To hear Donald Trump tell it, addressing crime in Washington, D.C., is a riddle he’s solved. In fact, the president spent several minutes at an unrelated White House event Monday afternoon boasting that the combination of deportations and National Guard deployments has led to a “renaissance” in the nation’s capital.

“We have very little crime now,” he claimed. “This was the crime capital, frankly, of the world. It was the most unsafe capital of any country in the world. Now it’s one of the safest, and it’s one of the safest places in the United States.”

Trump went on and on about the crime-free paradise he’s created and the many calls he’s received from unnamed people thanking him for the magical results. “Everyone’s safe now,” the president said. “Nobody’s getting mugged, shot.”

After describing a city filled with residents who suddenly want to walk to work and struggle to get restaurant reservations because so many people are out and about, the Republican concluded, “It was a graffiti-filled, crime-filled mess. We turned it into Shangri-La.”

It was an interesting choice of metaphors, since Shangri-La is a place that only exists in fiction.

The president has spent nearly a full year patting himself on the back, claiming credit for having eliminated crime in Washington, D.C. Unfortunately, facts keep getting in the way.

Indeed, shortly after Trump claimed that “nobody” in the nation’s capital is the victim of violent crime anymore, The New York Times reported, “In reality, four homicides were reported in the last week, and 16 in the last month, according to police statistics, up from the same periods last year.”

Those statistics come just two months after NPR reported on the latest analysis of crime data from the Niskanen Center, a nonpartisan think tank, which found that Trump’s policy “has reduced petty property crimes, but has had little to no effect on violent crime, despite the high cost to taxpayers.”

According to the data, there was a 24% drop in “opportunistic” crimes, such as property crimes and vehicle break-ins, but the presence of the guard has had no meaningful effect on violent crime.

“What the Guard brought was a massive, sudden shock from the visible presence of uniformed military personnel on the streets of Washington almost overnight,” researchers wrote, calling the deployment of the Guard a “blunt and expensive instrument.”

There is a degree of irony to the circumstances: When it comes to the Reflecting Pool, Trump keeps pointing to crimes that didn’t happen, but when it comes to the city overall, Trump keeps pretending not to notice crimes that did happen.

As for the price tag, The Washington Post reported that the Pentagon’s deployment of National Guard troops to Washington “is set to cost an additional $1.4 billion” through the end of Trump’s second term. The cost led Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts to respond, “While American families are getting flattened by skyrocketing costs, Donald Trump is spending $1.4 billion to keep troops on the streets in Washington for years on end. The National Guard are not pawns, and taxpayer dollars are not a piggy bank for Trump’s political stunts.”

That said, it’s a safe bet that the White House, indifferent to the results of this real-world experiment, will support the $1.4 billion investment.

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