Democrats in blue strongholds such as Chicago and Baltimore have bucked President Donald Trump's plans to send in National Guard troops to help deter crime. (Evan Vucci/The Associated Press)
"The attorney general for (Washington, D.C.) says that having more police is unneeded, and it's unnecessary for that. And so they don't see a connection between making it riskier for criminals to go and commit crime and the amount of crime that's occurring," he continued, explaining the similarities between the 2020 defund movement and 2025's opposition to Trump's anti-crime initiative.
Trump's 2024 presidential campaign heavily focused on cleaning up crime-riddled cities after the violent wave of 2020 that left an excess of Americans dead as anti-police and Black Lives Matter protests and riots broke out in cities nationwide.
After roughly seven months back in the Oval Office, those campaign promises are becoming reality, with Democrat lawmakers and liberal activists decrying the crime crackdowns with protests and legal challenges along the way. Fox News Digital took a look back at the 2020 defund narrative and its consequences and how the era stacks up compared to the recent rhetoric against Trump's crime crackdown.
Trump federalized Washington, D.C.'s police department in August, which included the National Guard flooding the capital's streets to patrol the area and federal law enforcement agents from departments, such as the Drug Enforcement Administration, FBI and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives assisting in arrests.
Trump is in the midst of determining when to send the National Guard to help patrol chronically crime-addled Chicago, he said Tuesday, while other cities such as Baltimore are anticipated to see similar crackdowns.
Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson argues locking criminals up is "racist" and "immoral." (Charles Rex Arbogast/The Associted Press)
"We cannot incarcerate our way out of violence; we’ve already tried that, and we’ve ended up with the largest prison population in the world without solving the problems of crime and violence," Johnson said during an August press conference, the New York Post reported.
"The addiction on jails and incarceration in this country, we’ve moved past that," he said. "It is racist, it is immoral, it is unholy, and it is not the way to drive violence down."
The sentiment echoes the rhetoric of 2020, when activists and supporters of the defund the police movement championed cutting police budgets and redirecting the funds to community services such as housing, education, mental health services and community-based responders who would manage certain emergency calls such as a mental health crisis instead of police officers. Proponents of the movement argued such reallocation of police funds would wipe out crime and foster peace, as opposed to arresting and prosecuting criminals.
BLUE CITIES IN TRUMP’S CROSSHAIRS AFTER DC POLICE TAKEOVER
The year 2020 was a whirlwind underscored by a massive federal election, the COVID-19 pandemic that upended society with unprecedented government-mandated lockdowns that kept American workers and school children at home and a bloody crime wave that rocked the nation from coast to coast as activists heralded the "defund" narrative.
People walk in Washington, D.C., after "defund the police" was painted on the street near the White House June 8, 2020. (Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images)
Cities such as New York and Seattle slashed police budgets in response to the calls, with local leaders soon after reversing course as violent crimes such as carjackings and murders soared.
Amid the defund the police rhetoric and protests, police morale cratered as lawmakers and locals backed away from supporting them. Cops retired en masse, while others moved from cities witnessing repeat protests to departments in states offering continued support for the police.
Departments nationwide were left with persistent understaffing issues, including in large departments such as Philadelphia and Chicago.
In 2025, in response to Trump's anti-crime initiative in cities such as D.C., protests have formed to denounce the mission, in addition to some Democratic lawmakers vocally rejecting National Guard members from patrolling the streets.
Protesters have marched from DuPont Circle to the White House in opposition to the federal takeover of the Metropolitan Police Department and held "Free DC" gatherings aimed at removing the National Guard from the capital and ending the current federal control of the police department.
D.C. Attorney General Brian Schwalb additionally filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration for federalizing D.C. under Section 740 of the D.C. Home Rule Act and against Attorney General Pam Bondi's order to install the DEA head as the emergency commissioner of the Metropolitan Police Force. Schwalb called the moves "brazenly unlawful" that could "wreak operational havoc" on the Metropolitan Police Department.
Washington, D.C., leaders initially disapproved of Trump federalizing the local police department Aug. 11, with Democratic Mayor Muriel Bowser calling the move "unprecedented," "an intrusion on our autonomy" and characterizing it as an "authoritarian push" before changing her tune and earning the praise of the president.
The city saw a 13-day period free of homicides after Trump's crackdown, with Bowser rattling off how other crimes have dropped since Aug. 11 during a press conference Tuesday supporting the president's mission to clean up the city.
"For carjackings, the difference between this period, this 20-day period of this federal surge and last year represents an 87% reduction in carjackings in Washington, D.C.," she said. "We know that when carjackings go down, when use of gun goes down. When homicide or robbery go down, neighborhoods feel safer and are safer. So, this surge has been important to us for that reason.
National Guard members stood among protesters at Union Station in Washington Aug. 31, 2025. (Fox News Digital/Emma Woodhead)
"It's a mystery to me how Democrats can take that side of that issue, given that even Mayor Bowser now is saying what a success it's been," Lott said. "But you do have some longer-lasting effects that will be there, and one of them is the fact that you've already arrested and taken off the street a lot of these criminals. You've also arrested and caught, you know, a lot of illegal aliens that were there committing crimes.
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"I assume some of the illegals have moved out of the area, because it's no longer effectively, or at least for a period of time, been a sanctuary area," he said. "Now, whether some of them move back again when these, if these policies are allowed to change back, I don't know. But at least you're going to have some longer run impact from from this, even if, even if it were to end" Sept. 11.
Fox News Digital's Breanne Deppisch and Diana Stancy contributed to this report.
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/new-anti-trump-crime-cleanup-protests-echo-defund-police-movement-trhat-rocked-2020