President Trump does not take attacks on his record lying down.
A left-wing think tank sent one of its researchers on national television to claim Trump’s crime-fighting agenda accomplished nothing.
And Trump came back with something that had the donors behind that think tank suddenly wishing they had stayed anonymous.
The Think Tank That Took a Shot at Trump’s Law and Order Record
The Center for American Progress, known as CAP, sent associate director Chandler Hall onto C-SPAN to discuss a report published in July concluding that the president’s use of the National Guard and federal law enforcement in Washington, DC, and other cities had failed to demonstrate a meaningful impact on crime despite costing $1.7 billion.
Hall told viewers, “What we find is that across multiple cities, multiple data sets, and multiple time windows, we find no effect that violent crime actually did change post the National Guard deployments in any of the cities.”
CAP, founded in 2003 by John Podesta, no longer publicly identifies its donors, and during his C-SPAN appearance, Hall acknowledged that homicides and violent crime had fallen in Washington, but argued that the decline began before Trump’s federal intervention.
That is a convenient argument. Crime fell on Trump’s watch, the National Guard was deployed, and the left-wing research arm of the Democrat Party wants credit to go anywhere but to the President. The timing argument is exactly the kind of thing you produce when the data refuses to cooperate with your preferred conclusion.
Hall told C-SPAN, “I think it’s unfortunate that the president is continuing to still choose to boast that these deployments, these very costly interventions, are showing any result to try to convince voters that they should sign on for more of these kinds of interventions and federal overreach when, again, there’s no proof that they have any effect.”
That is the kind of language that gets produced in a building full of people who have never had to walk through a neighborhood where violent crime was destroying ordinary families. “Federal overreach.” That is what they call it when the President sends troops to make American cities safe again.
Trump Named Names and Threatened a Lawsuit
Trump read the report. Then he got on Truth Social and unloaded.
“Chandler Hall, representing, on Television, the foolish Center for American Lack of Progress, stated that adding the National Guard to Cities, including our now Great Again, Washington, D.C., had ‘NO impact on Crime,'” the president wrote.
Trump wrote that “Hall was met with furious dissent,” then called the report “just another Radical Left SCAM, as are the people who fund this gaggle of Lunatics,” and named the donors: “George Soros, Bill and Melinda Gates, Google, Apple, Visa, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, WellsFargo, Bank of America, Walmart, Toyota, T-Mobile, and NBC Universal.”
Trump also noted that foreign support for CAP “includes the Embassy of Japan, the Korea Foundation, Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office (Taiwan), and the Embassy of the United Arab Emirates.”
And then came the threat.
“These people, and others like them, are so bad for our Country. Their stated course is anything to hate or demean ‘TRUMP.’ This will be met with a lawsuit, which is being drawn now.”
Trump added that he was “also strongly considering adding some of the contributors to this Fake Organization” to the suit, and closed with: “Crime is way down since I took Office, and they know it.”
The president finished with a warning: “Liars, at this level, must be held accountable!”
What This Is Really About
CAP is not a neutral research organization. It was co-founded by George Soros, former Clinton White House Chief of Staff John Podesta, and Morton Halperin from Soros’s Open Society Institute. The idea that a Soros-seeded operation with Apple and Goldman Sachs writing checks is producing dispassionate, politically neutral crime research is not a serious proposition.
The donor list Trump published is striking not just for who is on it but for what it tells you about how the left-wing policy apparatus actually works. Major American corporations, foreign embassies, and the biggest names in global finance are all quietly funding an organization whose stated mission is to produce research that undercuts the Trump agenda. CAP stopped publicly listing its donors. Trump just put the list back in public view.
There is a pattern here that goes back years. The left builds think tanks, staffs them with former Democrat operatives, funds them with corporate and foreign money, and then sends researchers onto cable television to announce that whatever Trump is doing is not working. The research gets written up, the media covers it as neutral analysis, and the cycle repeats. CAP’s report on National Guard deployments fits that template almost perfectly.
But the crime numbers are what they are. Homicides and violent crime fell in Washington, DC. The administration deployed the National Guard. CAP’s own researcher acknowledged the drop on live television and then argued the timing was coincidental. That is the kind of conclusion you reach when you start with the answer and work backward.
Trump’s threat to sue CAP and potentially its donors will draw the usual hand-wringing about threats to free speech and nonprofit independence. The same people who spent years cheering on lawfare against Trump and his allies will suddenly discover the sanctity of political research organizations. That argument will be made with a straight face by people who have no memory of what the last several years looked like from the other side.
The bigger picture is that Trump is not just fighting back against one report. He is putting every major corporation writing checks to left-wing policy shops on notice that their funding decisions are not invisible. Apple, Walmart, Goldman Sachs, and the rest can fund whoever they want. But they do not get to pretend that writing six-figure checks to a Soros-founded Democrat operation is a neutral act of civic philanthropy. Trump just made that point in the loudest possible way.
Whether the lawsuit goes anywhere is a separate question. What matters right now is that the names are out, the donors are on record, and the organization that spent years positioning itself as the serious, credible voice of the progressive policy world just got introduced to a much wider audience than it expected.
Sources: Mediaite, The Hill, Raw Story, Washington Examiner, WSET, RSB Network, InfluenceWatch