The OAFPOTUS has moved to federalize the Washington, D.C., police force under the DC Home Rule statute that gives him a little more than a month to do so before Congress has to consent. As with many of his more dramatic trolls, this has sent everyone to the left of Mitch McConnell into varying degrees of outrage.
Asawin Suebsaeng and Ryan Bort warn that the "military crackdowns are only going to get worse:"
The president and his top government appointees are publicly stressing that this will not end with D.C. and L.A., that other military options are very much on the table. The facts, the laws, and data do not seem to matter: Trump and his team believe he can do whatever he wants, whenever he wants, including using the U.S. armed forces for domestic political purposes as well as intimidating his enemies. His team is privately putting together plans for him to do just that.
Trump has long yearned to unleash the military on American soil for his political agenda, and the D.C. and L.A. deployments this summer are critical stepping stones in his increasingly authoritarian government’s vision for punishing his enemies Democratic area of the country, carrying out his brutal immigration agenda, and making life hell for unhoused people. Trump said on Monday that federal forces will work to remove “homeless encampments from all over our parks,” and that the unhoused will not be “allowed to turn our capital into a wasteland for the world to see.”
Trump officials note that it is a priority of the president’s that these kinds of military deployments — in L.A., and now D.C., in times of relative calm — become normalized in American political culture.
(Emphasis mine.) Federal agents have already started clearing DC homeless encampments and marching the homeless off to jail in a show of performative cruelty unmatched since Jim Crow.
Josh Marshall warns us not to get distracted by the legal niceties and to look at this as the first of many steps to occupy left-leaning US cities:
My argument was that even though the unique rules governing DC make this legal it is by Trump’s own argument part of a rollout he envisions for using federal police (ICE, CBP, FBI) and the National Guard to start taking over policing in big U.S. cities, universally blue cities and in every case in blue states.
We are fundamentally in a battle over public opinion. If a decisive majority of the public opposes Trump, his rule and criminality won’t stand. What follows from that is that what might be technically legal under some obscure statute or simply unreviewable isn’t the point. That’s deep in the weeds. That’s Michael Dukakis delving into statutes and principled opposition to the death penalty when the moment calls for modulated fury and outrage.
The issue is do people want to live under martial law, in cities occupied by the military.
Radley Balko breaks down "the White House lies about DC:"
So let’s get this out of the way, first: As I wrote in my previous post, Donald Trump’s “takeover” of Washington, D.C. is authoritarian thuggery. It’s a projection of power, driven by retrograde racism. It has nothing to do with recent crimes, or actual crime, or actual crime rates. We know this because it’s been in the works for more than a year. That said, I think it’s still important to point out when they’re lying. And everything they’re claiming in justification of the deployment of National Guard troops to D.C. is a lie.
This seems like a good time to remind everyone that when he first entered the White House in 2017, Donald Trump inherited the lowest murder rate of any president in 50 years. Four years later, he was the first president in 30 years to leave with a higher murder rate than when he started.
Deploying the military won’t make people safer — and it won’t make people feel safer. We’re seeing more disorder because the pandemic brought a surge in mental illness, substance abuse, and homelessness, and funding for social programs hasn’t returned to pre-pandemic levels. Now that the Trump administration has taken a huge bite out of federal supplemental funding for those programs, it’s probably going to get worse.
I’m fairly comfortable predicting that, contrary to the administration’s claims, Donald Trump will not end crime in D.C. I’ll also go out on a limb and predict that the Democrats are not going to unravel civilization. To the extent that our own civilization is in jeopardy, Donald Trump is a big part of the cause.
NPR's Steve Inskeep, a DC resident, says "of course DC has crime," but c'mon, man:
[T]here is crime, and local politicos know they need to address it. But that’s not really the question raised by President Trump’s decision to seize formal control of the DC police and send in federal agents to help them.
Trump’s declaration, and all the rhetoric that accompanied it, lean into prejudice. People who do not live in big cities are conditioned to be afraid of them. I learned this as someone who did not grow up in a big city. The declaration plays on that fear, and widens the gulf between Americans.
Statistics are different from place to place. But unfortunately, crime is everywhere and anywhere; you are more likely to have a drug problem in your own family or on your own block than you are to encounter trouble in somebody else’s city.
James Fallows contrasts the OAFPOTUS's deranged ranting with "what it actually 'feels like' in DC:"
Donald Trump obviously does not know this city. According to press accounts, and to judge by his own rhetoric, Trump lurched into declaring a “public safety emergency” for DC based mainly on two pieces of evidence. One was the reported injury of the 19-year-old former Doge staffer Edward Coristine, generally known as “Big Balls,” in an alleged carjacking. The other was Trump’s alarm at seeing a homeless encampment while being driven from the White House to his own golf course in Northern Virginia.
Anyone in DC can tell you that it has big problems. My experience is that the same is true of anyone in Shanghai about their home city, anyone in LA about LA, any Londoner about London, anyone anywhere about the place they live.
But if you can find anybody who knew the area in the 1970s, the 1980s, or even the 1990s, and does not think that the DC of 2025 is vastly more pleasant, more stimulating, more beautiful, more environmentally sustainable, more cultured, better managed, and safer than it was a generation ago, then you have found someone detached from reality.
What’s the even bigger problem for DC? Taxation without representation.
Anyone paying attention to city life in the US knows the OAFPOTUS is full of shit. But that doesn't mean he can't make life difficult for everyone he hates. I'm glad DC is pushing back to the extent they're able, and I know that Illinois will push back as well if he tries that shit here. It's going to be a long 18 months until the next Congress.