Trump Threatens to Sue Think Tank Over Report Finding No Crime Drop From $1.7 Billion Guard Deployments

President Trump is threatening to sue a liberal think tank after one of its analysts said his National Guard deployments to American cities had no measurable effect on violent crime.

The Center for American Progress published an analysis in July estimating that Trump's deployments to cities including Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles cost taxpayers more than $1.7 billion. CAP's report argues that violent crime and murder rates in those cities were already falling before troops arrived, and that the administration is taking credit for a trend it didn't create.

Chandler Hall, CAP's associate director for public safety, laid out the group's methodology during an appearance on C-SPAN's Washington Journal on Monday. "We looked at what were the effects of the National Guard deployments, not just in D.C., but in all cities in which the National Guard were deployed," Hall said. "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 says it checked several cities, several data sources, and several time windows, and found the same result every time: no measurable change in violent crime attributable to the deployments.

Trump did not respond with data. He responded with a 190-word Truth Social post that mixed personal insults with a list of CAP's funders. "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.' How crazy is that," Trump wrote, according to the post reviewed by The Daily Beast.

Trump went on to name CAP's donors and describe the report as "another Radical Left SCAM," listing George Soros, Bill and Melinda Gates, Google, Apple, Visa, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Walmart, Toyota, T-Mobile, and NBC Universal, along with the Embassy of Japan, the Korea Foundation, the Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office, and the Embassy of the United Arab Emirates. He said a lawsuit against CAP was "apparently being drawn up now" and that he was "strongly considering adding some of the contributors" as defendants. "Crime is way down since I took Office, and they know it. Liars, at this level, must be held accountable!" he wrote.

Trump's claim that crime is "way down" nationally since he took office is a separate assertion from CAP's specific claim about the deployments themselves. Crime can fall nationwide for reasons that have nothing to do with troops in three or four cities. CAP isn't disputing that crime fell. It's disputing that the National Guard caused it to fall faster than it was already falling.

That's a legitimate methodological question. A government audit or independent researcher could settle it with pre- and post-deployment crime data, which CAP says it already examined across "multiple data sets."

The administration hasn't published its own competing before-and-after analysis showing the deployments changed crime trajectories. Absent that, Trump's rebuttal so far consists of asserting the report is a "SCAM" and naming its funders, not disputing the numbers.

Naming a think tank's donors isn't itself evidence the data is wrong. Corporations and foundations fund policy shops across the ideological spectrum, including plenty that produce work friendly to Trump's own agenda. Pointing out that Goldman Sachs or Walmart gave money to CAP doesn't tell you whether CAP's crime-trend calculation is accurate.

At the same time, CAP is not a neutral arbiter either. It's an explicitly progressive advocacy organization founded by John Podesta, a longtime Democratic operative, and it has a clear institutional interest in undercutting Trump's signature domestic security initiative. That doesn't make its data wrong, but it means CAP's numbers deserve the same scrutiny anyone would apply to a report from a conservative group attacking a Democratic policy.

No independent government watchdog, such as the Government Accountability Office or an inspector general, has published its own audit of the $1.7 billion in deployment costs or crime outcomes as of this writing. Congress has not announced hearings specifically on CAP's findings.

Trump's threatened lawsuit against CAP has not been filed in any court as of Monday's Truth Social post, and no specific legal claim, such as defamation, has been publicly detailed. Whether the administration follows through, and whether it releases its own crime data to counter CAP's analysis, remains to be seen.