Trump has threatened to deploy troops to Baltimore after Governor Wes Moore’s ‘safety walk’ invite, sparking Democratic backlash.
Trump has threatened to deploy troops to Baltimore after Governor Wes Moore’s ‘safety walk’ invite, sparking Democratic backlash.
US President Donald Trump has threatened to send troops into Baltimore, escalating a bitter clash with Maryland Governor Wes Moore after the Democrat invited him to join a “safety walk” in the city.
“If Wes Moore needs help, like Gavin Newscum did in L.A., I will send in the ‘troops,’ which is being done in nearby DC, and quickly clean up the Crime,” Trump wrote on social media on Sunday.
The president’s remarks appeared to be a direct response to Moore’s invitation letter, which Trump described as “nasty” and “provocative”. He added: “As President, I would much prefer that he clean up this Crime disaster before I go there for a ‘walk.’”
Governor Moore, a frequent critic of Trump’s strategy, accused him of being detached from the realities of American cities. “His comments about fighting crime come off as so, so tone deaf and so ignorant,” Moore said. “It’s because they have not walked our streets. They have not been in our communities, and they are more than happy to keep making these repeated tropes about us.”
The dispute marks the latest flashpoint in Trump’s drive to deploy National Guard troops to Democratic-led cities as part of what he calls a crackdown on crime. He has already dispatched around 2,000 troops to Washington DC, where Guard members began carrying weapons on Sunday, according to the military. A Joint Task Force statement stressed they would only be used as a last resort.
The White House insists the deployment has restored order. “DC was a hellhole,” Trump declared in the Oval Office on Friday. “But now it’s safe.” He claimed the mission had brought “total safety” to the capital, where hundreds of arrests have been made since the operation began.
But crime figures tell a different story. According to Washington DC’s Metropolitan Police Department (MPDC), violent offences fell after peaking in 2023 and in 2024 dropped to their lowest level in three decades. Preliminary 2025 data show violent crime down 26% compared with the same period last year, with robbery down 28%.
Democrats have condemned the deployments as an abuse of presidential power. Illinois Governor JB Pritzker said Trump’s threat to send troops into Chicago was an “abuse of power”, while House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries argued the president lacked the legal authority to dispatch forces to cities like Baltimore and Chicago.
Jeffries said Trump was exploiting falling crime rates to manufacture a crisis, citing Baltimore’s “fewest homicides in over 50 years”.
Public opinion also appears to be turning against the president’s tactics. A Washington Post/Schar School poll released earlier this week found nearly 80% of DC residents opposed the deployment of federal officers and the National Guard, as well as the federal takeover of the Metropolitan Police Department.
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