Donald Trump fired off a blatant and off-topic lie during his rambling press conference about bombing Venezuela and abducting its president, Nicolás Maduro, and his wife.
“We have no crime in Washington, D.C.,” said a visibly exhausted Trump, 79, while listing the alleged atrocities of Maduro, 63, on Saturday.
Trump made the bizarre digression during a press conference that was otherwise about the U.S. military’s stunning Saturday morning smash-and-grab capture of the Venezuelan dictator, who now will face trial in New York upon his arrival in the United States.
“We haven’t had a killing. We had the terrorist attack a few weeks ago. Uhhh. A little bit of a different kind of a threat. But we haven’t had a killing in a long period of time. Six, seven months.”
The idea that nobody has been killed in Washington, D.C., in “six, seven months” can be easily proven false.
Since June 3, 2025, there have been 59 homicides in Washington D.C, according to the Metropolitan Police Department. Since the National Guard began occupying Washington, D.C. on August 11, there have been 30 homicides.
In just the last 30 days, multiple people have been shot and killed in Washington, D.C.
On December 23, 30-year-old Devonta Prince Williams was found by responding officers with gunshot wounds on Congress Street, succumbing to his injuries five days later. On December 5, 20-year-old Roy Lee Bennett Jr. was found shot to death on Morse Street.
On Nov. 27, National Guard member Sarah Beckstrom was killed in a Washington, D.C. Thanksgiving shooting. Trump appeared to acknowledge that the event occurred in his statement, but brushed it aside as a “different kind of threat” because it was classified as a terrorist attack.
Trump could have chosen to brag that the overall murder rate is significantly down in D.C. Between June 3, 2024, and January 3, 2025, D.C. had 116 murders. There were 57 fewer murders between the same dates in 2025 and 2026.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
It’s unclear why Trump chose to mention the murder rate in the nation’s Capitol. During his press conference, Trump was in the middle of describing the horrors of narcoterrorist cartels Tren de Aragua and Cartel of the Suns when he immediately shifted to congratulating the National Guard on the job they were doing in the nation’s capital.
“Maduro sent savage and murderous gangs, including the bloodthirsty prison gang Tren de Aragua, to terrorize American communities, and they did indeed,” said Trump. “They were in Colorado, they took over apartment complexes, they took the fingers off anyone who tried to call the police. They were brutal. Not so brutal now.”
His next sentence was, “I just have to congratulate our military, Pete [Hegseth], and our National Guard, because the job they’ve done, whether it’s in Washington D.C., where we have a totally safe city, where it was one of the most unsafe cities anywhere in the world, frankly.”
He then claimed there had been no crime and no killings in the city for over half a year.
Trump announced on New Year’s Eve that he was removing the National Guard from left-leaning cities Los Angeles, Chicago, and Portland, after the Supreme Court declared his deployment of the National Guard to Chicago unconstitutional.
Washington, D.C., where the National Guard has been on trash duty, was not included in his announcement.
