More numbers that do not add up – How Trump justifies the Venezuela operation with false claims and how everything repeats itself

Donald Trump stepped before the cameras on Saturday to explain the US military operation in Venezuela that led to the arrest of Nicolás Maduro and his wife. What was intended as a justification for an extraordinary operation quickly turned into an extended self-staging, in which the president repeatedly left the ground of verifiable facts. Instead of providing clarity, he presented a series of statements on crime, drug enforcement, and National Guard deployments that do not align with the available data. See also our article: The new battlefield – Government documents in our possession confirm Trump’s fake war against Venezuela – It is only about oil and hard dollars

Particularly striking was Trump’s claim that every US attack on a suspected Venezuelan drug smuggling boat saves an average of 25,000 lives. This figure does not withstand scrutiny. According to preliminary data from the US health authority CDC, up to 76,516 people died from drug overdoses in the twelve months through April 2025 – this total alone already contradicts the logic of Trump’s calculation. Since the beginning of the operations in early September, the US military has attacked at least 35 boats in the Caribbean Sea and the eastern Pacific. Taking Trump’s numbers seriously would mean his administration prevented nearly 900,000 deaths – more than the total number of overdose deaths recorded in recent years. There is another contradiction as well: The majority of drug deaths in the United States are caused by opioids, especially illicitly manufactured fentanyl. This substance primarily enters the United States over land from Mexico, not via the maritime routes on which the US attacks have focused.

Trump also painted a picture of the security situation in Washington, D.C., that contradicts official statistics. He stated that there had been no murders there for six or seven months. In reality, the Metropolitan Police recorded 59 homicides during that period, including two in the past week. Among these cases was the fatal shooting of a National Guard member from West Virginia on November 26 by an Afghan national, in which another guardsman was injured. Overall, 126 homicides have been counted in the capital so far in 2025, 29 of them after the deployment of the National Guard in August. At the same time, the data show that violent crime already reached a low point in 2024 and continued to decline in 2025 – a development that contradicts Trump’s portrayal of an acute security crisis.

A similar pattern applies to his statements about Chicago and Los Angeles. Trump portrayed National Guard deployments as a decisive factor in declining crime. In Chicago, however, no National Guard troops were deployed on the streets, as legal disputes prevented this. Even the Department of Justice clarified in court that the Guard’s role was limited to protecting federal buildings and federal officers. While homicides declined between 2020 and 2024, other violent crimes such as rape, robbery, and aggravated assault increased.

In Los Angeles, Trump deployed several thousand National Guard troops and Marines in June, initially to protect federal buildings, later to secure operations related to immigration policy. The troop strength was gradually reduced until only a few hundred remained by mid December. Following a court order, they eventually withdrew from the streets, and an appeals court ordered that control of the National Guard be returned to California Governor Gavin Newsom.

The president’s appearance thus follows a familiar pattern: sweeping political justifications carried by figures and claims that do not hold up under closer examination, repeating themselves as they did on August 11, 2025.

There are moments in history that burn themselves into the collective memory because they show how thin the veneer of civilization really is. August 11, 2025, was such a moment. On that Monday, Donald Trump stood in the White House briefing room, surrounded by his entourage of cabinet members, and carried out something unprecedented in American history: the de facto disempowerment of a democratically elected city government based on demonstrably false claims, underscored by a stack of colorful statistics that, upon closer inspection, looked like the homework of an overwhelmed intern. What happened in those 78 minutes was no normal press conference.

t was a frontal assault on reality itself. With arms flailing and a stack of papers bearing numbers, some of which dated back to 2016 and others that were simply invented, Trump painted a picture of a capital city in the grip of crime. “Bloodthirsty criminals,” “roaming hordes of wild youths,” “drugged-out lunatics” – the language sounded more like a dystopian B movie than a presidential address. The reality? Washington is currently experiencing the lowest level of violent crime in three decades. The murder rate has fallen by 32 percent, armed carjackings by 53 percent, and violent crime overall by 35 percent since 2023. Karoline Leavitt, the figurehead stranded in Trump’s orbit, a brown chicken of the radical right, long trapped in the hermetically sealed delusional world of her Project 2025, distributed papers that make any mentally healthy person instinctively shake their head. Meanwhile, Washington appears like a besieged city – dominated by an unleashed mob of political gamblers, led by a president whose capacity to govern and judge would need to be formally established through an independent medical psychological examination, to officially confirm what has long been evident to any sober observer.

The absurdity of the situation became fully clear when we journalists began to fact-check Trump’s colorful graphics. A table supposedly showing Washington’s murder rate in international comparison confused the flags of Mexico and Ethiopia. Lagos was named as the capital of Nigeria - an error that has been embarrassing since 1991, when Abuja took over that role. The UN data cited? Some almost a decade old. It was as if someone had hastily copied Wikipedia articles at the last minute and cobbled them together into a presentation without bothering to check even the most basic facts. But the sloppy workmanship was only the surface of a much deeper problem. By activating Section 740 of the District of Columbia Home Rule Act, Trump carried out an act whose scope can hardly be overstated. For the first time in modern history, a president took control of a city’s police not in response to an actual emergency, but as a demonstration of power based on an invented crisis. 800 National Guard troops were mobilized, 120 FBI agents pulled from their actual duties and assigned to night patrols. The cost? Millions of dollars a day. The reason? A phantom.

The constitutional implications are dizzying. While the Home Rule Act theoretically grants the president this authority, the spirit of this 1973 law was aimed at real emergencies, not political theater. Brian Schwalb, the attorney general of the District, called the move “unlawful” – a remarkably sharp formulation for an official who usually speaks in legal shades of gray. Human Rights Watch, an organization that otherwise deals with dictatorships in distant countries, felt compelled to issue a warning normally reserved for military juntas: “The military takeover of local law enforcement is a harbinger of authoritarianism.”

The historical irony is almost unbearable. The same man who in January pardoned hundreds of violent Capitol rioters – people who had attempted to prevent the certification of a democratic election – the same man who labeled these rioters “heroes” and “patriots,” now stood there and declared Washington a war zone because of a crime wave that exists only in his imagination. The same thing has now happened with Venezuela, and here too only one question remains: “Is this man actually still of sound mind?”