WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump is hailing his crackdown on crime in Washington, D.C., as driving a boom in the restaurant scene in the nation’s capital, even as data shows a dip in online reservations last week in the wake of his takeover of the city’s police.
“Did you see what's happening with the restaurants?” Trump said during an appearance on Fox News on Tuesday. “They're bursting.”
It comes after the president on Monday derided press coverage of his move to exert federal control over Washington’s police force and deploy National Guard troops and federal officers to the city, saying his only goal is “security for our people.”
“We went from the most unsafe place, anywhere to a place that now people, friends are calling me up, Democrats are calling me up, and they're saying: 'Sir, I want to thank you. My wife and I went out to dinner last night for the first time in four years, and Washington, D.C. is safe, and you did that in four days," Trump said while taking reporter questions during an Oval Office meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
Trump went on to specifically tout the impact on restaurants in the nation’s capital, sharing a story of a friend telling him his son, who played in a golf tournament in Maryland over the weekend, was coming into the city to go to dinner.
“But people that haven't gone out to dinner in Washington, D.C., in two years are going out to dinner, and the restaurants the last two days were busier than they've been in a long time,” Trump said.
Real-time data from OpenTable, which tracks year-over-year changes in seated diners from online reservations for restaurants on its platform, shows dining establishments in Washington saw a decline in customers every day last week compared to the same week a year ago in the wake of Trump’s takeover announcement last Monday. WUSA9 was first to report on the data.
Online reservations were down 16% on the day of his announcement compared to the same day in 2024. Reservations dropped 27% last Tuesday, 31% on Wednesday, 29% on Thursday and 25% on Friday compared to the same days a year prior. Saturday and Sunday saw dips of 20% and 22% from 2024, respectively.
Overall, online OpenTable reservations are down 7% in August this year in Washington compared to the same month in 2025, the data shows.
Trump's boast comes as Attorney General Pam Bondi on Tuesday said that 52 people were arrested in the nation’s capital overnight as part of the new operation, including a member of the gang MS-13. She added the total number of arrests in Washington since Trump’s takeover now amounts to 465, with 68 firearms seized.
“At the direction of @POTUS, our nation’s capital is a SAFER place—and we are just getting started,” Bondi wrote in her post on X.
Trump moved to send extra officers from federal agencies into Washington streets in a bid to crack down on crime earlier this month. The formal announcement that he was deploying National Guard troops and invoking a section of the 1973 District of Columbia Home Rule Act — which gave residents of the nation’s capital a degree of self-governance, including the ability to elect a mayor — to exert federal control over the city’s police force came on Monday last week.
Trump made the move despite statistics from local police showing that violent crime in Washington is down 26% from the same time a year ago and recently hit its lowest level in more than 30 years, according to the Justice Department. According to multiple reports, federal prosecutors have opened an investigation into whether Washington police manipulated data to make crime rates appear lower.
A handful of Republican-led states have also announced they are sending National Guard members to Washington to assist officers on the ground in the wake of the announcement.
Trump has said his crackdown in Washington could serve as a model for other cities in the U.S.