President Trump is threatening to sue the Center for American Progress and potentially its donors over a report claiming National Guard deployments in Washington, D.C., had no impact on crime — putting a spotlight on the foreign and corporate money flowing into the think tanks that shape Washington policy from the shadows.
The clash cuts to the heart of who gets to define reality in the capital: voters and elected officials, or funded policy shops with ties to corporate giants and foreign governments. CAP presents itself as an independent research outfit, but its donor list reads like a who's who of global finance and foreign interests — exactly the kind of permanent Washington infrastructure the founders would have recognized as a threat to self-governance.
Trump's Truth Social post targeted CAP's Chandler Hall, who appeared on C-SPAN to argue that National Guard deployments in D.C. and other cities showed "no proof" of reducing crime and that violent crime was already declining before the administration acted. "I think it's unfortunate that the president is continuing to still choose to boast that these deployments, these very costly interventions, are showing any result to try to convince voters that they should sign on for more of these kinds of interventions and federal overreach when, again, there's no proof that they have any effect," Hall said, according to the Washington Examiner.
Trump fired back that the report is "just another Radical Left SCAM" and that a lawsuit "is being drawn now." He also named CAP's donors — including George Soros, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Google, Apple, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, Bank of America, Walmart, and NBC Universal — and said he is "strongly considering adding some of the contributors to this Fake Organization" to the suit. Foreign donors include the Embassy of Japan, the Korea Foundation, the Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office, and the Embassy of the United Arab Emirates.
The Examiner framed the dispute squarely around Trump's pushback and the crime stats, noting that the Make D.C. Safe and Beautiful Task Force has made more than 16,000 arrests since last August, per the U.S. Marshals Service. WTOP, by contrast, centered the voices of protesters: a group called Free D.C. rallied Monday calling the Guard deployment an "occupation" and demanding home rule. "Our unhoused neighbors are, in this occupation, are some of the most visible and vulnerable," said Erin Schmieder, who represents Ward 2 for Free D.C. WTOP buried the think-tank confrontation and the donor question entirely.
Whether the Guard deployment actually drove down crime or merely coincided with a national trend is a factual question worth answering. But the bigger story is the infrastructure behind the claim: a think tank funded by Wall Street banks, Big Tech, and foreign embassies telling working Americans that federal intervention in their crime-ridden neighborhoods accomplished nothing — while those same neighborhoods recorded 16,000 arrests in a year.
The open question is whether a lawsuit against a think tank over its research holds legal water. The First Amendment protects even funded spin. But Trump's move drags into daylight something the lobbying class prefers kept dark: the money pipeline from corporations and foreign governments to the policy shops that feed narratives to the press and the public alike.
