not up for debate. Words cannot take us backwards and the days of treating domestic and sexual violence as ‘private matters’ are long gone. Any attempt to minimize these crimes does not change the impact of domestic violence and cannot change the reality of crime statistics in Washington, D.C.,” said Casey Carter Swegman, director of public policy at Tahirih Justice Center.
“By reducing domestic violence to a ‘little fight,’ President Trump revives a regressive view from an era when survivors were expected to endure abuse alone, without legal protections or public support, said Susanna Saul Director, Legal Programs at Her Justice, a nonprofit that provides free legal services to women living in poverty in New York City. “This does more than trivialize domestic abuse. It emboldens abusers to increase their violence and risks undoing decades of legal and cultural progress that have made safety a community responsibility, rather than a private burden.”
Rep. Gwen Moore, a Democrat from Wisconsin who has championed legislative efforts against domestic violence, said such crimes amount to “abuse that devastates families, endangers women and children, and takes lives every single day.”
“As a survivor of domestic violence, I found President Trump’s comments today downplaying domestic violence deeply offensive and disturbing,” she said in a statement. “Trump has a long history of violence against women that makes his dismissiveness unsurprising.”
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