President Donald Trump floated the possibility of a federal crime crackdown in New Orleans, pointing to support from the state’s Republican governor.
“We’re making a determination now: do we go to Chicago, or do we go to a place like New Orleans, where we have a great governor, Jeff Landry, who wants us to come in and straighten out a very nice section of this country that’s become quite, you know, quite tough, quite bad,” Trump said during an Oval Office meeting with the president of Poland.
He continued, “So we’re going to be going to maybe Louisiana, and you have New Orleans, which has a crime problem. We’ll straighten that out in about two weeks.”
Trump has repeatedly floated Baltimore and Chicago as the next cities his administration could target following his deployment of the National Guard to Washington, DC, and a federal takeover of the DC police department.
But Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker and Maryland Gov. Wes Moore, both Democrats, have strongly pushed back against such intervention. DC is also significantly different from other cities because the federal government has more authority.
Trump later again pointed to Baltimore as a city the federal government could “straighten out.”
“Gov. Moore wanted me to go and walk through Baltimore with him. And I said, you know, ‘I think I’m a brave guy, but there’s no reason to be stupid.’ … We’d go into Baltimore, straighten that out very quickly, too,” he said.