Maryland Gov. Wes Moore has drawn criticism after retreating to actor George Clooney’s estate in Lake Como, Italy, amid an escalating clash with President Donald Trump over how to tackle crime in Baltimore and Washington, D.C.
Although Clooney and his wife Amal have left Italy following the Venice Film Festival, they have made the estate and its staff available to the Moores during their vacation.
The images surfaced just days after Moore publicly rejected Trump’s offer to deploy the National Guard to Baltimore, following the president’s deployment of federal troops into the nation’s capital.
“I absolutely want federal assistance,” Moore said in a Fox45 News interview on Aug. 29. “But not in the form of the National Guard, because the National Guard is not an effective form of federal assistance.”
Moore has repeatedly argued that local law enforcement and federal agencies such as the FBI are better suited to address violent crime in Baltimore than the military.
“The National Guard is completely performative because the National Guard is not even trained for it,” Moore said on ABC’s This Week on Aug. 31.
Trump, meanwhile, has defended his D.C. deployment, citing new data showing crime reductions. Since the Guard arrived in Washington earlier this month, the city has seen a 45 percent drop in violent crime and an 87 percent decline in carjackings, according to the Metropolitan Police Department. Mayor Muriel Bowser, a Democrat, praised the results, saying the federal surge “enhance[d] what MPD has been able to do in this city.”
Attorney General Pam Bondi reported that between Aug. 7 and Aug. 30, law enforcement made 1,452 arrests in D.C. and seized 151 illegal guns, with more than 80 arrests and 11 firearm seizures on Aug. 30 alone. Trump has pointed to those statistics as proof his approach is working and suggested Baltimore should see a similar deployment.
Moore has dismissed Trump’s push as “tone deaf” and “ignorant,” accusing the president of stereotyping Baltimore residents. “It’s because they have not walked our streets,” Moore said. “They have not been in our communities, and they are more than happy to keep making these repeated tropes about us.”
Trump escalated the dispute by branding Baltimore a “hell hole” and “horrible death bed” and by highlighting Moore’s past misstatement about receiving a Bronze Star on a White House fellowship application.
Moore insists his focus remains on Maryland.
“I’m going to fight for my people,” he said last week. “When I’m hearing attacks on my state and on our state’s largest city, things like hellscape and hellhole and death scape, I feel like our state is under attack from the federal government. But if the President of the United States wants to have a serious conversation — not to fight us, but to fight for us — I would be very excited to have that conversation with him.”
The debate over crime and federal aid comes as Moore’s political profile rises. Clooney has publicly praised the governor as a possible Democratic presidential candidate in 2028, calling him “a proper leader” and “a unifying candidate.”
Clooney told CNN earlier this year that Moore “handled the tragedy in Baltimore beautifully” and stands out among potential successors to President Biden.