The New York Times is growing desperate. In its efforts to discredit Donald Trump’s crime initiatives, it has deliberately drawn attention to black-on-black crime.

Trump has been touting the crime drop in Washington D.C. since the deployment of the National Guard there in late August 2025. During the annual Thanksgiving turkey pardoning ceremony, Trump said: “It’s really been a beautiful thing to see ... Washington D.C. is now a totally safe city.” Unable to confine himself to hyperbole, Trump went a step further into demonstrable falsehood: “We haven’t had a murder in six months.” In fact, D.C. has seen about seven homicides a month since the National Guard were called up. That's an impressive 31 percent drop from the same period in 2024, but not zero.

The New York Times had its story: Trump did not care about black homicide victims. “The people whose deaths get downplayed or wiped away in his telling are typically people of color,” reported the Times in a front-page story on December 30, 2025. “Historically, most murder victims in Washington have been Black.”

The paper assembled portraits of some of those recent murder victims: two 17-year-old males, a 22-year-old female, and a single mother killed in a domestic dispute. To back up the “Trump racism” narrative, the newspaper quoted D.C. residents complaining that the National Guard deployment is focused on the National Mall and other areas downtown, not on black neighborhoods.

As its final piece of evidence, the paper noted that Trump had reacted with “ferocity” to the assassination of what the Times called a “white” National Guard member the day before Thanksgiving. In response to that Islamist ambush, Trump had ordered up more National Guard troops to the city.

The New York Times’s spin on Trump’s allegedly racist crime policies and rhetoric has a few problems — among them hypocrisy, double standards, and inconsistency. If Trump has failed to publicize the black homicide victims mentioned in the Times’s story, he was only following the paper’s lead. None of those killings got any coverage in the paper at the time.

The Times has ignored even more egregious murders than the garden-variety gang violence that now so moves the paper to sorrow. Three-year-old Honesty Cheadle was caught in a drive-by shooting after a Fourth of July cookout this year. Another three-year-old, Ty’ah Settles, suffered a similar fate in May 2024. Neither loss earned notice from the Times.

When Trump announced the National Guard deployment, the paper denounced that initiative as a racist intrusion upon D.C. home rule. It said nothing about the crime that was mowing down black lives. The paper may now bemoan the stationing of National Guard soldiers in downtown areas instead of in black neighborhoods, but in August, it wanted no Guard, period.

Times columnist Jamelle Bouie expressed the paper’s position: There was “no public safety emergency in Washington D.C.. Crime is ... at a 30-year low,” Bouie said on August 16. Trump was merely demonizing the “residents of D.C. as essentially incapable of self-government.”

What does that acceptable crime picture look like? In 2024, D.C. saw 187 homicides, or more than 15 a month. At least 177 of the victims, or 94 percent, were black. Yes, crime had dropped in 2024 compared with 2023, as George Floyd-driven de-policing abated. In 2023, there were 251 black homicide victims. But nearly 15 black lives lost per month in 2024, in a city of just over 700,000 residents, might conceivably be considered a “public safety emergency” by such racial justice warriors as Times columnists and reporters, whether or not crime was trending downward. Certainly, such homicide numbers would be considered an emergency in First World cities outside of the United States — the D.C. homicide rate is about 27 times that of London’s and Berlin’s, for example, and 60 times that of Switzerland’s.

The people least concerned with black lives would seem to be the Black Lives Matter activists and their media mouthpieces. If Black Lives Matter activists have shown up to protest a black toddler being gunned down in a drive-by shooting, the record does not reflect it.

The reason for this silence is that drawing attention to black crime victims means drawing attention to black criminals, who are almost invariably the victims’ assailants. In Washington D.C., from 2019 to the end of 2020, blacks made up nearly 97 percent of homicide suspects, according to the National Institute for Criminal Justice Reform. Whites accounted for 0.8 percent of homicide suspects. The black homicide commission rate was roughly 99 times higher than the white homicide commission rate, and remains so.

When Trump decries urban crime, therefore, he is by definition decrying the victimization of blacks. “I’m announcing a historic action to rescue our nation’s capital from crime, bloodshed, bedlam and squalor, and worse,” he said on August 11. “This is liberation day in DC, and we’re going to take our capital back. ... We’re not going to let it happen anymore. We’re not going to lose our cities over this.”

There were four white homicide victims in D.C. in 2024, or 2 percent of the black homicide victims. Trump’s D.C. crime initiative redounded disproportionately to the benefit of blacks.

But the Times saw only racism in Trump’s National Guard actions. The paper quoted the widow of the late D.C. mayor Marion Barry. The Trump era resembled the Emmett Till era with its state-sanctioned “racism, oppression, and violence,” Cora Master Barry said. “Black folks” were and are “disappearing all over the place.”

The reason “black folks” are currently disappearing is that other “black folks” are killing them.

When Trump first called up the National Guard, The New York Times complained that the soldiers were making “black folks” feel scared and under siege. At the same time, it complained even then that the deployment favored white areas over black areas. Now the Times complains only that the Guard is ignoring black neighborhoods. “He definitely don’t value Black people,” the Times quoted a local official as saying.

About 30 percent of the arrests made by federal agents under Trump’s increased policing initiative come from just one of the city’s eight wards. Ward 8 is 10 percent of the city’s population but 81 percent black. It has the highest number of violent crimes in the city. The federal officers are not ignoring black victims; they are picking up their assailants.

As predictably as clockwork, the Times has lamented that the “overwhelming majority” of arrestees in the first two weeks of the D.C. crime blitz are black, a “markedly disproportionate share for a city where Black people make up a little more than 40 percent of the population.” That complaint not only contradicted the claim that federal agents were slighting black neighborhoods but also ignored the truth that blacks commit a “markedly disproportionate” amount of crime in Washington D.C.. Police officers are damned if they concentrate their resources on areas with the highest incidence of crime and if they allegedly stay out of high-crime areas. In both cases, they are racist.

Contrary to the Times’s characterization, Trump’s outraged reaction to the November 2025 killing of a National Guard soldier and the wounding of another had nothing to do with the victims’ race. Assassinations of law enforcement officials tear at civilized order. Such attacks aim at the country itself. They necessarily rise to a level of significance not possessed by the daily gang killings that the media do their best to conceal, however heartbreaking such quotidian violence is to the victims’ survivors.

The power of the taboo in elite circles against noticing black-on-black crime cannot be overstated. One would never know from mainstream media coverage that dozens of blacks are murdered every day across the United States, more than all white and Hispanic homicide victims combined, though blacks are only 13 percent of the U.S. population. The Chicago Tribune is the exception in regularly reporting on local Chicago gang crime, but otherwise, media attention focuses disproportionately on white victims, contrary to the press’s self-image as champion of the marginalized. The media activate wall-to-wall reporting on a lost black life only in the rare instance that a black person is killed by a police officer. The rest of the time, what Trump has rightly called urban “carnage” is out of sight, out of mind.

Only the Times’s revulsion for Trump could have led it to breach the contemporary code of racial etiquette. The breach will be temporary. Trump’s focus on crime and disorder will not be. His refusal to treat urban violence and squalor as inevitable features of life in American cities is among the most salutary aspects of his presidency, however undisciplined his rhetoric.

Heather Mac Donald is the Thomas W. Smith Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a contributing editor of City Journal, and the author of When Race Trumps Merit and other books. This article originally appeared in City Journal on Thursday, January 8, 2026.