Since President Donald Trump announced his plan to clean up Washington, D.C., by taking over the city’s police department and deploying some 800 members of the National Guard to the street, the left and corporate media have been contorting themselves to claim crime and homelessness aren’t actually an issue in our nation’s capital.
Hillary Clinton took to X to say to declare “violent crime in D.C. is at a 30-year low” and “an unhinged Trump” is just trying to “justify deploying the National Guard.” Over on CNN, Dana Bash used the story as an opportunity to bring up – what else? – January 6. Meanwhile, MSNBC’s Eugene Daniels questioned whether Trump was “targeting the city” due to its “high minority population.”
But there was a notable exception to the spin. ABC News correspondent Kyra Phillips no doubt spoke for many who live and work in the D.C. area when she got candid about the dangers she and her colleagues have faced in recent years.
On Tuesday’s show, Megyn was joined by Andrew Klavan, host of The Andrew Klavan Show, to discuss the hysterical reaction to President Trump’s action and how Phillips cut through the noise.
Honest Reporting
While anchoring ABC News Live on Monday, Phillips offered a “firsthand” account of what it is really like to spend time in the nation’s capital. “I can tell you firsthand here in downtown D.C. where we work, right here around our bureau, just in the past six months, you know, there were two people shot, one person died, literally two blocks down here from the bureau,” she explained.
She then shared that the violence hit closer to home when she was mugged by a “half-dressed” homeless man while walking near the ABC studios. Phillips said the incident happened “within the last two years,” but she noted one of her colleagues had her car stolen “a block away from the bureau” that very morning.
“We can talk about the numbers going down,” she added. “But crime is happening every single day because we’re all experiencing it firsthand, working and living down here.”
The No Spin Zone
Megyn praised Phillips, who she noted is married to Fox News’ John Roberts, as a “straight shooter,” and Klavan said her reporting illustrates an important point – statistics only tell part of the story.
“It’s like when there was inflation and the press was telling people… inflation is not so bad, as if people didn’t know whether they could put food on their table or take their kids on vacation; as if somehow they were deluded about what was happening in their own home,” he explained. “People are not deluded about being afraid to walk in the streets of Washington, D.C., especially after dark.”
While accounts like Phillips’ may be dismissed by others in the media because they do not fit the preferred narrative, Klavan said they tend to win out in the court of public opinion. “They are always dismissing things like that as ‘anecdotal evidence,’ but the choice is between the evidence that is being given to you by ordinary people and the evidence given to you by a corrupt media,” he said. “That is our choice, and I’m going to take the people every single time.”
You can check out Megyn’s full interview with Klavan by tuning in to episode 1,126 on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you like to listen. And don’t forget that you can catch The Megyn Kelly Show live on SiriusXM’s Triumph (channel 111) weekdays from 12pm to 2pm ET.