Tea at Trianon: A Week Without Murder: What Washington Can Teach the Nation

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Sunday, August 24, 2025

A Week Without Murder: What Washington Can Teach the Nation

From Direct Line News:

For the first time in what feels like forever, Washington, D.C. just went an entire week without a single murder on its streets. Let that sink in. In a city where crime has become as routine as morning traffic on the Beltway, we finally had seven days of peace. Coincidentally—or maybe not so coincidentally—this streak happened during the same week the National Guard was deployed in the nation’s capital.
As a Georgetown Hoya, this is more than just a statistic to me. It means I can actually walk down M Street at 9 p.m. to grab a coffee or a late snack without constantly glancing over my shoulder. It means my classmates don’t have to text three friends to escort them across the Key Bridge after dark. It means, for the first time, people in D.C. felt like someone actually had their back. And that someone wasn’t the mayor, or the city council, or the entrenched bureaucrats who wring their hands while crime spirals out of control. That someone was President Donald J. Trump.
The critics will sneer and say it’s all optics, that the Guard was just a show of force. But tell that to the residents who could finally breathe easier for a week. Tell that to the parents who didn’t have to wake up to another headline about a teenager gunned down on a corner. The truth is simple: security works. And President Trump has never been afraid to use the tools at his disposal—whether it’s the National Guard, federal task forces, or tough-on-crime policies—to put the safety of American citizens first.
Pam Bondi deserves credit here too. She’s been one of the strongest advocates for restoring law and order in American cities. While the left demonizes law enforcement and handcuffs police officers with endless restrictions, Bondi and Trump have pushed for empowering cops and cracking down on the criminals who terrorize neighborhoods. Their leadership is producing results the Democrats only dream of.
Let’s be honest: the loudest critics of Trump’s strategy are the ones jealous that his policies are working. They cling to failed experiments in “reimagining” public safety that usually boil down to coddling criminals while leaving law-abiding citizens to fend for themselves. Meanwhile, when Trump acts decisively, real people see immediate benefits—like a week without murder in Washington, D.C.
That’s not just a victory for Trump. It’s a victory for every single person who calls this city home. It’s a glimpse of what life could look like if we stopped treating crime as an inevitable feature of urban living and started treating it as a problem to be solved. (Read more.)