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CNN anchor Audie Cornish suggested on Tuesday that President Donald Trump’s Washington, D.C., crime crackdown makes him look like a North Korean dictator.
During her “CNN This Morning” report on how Trump’s critics think deploying U.S. National Guard troops in the nation’s capital to handle crime makes him like a dictator, Cornish joked that the murder rate in North Korea’s dictatorship is low, too.
“There’s probably no murders in North Korea, too. But I don’t want to be presumptuous,” she said after noting a New York Post cover stating that there have been zero murders in D.C. following Trump’s crackdown that started earlier this month.
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Starting Aug. 14, the nation’s capital saw 12 straight days without a homicide after Trump launched the operation. That streak ended early Tuesday morning, when a man died from a gunshot wound.
Cornish began the segment by noting the latest move in Trump’s D.C. crackdown.
“It’s not enough to have more than 2,000 National Guard troops in D.C. The president just signed an executive order creating specialized units of Guard troops charged with quelling civil disturbances. The order comes as he threatens to send troops into Chicago, and Democratic leaders across the country accuse him of making authoritarian moves.”
Trump seized federal control of D.C.’s Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) on Aug. 11 when he launched the “Making D.C. Safe and Beautiful” task force. He exercised the emergency powers in the Home Rule Act, which allows the president to federalize the MPD for up to 30 days, unless Congress extends the duration.
Additionally, the president has ordered more than 2,000 National Guard troops to be deployed in the city. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth ordered the majority of those troops to carry firearms this past Sunday.
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As Cornish noted, Trump has also threatened to deploy troops to other major U.S. cities like Chicago to clean up crime.
The anchor played a video of Trump in the Oval Office commenting on those who have accused him of playing dictator with these deployments.
“And they say, ‘We don’t need them. Freedom, freedom. He’s a dictator. He’s a dictator.’ A lot of people are saying, ‘Maybe we’d like a dictator.’ I don’t like a dictator. I’m not a dictator. I’m a man with great common sense, and I’m a smart person,” Trump said, adding, “And when I see what’s happening to our cities, and then you send in troops, instead of being praised, they’re saying, ‘You’re trying to take over the republic.’ These people are sick.”
Following the clip, Cornish quipped, “No word yet on which Americans actually want a dictator, but here’s the governor of Illinois in response.”
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She then played a clip of Gov. J.B. Pritzker, D-Ill., slamming Trump in a Monday press conference for proposing a federal crime crackdown in Chicago. During the clip, the governor called Trump a “wannabe dictator” looking to use troops to “intimidate his political rivals.”
Suggesting that the people who support Trump’s moves have a warped view of what’s going on in urban areas, Cornish elsewhere said that “the people who perceive cities as fundamentally crime-ridden at all times in all decades think this is a good thing.”
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