Republican Sen Jumps to Add Weird Anecdote to Trump’s DC Hell Hole Propaganda
This is your TPM evening briefing.
It’s been clear since President Trump and his Fox News DC U.S. Attorney first announced that he was placing the Metropolitan Police Department under emergency federal control that he was trying to pull off another LA-style federal occupation of a city run by politicians he doesn’t like.
Multiple news outlets have put out aggressive fact checks on the president’s claims in the days since, rebutting Trump’s false assertions that Washington, D.C. is somehow overrun with violent crime. Statistics show that violent crime in D.C. has actually declined substantially since 2023 when the city experienced a spike in crime — falling to the lowest its been since before the pandemic, the Washington Post reported. The New York Times reports that homicides in the city declined by a third from 2023 to 2024 and are on track to decrease even further in 2025. The Times also determined that Trump’s and former Fox News host Jeanine Pirro’s claims about youth arrests in D.C. this week were exaggerated at best.
Trump foreshadowed his interest in taking over blue cities and punishing elected Democrats during his first term, and his interest in such maneuvers only became clearer on the campaign trail last summer and during his first few months back in office. When he deployed National Guard troops to Los Angeles in the wake of resistance to his mass deportation efforts, he justified the move by pointing at (mostly peaceful) protests breaking out in the city. In D.C. this week, he barely tried to come up with a rationale for his power play, as my colleague Josh Kovensky reported earlier this week.
It appears that some of his closest allies in Washington are jumping at the opportunity to spin up some tall tale anecdotes to give Trump datapoints to gesture toward to justify his federalization of the D.C. police, which he can legally do for 30 days before needing congressional approval. (Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said he’ll deploy 800 members of the D.C. National Guard to the streets for whatever reason over the coming week.)
Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-OK), a former MMA fighter-turned MAGA senator, told Fox News during an interview on Wednesday night that he doesn’t follow D.C.’s law about wearing seatbelts because he is too afraid of getting carjacked. In D.C., you are required to buckle up while driving. You can be fined $50 for not wearing a seatbelt.
Here’s an excerpt of what he said on “The Ingraham Angle” last night, which was first flagged by Mediaite:
And by the way, I’m not joking when I say this. I drive around in Washington, D.C. in my jeep and, yes, I do drive myself. And I don’t buckle up. And the reason why I don’t buckle up, and people can say whatever they want to, they can raise their eyebrows at me, again, is because of carjacking.
I don’t wanna be stuck in my vehicle when I need to exit in a hurry because I got a seat belt around me. And I wear my seat belt all the time, but in Washington, D.C., I do not because it is so prevalent of carjacking. And I don’t want the same thing happen to me what’s happened to a lot of people that work on The Hill.
HuffPost notes that carjacking incidents in D.C. are on the decline as well after a spike in 2023.
The actual statistics on violent crime obviously don’t matter to the MAGA movement or those looking to extend Trump’s federal occupation of D.C. Trump and the right-wing media has been on this racist bender for decades, attempting to paint urban areas of the U.S. as crime-ridden hell holes that need an authoritarian to whip them into shape.
DeSantis to Open Another Immigrant Detention Center With Another Intentionally Outrageous Name
After getting flooded with praise from the Trump administration over the opening of “Alligator Alcatraz,” Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has announced he is opening another immigrant detention facility, which he is going to call “Deportation Depot.” Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem applauded DeSantis’ outrage-inducing Alligator Alcatraz as a model for other states to follow.
DeSantis announced Thursday that the new facility is to be housed at the Baker Correctional Institution, a state prison about 43 miles (69 kilometers) west of downtown Jacksonville. It is expected to hold 1,300 immigration detention beds, though that capacity could be expanded to 2,000, state officials said.
Newsom Plan To Counter Texas Has Yet to Win Over the Public
We’ve mentioned before that while Democratic leaders in blue states like California and New York are working out plans to try to offset the impact of Trump’s power grab, guised as a Texas’ midcycle redistricting effort, those efforts might not pan out. That’s because many blue states have established independent redistricting commissions and adopted other measures to create nonpartisan maps for state legislatures to approve — aimed at preventing the exact type of egregious gerrymandering that Texas Republicans are trying to pull off. It appears that California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s plan to redraw some maps to net more Dem seats in the blue state might not be too popular among voters. Per a new Politico poll:
By nearly a two-to-one margin, voters prefer keeping an independent line-drawing panel to determine the state’s House seats, the latest POLITICO-Citrin Center-Possibility Lab survey found. Just 36 percent of respondents back returning congressional redistricting authority to state lawmakers.
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