OPINION:
President Trump’s superpower is his ability to effortlessly expose the lies and hypocrisy of his political opponents. Take D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser. A decade ago, she introduced her “vision zero” plan to eliminate traffic deaths. “Everyone deserves safer streets,” she said. “We talk not of reducing traffic fatalities but getting to zero.”
With 26 deadly crashes in 2014, she proclaimed the importance of implementing extreme measures to lower the toll, as if nothing could be more important. She banned right turns on red. She launched robotic cameras to ticket drivers who slowly roll past a stop sign at 2 miles per hour.
She slashed speed limits on major roads to 25 mph and multiplied the number of automated highwaymen to boost violations to unprecedented levels. It was worth it, she insisted, to save lives. Except no lives were saved.
Fifty-two people died on D.C. roads last year, and there were 52 traffic fatalities the year before that, which means the carnage has doubled since vision zero’s implementation. The only thing climbing faster than the bodies stacked in the morgue is the municipal profit margin. According to city data, the District issued $423,736,120 worth of moving violations in 2024.
All that to deal with 26, now 52, roadway deaths. The far more frightening statistic is the number of Washingtonians stabbed, shot or bludgeoned annually. There were 274 homicides in 2023, and a still overwhelming 187 last year, yet Democrats offered no “vision zero” response to that crisis.
Taking matters into his own hands, Mr. Trump exercised emergency authority to commandeer management of the nation’s capital earlier this month. That has led to one of the longest homicide-free streaks this year. That’s the real vision zero, a vision that’s not just empty marketing fluff.
At Mr. Trump’s direction, federal forces have arrested 1,100 troublemakers, and that makes a difference. When muggers, carjackers and illegal aliens are locked up, they are no longer able to cause the mayhem that residents had grown to expect in the federal city.
“President Trump has literally set the people of Washington, D.C., free. They’re so happy now that they can just go out and live their lives, go to their favorite restaurant, go to their favorite bar, go to the favorite pool hall, go to the favorite park … because they know the police are there,” White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller said on Fox News.
Those lives don’t matter to Democrats, whose reflexive opposition to Mr. Trump’s initiatives has put them firmly in league with the cutpurses and arsonists, the same people leftists had been releasing onto the street with no-cash bail. Mr. Trump ended that Monday with an executive order pulling federal support for cashless bail, a policy that the 47th president points to as the primary source of lawlessness.
“That was when the big crime in this country started,” Mr. Trump explained. “Somebody killed somebody and they go: ‘Don’t worry about it. No cash. Come back in a couple of months. We’ll give you a trial.’ You never see them again. They kill people, and they get out.”
The results of the crime crackdown speak for themselves. It’s time for the D.C. Council to end the predatory “vision zero” scam and replace it permanently with the zero-tolerance attitude toward crime that the White House has shown is the only meaningful way to save the lives of residents.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.