President Trump says his legal team is preparing a lawsuit against the Center for American Progress after the left-wing think tank published a report claiming National Guard deployments to American cities had no measurable effect on crime.
Trump disclosed the planned legal action in a Truth Social post, calling the CAP report "another Radical Left SCAM" and naming more than a dozen corporate and individual donors he says bankroll the organization, including George Soros, Bill and Melinda Gates, Google, Apple, Goldman Sachs, and Walmart. He added that he is "strongly considering adding some of the contributors" to the suit, Breitbart News reported.
The lawsuit has not been formally filed. Trump described it as "being drawn now." But the announcement itself marks a direct escalation against a Washington policy shop that has operated as a clearinghouse for progressive ideas since its founding, and whose funders read like a Fortune 500 directory crossed with an international diplomatic roster.
The dispute centers on a CAP analysis that examined National Guard deployments to 11 U.S. cities, including Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., and New Orleans. The report's central claim: the Trump administration is "trying to take credit for the historic drop in violent crime across America despite the fact that this trend began before it took office."
CAP's own numbers tell a more complicated story than its conclusion suggests. The report found that the 11 cities where the National Guard was deployed or threatened with deployment saw a 14 percent decrease in their 12-month rolling violent crime rate and a 22 percent decrease in their 12-month rolling murder rate from June 2024 to June 2025. CAP argues those declines predated the Guard's arrival, noting they occurred "before the National Guard was first deployed to Los Angeles."
That framing asks readers to accept a narrow reading of cause and effect: crime was already dropping, so the deployments did nothing. It does not account for whether the announcement of deployments, or the broader federal posture behind them, contributed to the trend. And it sidesteps the possibility that sustained Guard presence kept the numbers moving in the right direction after troops arrived.
The report also projected that extending deployments through the end of 2026 could cost taxpayers more than $1.7 billion.
CAP's broad statistical argument runs into a specific problem in Washington, D.C., one of the cities Trump singled out in his post. Breitbart's Hannah Knudsen reported in August 2025 that overall violent crime in the District fell 22 percent in the week after Trump announced his crackdown there, with zero murders recorded over that seven-day stretch.
That one-week snapshot is not a long-term study. But it is the kind of immediate, measurable result that voters understand, and that a think tank report built on rolling 12-month averages can obscure. When a president sends the National Guard into a city and violent crime drops by a fifth in seven days with no homicides, telling the public it had "NO impact on Crime" requires a particular kind of confidence in your methodology.
The Soros family's political spending network extends well beyond think tanks. Alex Soros, George Soros's son, has become a major figure in Democratic fundraising circles, recently hosting Bill Clinton's 80th birthday fundraiser at his Hamptons estate.
Chandler Hall, CAP's associate director of public safety, appeared on television to present the report's findings. Trump wrote that Hall "was met with furious dissent," though the source of that pushback and the specific program were not identified. Trump mocked the organization as the "Center for American Lack of Progress."
The most provocative element of Trump's announcement was not the lawsuit itself but his threat to expand it. He named a roster of CAP's alleged funders: George Soros, Bill and Melinda Gates, Google, Apple, Visa, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Walmart, Toyota, T-Mobile, and NBC Universal. He also flagged foreign contributors, including the Embassy of Japan, the Korea Foundation, and the Embassy of the United Arab Emirates.
Trump said he is "strongly considering adding some of the contributors to this Fake Organization" to the lawsuit. Whether that threat carries legal weight or is designed to put public pressure on corporate donors remains to be seen. No cause of action or legal theory has been disclosed.
The strategy of naming donors publicly is itself a form of accountability. Soros-funded political operations have shaped races and policy fights across the country, from district attorney campaigns in Houston to state legislative races in New York, where candidates have built careers inside Soros-backed organizations before running for office themselves.
Corporate America's quiet funding of progressive advocacy shops rarely draws the same scrutiny as a direct political donation. Trump's post forced companies like Goldman Sachs, Walmart, and Google into the frame, whether or not they end up in a courtroom.
The language of the CAP report goes well beyond a dry statistical analysis. It accuses the Trump administration of "exploiting" crime declines to "justify expanding policies that are unpopular, ineffective, and costly." It describes National Guard deployments as "extreme actions" and claims the president is trying to "falsely claim his policies have reduced crime."
That is not the tone of a neutral research product. It is the tone of an opposition document dressed in academic formatting. The report's own data shows violent crime and murder rates fell sharply in the targeted cities, a fact it frames as proof that Trump deserves no credit rather than evidence that his approach may have reinforced an existing trend.
Trump's administration has taken a series of aggressive steps in the targeted cities, including deploying the National Guard and, in Washington, D.C., placing the Metropolitan Police Department under direct federal control. Those moves drew sharp criticism from progressive officials but coincided with measurable drops in crime, a sequence CAP's report acknowledges while arguing the causation runs the other way.
The Trump White House has not limited its pushback to think tanks. The administration has also compiled internal reviews of political actors it views as working against its agenda, signaling a broader willingness to confront institutional opposition directly.
Several key facts remain unresolved. The lawsuit has been announced but not filed, and no court, jurisdiction, or legal theory has been made public. Whether a sitting president can successfully sue a think tank over a policy report, and on what grounds, is an open question with significant First Amendment implications.
Trump's list of CAP donors, including foreign embassies, has not been independently verified within the available reporting. The president presented the names as fact; CAP has not responded publicly to the donor allegations in the material at hand.
The exact date of the CAP report's publication and the television appearance by Chandler Hall that triggered Trump's initial August 10 Truth Social post also remain unclear. Trump shared a post referencing the report on that date before later announcing the lawsuit in a separate post.
What is clear is the political dynamic. A well-funded Washington think tank published a report designed to undercut one of the administration's signature public-safety initiatives. The president responded not with a press release but with a lawsuit threat, and a public accounting of who pays the think tank's bills.
When the people funding the report have more to answer for than the people keeping the streets safe, the report has a credibility problem that no amount of rolling averages can fix.
