President Donald Trump is planning to deploy the National Guard to Washington, D.C., and it seems he already is eyeing other cities next. Now, one city’s Black mayor is calling him out big time over what he says are false claims about his city’s crime reputation.
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According to Trump, Baltimore and Oakland are “too far gone,” but the statistics say something very different. As we previously reported, the city of Baltimore recently celebrated another year of a historically low murder rate under Mayor Brandon Scott. So when news broke of Trump’s callout, the 41-year-old politician responded.
Scott revealed his theories about why the president is falsely portraying his city– and others– is plagued with violence. “I think it’s very notable that each and every one of the cities called out by the President has a Black mayor,” Scott told CNN. “And most of those cities are seeing historic lows in violent crime.”
Homicide rates haven’t been this low in Baltimore since the 1970s. “The City has seen a 23.6 percent drop in murders and a 23.4 percent drop in non-fatal shootings” in 2025 alone, the mayor’s office reported.
Similarly, Oakland just celebrated 25 days without a homicide from May into June, ABC 7 News reported. “I’m seeing reductions in homicides and reductions in shootings, and we’re just gonna keep our pedal to the metal until we don’t have all these homicides in Oakland,” Barbara Lafitte-Oluwole of Faith in Action East Bay told the news station.
Mayor Scott continued saying Black mayors are doing the work to accomplish what Trump hasn’t. “What he’s doing is dog whistling through this right-wing propaganda and, quite frankly, racist viewpoints that they have about these cities and trying to convince the American people that what they know is not true,” Scott said.
Instead of targeting his city and others run by Black leaders, the 41-year-old said Trump should take a page out of his book. “The president could learn a lot from us. Instead of throwing things at us,” he added.
In the span of two months, Trump sicced the National Guard in Los Angeles in response to anti-ICE protests, and now, he’s expressed plans to do the same in Washington, D.C. With Baltimore only an hour away from the capital, all eyes are on politcial leaders to see how they will respond.
LA Mayor Karen Bass outwardly condemned military deployment to her city. D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser called Trump’s recent actions “unsettling and unprecedented.” Mayor Scott, on the other hand, said Trump needs to take a look in the mirror.
“Maybe we are ‘too far gone,’” Scott continued. “Too far gone from the broken right wing policies of zero tolerance policing and all the things that did not make our city safer for all those many years.”
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