The Center for American Progress said it will not retract a report that found President Donald Trump’s National Guard deployments in cities across the country have had no measurable impact on violent crime.
Trump threatened the liberal think tank with a $5 billion lawsuit over the analysis, which undercuts one of his favorite stump speech narratives.
“The report is just another Radical Left SCAM,” Trump ranted on social media. “This will be met with a lawsuit, which is being drawn now. … Crime is way down since I took Office, and they know it.”
Crime rates in Washington, D.C., one of the cities in the report and where he first deployed troops in August 2025, had been falling for two years before he took office and were already at their lowest point in decades.
As a result, the CAP report concluded, Trump’s attempts to claim credit for the decades-long trend are baseless, not to mention a massive waste of money.
If Trump extends National Guard deployments through the end of 2026, CAP found, it could cost taxpayers more than $1.7 billion.
Trump, a convicted felon who also pardoned hundreds of violent felons who assaulted police officers on Jan. 6, 2021, had his personal lawyer Alejandro Brito threaten the group via letter.
According to The New York Times, he gave CAP a 5 p.m. Friday deadline to both retract the report and apologize to Trump. The letter ended in all-caps: “PLEASE GOVERN YOURSELVES ACCORDINGLY.”
CAP lawyer Kevin H. Metz called Brito’s letter “utterly absurd” in a written response.
“Truth is not and cannot be defamation,” Metz explained.
In a statement Friday, CAP President and CEO Neera Tanden also stood by the report’s conclusions and promised to “neither cower nor bend” in the face of Trump’s “transparent attempt to silence us”:
The Center for American Progress is an independent, nonpartisan research organization, and our work is grounded in rigorous, evidence-based research and analysis. Based on analysis of crime data, our report demonstrated facts about the National Guard deployments that are inconvenient to the Trump administration. Since its inception, CAP has published analysis of the impact of government policy under Democratic and Republican administrations.
This threatened lawsuit’s attack on facts and evidence is baseless. A fundamental protection of the First Amendment is to allow for the publication of facts and analysis that are contrary to the arguments and claims of any administration. A lawsuit is a transparent attempt to silence us. We will neither cower nor bend in the face of it.
In America, profound disagreements over public policy are resolved through robust public debate, not through threats or intimidation. Independent data, evidence, and analysis are essential to that debate. Efforts to silence independent research because its findings are unwelcome by an administration or president should alarm every American.