When President Donald Trump announced the federal takeover of the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department for 30 days to fight violent crime, the top Democrat in the U.S. House, Rep. Hakeem Jeffries of New York, told him to “get lost.”
U.S. Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) denounced Trump’s “raw authoritarian power grab in D.C. “He’s playing dictator in our nation’s capital as a dress rehearsal as he pushes democracy to the brink.”
And possible 2028 presidential candidate JB Pritzker, who recently spoke at a New Hampshire Democratic Party fundraiser, compared the president’s actions to the rise of Nazi Germany.
“You’ve seen that he doesn’t follow the law,” Pritzker said. “I have talked about the fact that the Nazis in Germany in the ’30s tore down a constitutional republic in just 53 days. It does not take much, frankly, and we have a president who seems hellbent on doing just that.”
But as the left-leaning news outlet InDepthNH first reported — and NHJournal can confirm — New Hampshire’s congressional delegation is a near-unanimous “no comment” on Trump’s actions to curb crime in the nation’s capital.
U.S. Rep. Chris Pappas, who lives at least half the year in Washington, D.C., declined to comment to any of the news organizations that contacted him. And he has not posted a statement on his congressional website or social media.
The same from U.S. Sens. Jeanne Shaheen (who Pappas hopes to replace when she retires next year) and Maggie Hassan.
The one exception: U.S. Rep. Maggie Goodlander.
“In America, domestic military deployments are extremely rare because it is the job of domestic law enforcement officers — not our Armed Forces — to enforce our laws,” Goodlander said in a statement to InDepth. “There are very good reasons for that in a democracy that depends on the public’s trust. President Trump’s deployment of National Guard troops over the objections of local leaders is a deeply concerning power grab in our nation’s capital.”
Interestingly, it’s an almost verbatim repeat of her statement regarding the National Guard being deployed in June to address riots in response to immigration enforcement.
Why the silence from Pappas and his colleagues? Many political professionals, including some Democrats, speculate that many of Trump’s opponents who live or work in the District actually support what he’s doing. They scoff at the argument, pushed by some media outlets, that crime in the nation’s capital isn’t a problem.
“D.C.’s homicide rate was five times New York’s last year, and we’re optimistic that this year, it will fall to merely 3 times higher,” wrote The Washington Post’s Megan McArdle. “As a matter of political strategy and moral correctness, it is better to acknowledge that crime is a huge problem and suggest better ways to fix it than calling out the National Guard, federalizing the MPD, and trying juveniles as adults.”
ABC News anchor Kyra Phillips interrupted her reporting on Trump’s actions to share her personal stories of being a crime victim in D.C.
“I can tell you firsthand here in downtown D.C., where we work, right here around our bureau, just in the past six months, you know, there were two people shot, one person died, literally two blocks down here from the bureau,” Phillips said. “It was within the last two years that I actually was jumped walking just two blocks down from here,” she revealed.
“And then, just this morning, one of my coworkers said her car was stolen, a block away from the bureau,” Phillips added.
While Pappas has been silent on the crime issue, he did vote in favor of Washington, D.C. becoming a state.
