In 1989, before the new millennium brought economic rebirth to the nation’s capital, large swaths of Washington actually resembled the hellish crimescape that President Donald Trump contends the city has become today.
The crack epidemic was raging. Gangs of drug dealers engaged in murderous competition. The annual homicide toll nearly surpassed 500, nearly five times last year's total, at a time when the city had about 100,000 fewer residents. The poverty-riven city was mired in fiscal and social chaos — and on the cusp of bankruptcy. The rampant "bloodshed, bedlam and squalor" Trump conjured to describe the city this week was a stark reality.
Back then, in a now largely forgotten intervention in the annals of on-again, off-again federal control of the nation's capital, it wasn't the White House that led the effort, as Trump did Monday. It was Congress. And the results were disastrous. Just a few years later, Congress intervened again with much better results — establishing a financial control board that helped turn around the city's dire finances.
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