Trump Federalizes DC Police (Full Presser)

President Trump delivers remarks from the White House press briefing room on crime in DC, the revenue-for-exports deal between Nvidia, AMD, and the US Government, and expectations for his meeting with Russian leader Vladimir Putin this week.

President Donald Trump downplayed expectations for his upcoming meeting with Russian leader Vladimir Putin as he seeks to end the war in Ukraine, casting it as a “feel-out meeting” and saying he would confer with Ukraine and European leaders after the sitdown.

“I’m going in to speak to Vladimir Putin, and I’m going to be telling him, You got to end this war. You got to end it,” Trump said Monday at a White House press conference. The comments come ahead of an Aug. 15 summit with Putin in Alaska, the Russian leader’s first visit to US soil in nearly a decade.

“It’s not up to me to make a deal. I think a deal can be made for both,” Trump added.

He indicated he did not plan to invite Volodymyr Zelenskiy to the summit, saying the next step after the Alaska meeting would be for Putin and the Ukrainian president to meet directly. Trump said he would mediate that conversation, if necessary.

“I would say he could go but he’s gone to a lot of meetings,” Trump said of Zelenskiy. “You know, he’s been there for three-and-a-half years, nothing happened.”

Trump said he expected to confer with Zelenskiy and European allies by phone immediately after his meeting with Putin. The president said he expected to either outline to them the contours of a deal that included land swaps negotiated with Putin or that he did not believe a peace deal could be brokered.

“I think we’ll have constructive conversations then after that meeting, immediately, maybe as I’m flying out, maybe, as I’m leaving the room, I’ll be calling the European leaders,” Trump said.

This week’s meeting with Putin represents a high-stakes gamble for the US president, who campaigned on ending the war quickly but whose efforts have been frustrated in office. Putin is demanding that Ukraine cede Crimea, which his forces illegally annexed in 2014, as well as the entire eastern Donbas region, which would require Zelenskiy to order a withdrawal of troops from parts of the Luhansk and Donetsk regions still held by Kyiv.

President Donald Trump announced he would take federal control of Washington DC’s police department and deploy 800 National Guard troops there, escalating his push to exert power over the nation’s capital.

Trump on Monday also threatened to insert federal personnel into other cities, including New York and Chicago, if they did not crack down on what he called “out of control” crime.

During a White House news conference, Trump painted a nightmarish picture of a Washington that’s been “overtaken” by “bloodthirsty criminals” and “roving mobs of wild youth” that was at direct odds with statistics showing plummeting crime rates. Violent crimes in the capital reached a 30-year low in 2024, the Justice Department announced weeks before Trump took office in January.

“We’re not going to let it happen anymore,” Trump told reporters. “We’re going to have a safe, beautiful capital and it’s going to happen very quickly.”

Trump has sought to flex his authority over states, cities and towns run by Democrats since returning to power, arguing their policies have led to rampant crime and homelessness. Leaders there have dismissed those accusations as thinly veiled excuses for the president to seize power.

Earlier this year, Trump deployed the National Guard to quell protests over immigration raids in Los Angeles against the wishes of California Governor Gavin Newsom. A federal court is due to hear arguments on Monday in a lawsuit filed by Newsom alleging Trump broke the law by federalizing the state’s guard.

Trump faces fewer legal curbs on what he can do with Washington, which as a federal district under the US Constitution has limited self-government. He declared a public safety emergency under a provision of DC’s Home Rule Act that allows him to temporarily assume control of the city’s Metropolitan Police Department. It’s not clear how long the arrangement will last.

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