NBC’s Seth Meyers hyped on Monday’s Late Night some highly suspect fact-checking from CNN during President Trump’s press conference when he announced he is federalizing Washington, DC’s law enforcement because, for Meyers, the binary choice is between Trump and CNN’s “stat nerds.”
Meyers teed up a clip of Trump, “Trump is ordering what he’s calling a federal takeover of Washington, D.C., based on numbers that once again make no sense. And you don't have to take it from me. CNN fact-checked him live as he was talking.”
In the clip, Trump declared, “The murder rate in Washington today is higher than that of Bogota, Colombia, Mexico City, some of the places that you hear about as being the worst places on Earth, much higher. This is much higher. The number of car thefts has doubled over the past five years. And the number of carjackings has more than tripled.”
As Trump was talking, CNN put up a list of stats from the DC Metropolitan Police. They included a 12 percent decrease in homicides, 49 percent in sex abuse, 20 percent in assault with a dangerous weapon, and 28 percent in robbery. Additionally, there was reportedly a 35 percent decrease in violent crime from 2023 to 2024 and an additional 26 percent decrease from 2024 to 2025.
Meyers used the numbers to claim, “We've had presidents who have lied before, but we've never had a president who was this easy to fact-check. But who are you going to believe? The stat nerds at CNN, or the guy who says we can lower drug prices by 1,500 percent.”
The quip about Trump’s claims of mathematically impossible drug price reductions aside, Meyers’s question omits the fact that the police union has accused the department of cooking the books. As a result, a department commander is on administrative leave pending an investigation. Meyers didn’t find this noteworthy.
More interestingly, in the clip that Meyers actually played, Trump’s statement was true. Even the Associated Press admitted that, but they couldn’t just give Trump a win, “It’s true, but Trump isn’t telling the whole story. Washington does have a higher homicide rate than many other global cities, including some that have historically been considered unsafe by many Americans. But Trump is leaving out important context: the U.S. in general sees higher violent crime rates than many other countries.”
Who cares? Washington is the nation’s capital. If the voters of other major U.S. cities keep electing bad local governments, that is their problem, but the capital city of the world’s preeminent superpower should not be an international joke.
Here is a transcript for the August 11-taped show:
NBC Late Night with Seth Meyers
8/12/2025
12:45 PM ET
SETH MEYERS: Now, Trump is ordering what he’s calling a federal takeover of Washington, D.C. based on numbers that once again make no sense. And you don't have to take it from me. CNN fact-checked him live as he was talking.
DONALD TRUMP: The murder rate in Washington today is higher than that of Bogota, Colombia, Mexico City, some of the places that you hear about as being the worst places on Earth, much higher. This is much higher. The number of car thefts has doubled over the past five years. And the number of carjackings has more than tripled.
MEYERS: We've had presidents who have lied before, but we've never had a president who was this easy to fact-check. But who are you going to believe? The stat nerds at CNN, or the guy who says we can lower drug prices by 1,500 percent.
