In the summer of 2020, as demonstrators gathered in Washington, D.C., to protest against the murder of George Floyd, President Donald Trump directed the National Guard and officers from various federal law-enforcement agencies to patrol the streets of the nation’s capital. The results were a disaster from the perspective of crowd control but a delight to a wannabe authoritarian obsessed with good TV: Troops and police buzzed peaceful protesters with a helicopter and fired pepper balls at them as Trump walked across Lafayette Square for a photo shoot.
Now, five years later, Trump has once again decided to impose his idea of law and order upon Washington. This time, however, the city is quiet, and he’s not responding to any protests. He’s sending in the troops because he can—because D.C., as a federal enclave with few protections from presidential overreach, makes for a uniquely soft target. This ostensible show of strength is more like an admission of weakness. It is the behavior of a bully: very bad for the people it touches, but not a likely prelude to full authoritarian takeover.
The inciting incident for this particular round of repression was the attempted carjacking last week of Edward Coristine, better known as Big Balls, a 19-year-old member of Elon Musk’s DOGE inner circle. This sent Trump into a frenzy. “Crime in Washington, D.C., is totally out of control,” he wrote on Truth Social. “I am going to exert my powers, and FEDERALIZE this City.”
One could raise a few objections to this. First, violent crime in the District, including carjackings, has declined dramatically from its post–pandemic highs to the lowest rate in 30 years. Second, if Trump is deeply concerned about safety in D.C., why did his Department of Homeland Security slash federal security funding for the city almost in half in recent months? (Why, for that matter, did he refuse for hours to deploy the National Guard on January 6, 2021, when a violent mob assaulted law-enforcement officers?) And third, the president cannot unilaterally “federalize” the city. D.C. is under the direct authority of the federal government, but the Home Rule Act of 1973 provides the city with significant control over its own affairs—something that can be removed only by an act of Congress.
What Trump can do, and what he announced he would do in a press conference this morning, is direct the D.C. National Guard onto the streets of the city, along with a variety of federal agencies that the president listed off in a bored, singsong tone (“FBI, ATF, DEA, Park Police, the U.S. Marshals Service, Secret Service, Department of Homeland Security …”). He also declared his intention to take control of D.C.’s Metropolitan Police Department under a never-before-used provision of the Home Rule Act that allows the president to direct local police for up to 30 days given “special conditions of an emergency nature.” Congress can extend the authorization, but Senate Republicans might well have to surmount a Democratic filibuster to do so. Whether Trump’s use of the statute can be challenged in court is unclear.
The idea of armed officers under presidential control patrolling the streets of a free city is not a reassuring one. So far, however, the surge in law enforcement—which began a few days ago, before this morning’s announcement—appears mostly farcical. Footage from WUS9, a local news station, showed a pack of Drug Enforcement Administration agents lumbering awkwardly along the Mall in bullet-proof vests as joggers streaked past. (For those unfamiliar with D.C., the Mall—a green expanse frequented by tourists and ice-cream trucks—is not exactly a hotbed of crime, especially on a sunny summer morning.) Near my quiet neighborhood in D.C.’s Northwest quadrant, federal officers have been patrolling a tiny park whose chief menace, in my experience, has been the occasional abandoned chicken bone scarfed down by my dog. Over the weekend, I watched a Secret Service car drive slowly in circles around my block. At first I assumed that the agents had gotten lost.
Trump is fresh off his deployment of National Guard troops to Los Angeles, which he launched with great fanfare in June to intimidate anti-ICE protesters, then quietly withdrew weeks later after grinding down the Guard’s morale with what some service members described to The New York Times as a “fake mission.” On the surface, deploying the Guard and federal law enforcement to D.C., and taking control of its entire police force, is an escalation of this project. In a deeper sense, however, it’s an admission of weakness. D.C.’s unique legal status means that Trump can personally direct the city’s National Guard, and even its police, with far fewer restrictions than he faced in Los Angeles. The same day that Trump announced his crackdown on the capital, a federal judge in San Francisco began a three-day trial over the legality of the Los Angeles deployment, in response to a lawsuit filed by California Governor Gavin Newsom.
The District, which is both heavily Democratic and plurality Black, has long served as a useful boogeyman in the Republican imaginary. During Trump’s press conference, he rambled about crime in not only D.C. but also Baltimore, Chicago, and Oakland, and appeared to suggest in one confusing moment that he was going to get rid of cashless bail in Chicago. (The president cannot do this.) These cities, like D.C., all have Black mayors and significant Black populations—and, for that matter, falling crime rates—but, unlike the capital, they are protected by blue-state governments with significant authority to push back against the president.
The good news, such as it is, is that Trump’s latest seizure of power is probably not the prelude to an autogolpe. The bad news is that, nine years into the Trump era, this sort of thing has become much more familiar: the president identifying a loophole in the law that allows him to wield force with little constraint. To the extent that his D.C. crackdown is real, those who will suffer the most are those who are already vulnerable, especially people living on the streets, whom Trump has declared are no longer welcome in the city. As Trump’s rhetoric heated up last week, the D.C. attorney general, Brian Schwalb, sent out a notice warning local hospitals to expect a surge of patients should law enforcement begin clearing homeless encampments.
After the 2020 National Guard deployment to D.C., congressional Democrats briefly rallied around the idea of finally granting the District statehood. After January 6, they pushed for legislation that would secure mayoral control over the Guard. Neither initiative went anywhere. Any future effort to patch up American democracy should understand that securing D.C.’s autonomy is part of the necessary work of limiting the tools available to malicious interference.
