Laughable lie, but it plays well to the LM's and Dope's of the country.

The reason that it plays well - and is likely to be a political winner for the GOP and a loser for the Democrats - is that it's not actually a lie, for the most part.

Look carefully at the language:

"DC is not safe. people don’t just walk the streets in DC and feel safe anywhere around DC. I mean, I gotta be careful in what I do. I’ve got people in my office that are very careful about where they go.

Notice that he's not really talking about whether DC is safe. He's talking about whether people feel safe. And by context, he's talking about whether the sort of people that he comes into regular contact with feel safe.

The former can be contradicted by looking at crime statistics and whatnot. Those can tell you whether a place is experiencing a given level of crime. But whether people feel safe is affected by more than the city-wide actual crime statistics.

The GOP has correctly identified that people feel that urban core areas are less safe than they used to be. Part of that is because there are fewer people in those areas than there used to be. Many urban core areas still haven't rebounded from COVID's effects on daytime population, even with RTO programs, with office attendance still close to only 50% of pre-pandemic levels. So everything feels emptier than it should be, which itself makes people feel uneasy - both in terms of direct personal safety and in an indirect sense of a struggling and less vibrant business area. And the other major part is that since the population of distressed people hasn't really changed (the homeless, the addicted), it really looks like proportionally there's a lot more of those folks than there used to be.

This is an excellent issue for the GOP and Trump. They can solve the "feelings" problem in the parts of the city that people will see on the news or experience as visitors (the downtown office and tourist areas). Many people will feel safer if there's a visible law enforcement presence in a previously empty-ish area. It doesn't matter that this won't actually reduce crime rates in the city (which most crimes occur out of that area any way) - the people who commute or are tourists will feel much safer.

It's somewhat disappointing that Democrats don't seem to understand that they're being baited into a losing issue for them. You can't cite figures to people to tell them what they're feeling isn't true, and expect that to work well politically.