CNN Fact-Checker Torpedoes Trump Claims in Blockbuster Presser: ‘Just Plain Wrong’
CNN correspondent Daniel Dale torpedoed a raft of claims President Donald Trump made about crime at a blockbuster press conference, calling Trump “just plain wrong.”
Trump held a press conference Monday to announce the deployment of National Guard troops in Washington, DC — a move that critics have described as a stunt to distract from the uproar over deceased sex criminal Jeffrey Epstein. The president spoke and took questions for more than an hour, insisting that crime has gone up in DC, even as data shows it has gone down.
On Monday’s edition of CNN’s Inside Politics, anchor Dana Bash called on Dale to fact-check the president minutes after the presser concluded:
BASH: And we are going to now do a deep dive into the fact check claiming that Washington, D.C. is getting worse. And I want to bring in the one and only, Daniel Dale. Daniel?
DANIEL DALE, CNN SENIOR REPORTER: There was a lot of deception from the president there. So, here’s a reality check. There is no doubt that D.C. has for decades been a high crime city. It is among the U.S. cities with the highest homicide rates, though there are a bunch of other big cities that are worse, and D.C. did indeed have a big crime spike in 2023, which is the year the president kept citing
But contrary to what the president said today, even in 2023 D.C. did not have an all-time high in murder. It was way worse during the crack crisis of the 80s and early 90s. And more pressingly, Dana, the president was just flat wrong when he said, it’s getting worse now and not getting better. Crime in D.C., including murder, has fallen sharply since that 2023 spike. It fell in 2024, it’s fallen further in 2025.
So, let’s look at some of this data. In 2023, D.C. had its most murders in more than two decades, 274 of course, that’s terrible. But it then plunged to 187 murders last year, and it’s been falling again so far this year, through July, according to figures compiled by crime data expert Jeff Asher, D.C. had 34 percent fewer murders than it did through the same period in that year 2023. Now, how about violent crime more broadly? Well, that’s also down sharply in the last year and a half. In fact, per Jeff Asher, D.C. is officially reported, violent crime rate in 2024 was the second lowest since 1966, so lower than every year of Trump’s first administration. It’s about a third of what it was in those bad old days the early 1990s.
And you heard from the president and his team about carjackings, well, indeed a problem in D.C., but what are the numbers say, again, a big spike in 2023 down since. Asher noted, the 16 carjackings reported in July were the fewest reported in any month in more than five years in D.C., down more than 87 percent from the same month in 2023.
So, look, we know crime is an issue in D.C. We’ve lived there. We know that every violent crime is a shame, a tragedy, of course, not excusing any of them. But this isn’t an ongoing crime spike, like President Trump suggested, and he said it’s rising even in the text of the executive order. I went through it. The first section says crime is rising in the Capitol. That is just not true.
BASH: Daniel, thank you so much. Really appreciate you bringing all of that to us, really important fact checks
Watch above via CNN’s Inside Politics.
