President Trump said Monday that restaurants in Washington, D.C., are more crowded than they’ve been in a long time, despite data suggesting restaurant attendance amid his police takeover has taken a dive.
Trump, at an Oval Office meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, said the result of his federal takeover is that D.C. is now safe, a week after he brought in the National Guard and federalized the police.
“The press says, ‘He’s a dictator, he’s trying to take over.’ No, all I want is security for our people. But people who 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,” the president said during an Oval Office meeting.
Trump, with Zelensky sitting to his side, offered stories of personal friends saying they felt safe enough to have dinner at a D.C. restaurant for the first time in years.
“Friends are calling me up, Democrats are calling me up. And they’re saying, ‘Sir, we 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,’” the president said.
He also shared that another friend told him his son was going to dinner and praised the federal law enforcement in the nation’s capital.
“I said, ‘Would you have allowed that to happen a year ago?’” Trump said. “He said, ‘No way. … What you’ve done in incredible.”
Data from OpenTable found that seated diners in Washington last week started to drop dramatically compared to last year, after Trump first announced he was taking federal control of D.C.’s police department and deploying the National Guard in the city, in what the administration has described as an effort to fight crime.
Beginning Monday, Aug. 11, seated diners at Washington restaurants, according to online reservation numbers, started to drop dramatically in comparison to the prior year, dipping 16 percent. On Wednesday, the number of seated diners at restaurants with reservations fell 31 percent, and Saturday’s drop was 20 percent.
During the Oval Office meeting, conservative commentator Brian Glenn offered more anecdotal support for Trump’s argument. He said he recently went out with Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) in D.C., joking, “if you can walk around D.C. with MTG and not be attacked, the city is safe.”
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