Maryland Gov. Wes Moore has spent the past few days going on TV to denounce President Donald Trump’s deployment of the National Guard in Washington, D.C.
The president took notice.
Speaking to reporters in the Oval Office on Thursday, Trump criticized Moore directly.
“I heard him today talking about how the National Guard or the military is not trained in police,” Trump said. “But they’re trained in common sense, and they’re not allowing people to burn down buildings and bomb buildings and cheat people.”
The Republican president pointedly did not mention Moore by name, calling him first “this character, where was he from?” and later as “the governor of Maryland.”
He also dismissed Moore’s potential national ambitions: “They say maybe he’ll be a president— he’s not presidential temper at all.”
The Democratic governor clapped back hours later with a social media video, noting that while Trump was bashing him, he was at a ribbon cutting for a health clinic on the Eastern Shore.
“He attacked me because I was critical of his performative decision to put military personnel in American cities to perform municipal policing functions,” Moore says in the video, speaking directly to the camera, with Maryland and American flags behind him.
In the video, Moore notes his own military service — he was a captain in the Army Reserves and earned a Bronze Star for a deployment to Afghanistan — saying, “I know what is being asked of these men and women.”
“If the president wants to have a real conversation about how to reduce violence like what we have had in the state of Maryland since I’ve been the governor — where Maryland has had amongst the fastest drops of violent crime anywhere in the United States of America — I’m ready to have that conversation any time, Mr. President,” Moore says in the video.
Moore’s remarks echo statements he’s made in media interviews on MSNBC, CNN, Fox News and other outlets since National Guard troops and federal agents descended on the District of Columbia under Trump’s orders.
Trump said Thursday that he’d heard Moore’s remarks earlier that morning, but he may have been referring to the governor’s appearance Wednesday on “Fox & Friends,” a show the president is known to watch.
Over the course of nearly 10 minutes on that show, Moore touted the progress toward reducing violent crime in Baltimore, “and I never once had to mobilize the National Guard in order to accomplish those feats.”
The homicide count in Baltimore has declined steadily since 2021, with about 200 last year, the lowest in nearly a decade, according to Baltimore Police Department data. The city is on pace for even fewer this year.
As for communities still experiencing crime, Moore said on “Fox & Friends”: “I can tell you right now what people want more than anything in these communities, is they don’t want performative, they want performance, right? They’re not looking for someone to walk around with military fatigues and a big gun.”
Moore said that Guard members are not trained for policing and that leaders should “actually do the things that make people safe.”