Stephen Miller Says Trump’s DC Crackdown Will Also Target Graffiti

The senior White House staff member called graffiti a ‘visual declaration of a society’s surrender,’ and said it’s ‘coming down.’

White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller at a press briefing at the White House in Washington on May 1, 2025. Evelyn Hockstein/REUTERS

President Donald Trump’s crackdown on crime in Washington will include a renewed effort to eliminate graffiti, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller said on Aug. 17.

“Graffiti left untouched to scar public spaces is the visual declaration of a society’s surrender,” Miller wrote in an Aug. 17 post on X. “The graffiti is coming down in Washington, DC.”

Miller’s remark about a “surrender” on the part of society appears to be a reference to the “broken windows” theory, a criminology concept introduced in the 1980s by Harvard academics James Q. Wilson and George Kelling. They theorized that unaddressed visible signs of neglect and vandalism harm communities by encouraging people to commit more serious crimes.

“Untended property becomes fair game for people out for fun or plunder, and even for people who ordinarily would not dream of doing such things and who probably consider themselves law-abiding,” the authors wrote, noting that vandalism is a slippery slope to a broader breakdown in community controls.

“A stable neighborhood of families who care for their homes, mind each other’s children, and confidently frown on unwanted intruders can change, in a few years or even a few months, to an inhospitable and frightening jungle,” Wilson and Kelling said, pointing to a growth in homelessness, panhandling, drunkeness in public, and disorderly conduct offenses.

Graffiti—which also has advocates who argue that it’s a legitimate form of art or socio-political protest—was cited by Wilson and Kelling as a challenge to order and a sign of weakening controls.

“In Boston public housing projects, the greatest fear was expressed by persons living in the buildings where disorderliness and incivility, not crime, were the greatest,” they wrote.

“Knowing this helps one understand the significance of such otherwise harmless displays, as subway graffiti. As Nathan Glazer has written, the proliferation of graffiti, even when not obscene, confronts the subway rider with the ‘inescapable knowledge that the environment he must endure for an hour or more a day is uncontrolled and uncontrollable, and that anyone can invade it to do whatever damage and mischief the mind suggests.’”

The D.C. Department of Public Works (DPW) runs a dedicated graffiti abatement program that employs dozens of workers to remove graffiti across the city in response to public complaints. In 2023, graffiti complaints in D.C. hit a five-year high.

According to DPW data, more than 1,900 graffiti incidents were reported through the city’s 311 nonemergency phone system in the past 30 days. Graffiti removal was also explicitly part of the district’s annual “spring cleaning” initiative, announced in April by D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser.

President Donald Trump, who recently federalized policing in Washington to tackle crime in the nation’s capital, singled out graffiti for removal from all commonly visited areas in a March executive order. The directive also called more broadly for the “prompt removal and cleanup of all homeless or vagrant encampments and graffiti” on federal land within the nation’s capital.

Since Trump federalized control of the Washington Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) and activated 800 National Guard troops, several Republican-led states have pledged to send hundreds of troops to assist with the effort.

On Aug. 15, local Washington officials filed a lawsuit challenging the president’s authority to take control of the city’s police force.

D.C. Attorney General Brian Schwalb said in a post on X that by “declaring a takeover of MPD, the Administration is abusing its temporary, limited authority under the law.”

“This is the gravest threat to Home Rule DC has ever faced, and we are fighting to stop it,” he said.

Over the weekend, Miller defended the president’s anti-crime initiative in the nation’s capital, citing anecdotal evidence of people expressing that they felt safer.

“President Trump is making D.C. safe, livable, clean, and secure—not just for the people who live here, but for every American citizen whose birthright is to visit our nation’s capital,” Miller said.