\n<\/p>\n
The Justice Department<\/span> announced in January that violent crime in D.C. hit a 30-year low<\/a> in 2024. So far this year, it\u2019s down 26 percent from that<\/em>. This, in other words, is a curious time for the president to declare that the nation\u2019s capital is a violent cesspool that demands the sort of crime-fighting expertise that only a 79-year-old man who fetishizes dictators and whose entire worldview is perpetually stuck in the 1980s can provide.<\/p>\n The motivation for Donald Trump\u2019s plan to \u201cfederalize\u201d Washington, D.C.,<\/a> is same as his motivation for sending active-duty troops into Los Angeles<\/a>, deporting people to the CECOT<\/a> torture prison in El Salvador, his politicization<\/a> of the Department of Justice, and nearly every other authoritarian overreach of the last six months. He is testing the limits of his power \u2014 and, by extension, of our democracy. He\u2019s feeling out what the Supreme Court, Congress, and the public will let him get away with. And so far, he\u2019s been able to do what he pleases.<\/p>\n The incident that apparently precipitated Trump\u2019s D.C. crackdown was entirely pretextual. It wasn\u2019t the overall amount of violent crime, it was that the wrong person had fallen victim to it. Both Trump and Elon Musk declared D.C. to be a crime-infested wasteland after photos emerged of Edward \u201cBig Balls\u201d Coristine, formerly of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, beaten and bloodied from an alleged carjacking. The attackers ran off when a Metro police officer arrived on the scene \u2014 which is far more protection than crime victims usually get from law enforcement.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n In response, Trump raged on social media over the weekend. He immediately sent hundreds of agents from the FBI, Department of Homeland Security Investigations<\/a>, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement into the city (who then responded<\/a> to a fender bender as if someone had detonated a dirty bomb.)<\/p>\n Trump is now deploying hundreds of National Guard troops to the city too. While state National Guards report to governors, the D.C. National Guard reports to the president. The federal government also has jurisdiction over Washington. Oversight power is supposed to lie with Congress, not the president. But this Congress has essentially dissolved itself into Trump\u2019s agenda.<\/p>\n These legal distinctions<\/a> mean that Trump\u2019s \u201cfederalization\u201d of D.C. isn\u2019t quite as extraordinary a power grab as his deployment<\/a> of Marines and National Guard troops to Los Angeles in June. But as he made clear at an unhinged press conference <\/a>on Monday, Trump himself is either unaware of that distinction or doesn\u2019t acknowledge it. He vowed to send troops into Oakland, Baltimore, and New York as well.<\/p>\n But as with Washington and Los Angeles, violent crime in Oakland and Baltimore has fallen dramatically this year.\u00a0New York, meanwhile, remains one of the safest big cities in the country, despite what the trembling cowards on Fox News may tell you.<\/p>\n If there were truly a violent crime surge in D.C., Trump wouldn\u2019t have cut security funding<\/a> to the city by 44 percent. (I\u2019m dubious of the link between such funding and crime rates, but the important thing here is that Trump thinks they\u2019re linked.)<\/p>\n There was no emergency<\/a> in Los Angeles, either. With the aid of the right-wing media bubble, the administration exploited a couple incidents of property destruction with a surge in peaceful protests against the administration\u2019s immigration raids<\/a> to depict the city as a dystopian hellscape.<\/p>\n The important thing Trump learned from Los Angeles is that the federal courts failed to intervene. While the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit ruled that a president\u2019s decision to federalize the National Guard over the objections of a state governor is reviewable by federal courts, the court also took at face value Trump\u2019s claim that the protests presented a threat to immigration enforcement.<\/p>\n There\u2019s little evidence that this was true. But more importantly, that was never the real reason Trump cracked down on the city. As Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, Trump himself, and internal documents made clear, the real reason was to intimidate protesters, terrify immigrant communities<\/a> and their advocates, and \u201cliberate\u201d blue cities and states<\/a> from the \u201csocialists\u201d elected to office. It was a projection of power.<\/p>\n Trump has long disparaged cities with large Black populations and Black leadership. New York, D.C., Baltimore, Oakland, and Los Angeles are all cities with large Black populations who are run by Black Democrats. The front-runner to be the new mayor of New York is a Muslim Democratic socialist<\/a>. Trump isn\u2019t planning to \u201cprotect\u201d the residents of these cities from crime. He\u2019s planning to impose his will on them.<\/p>\n The crackdown in D.C. comes 10 days after the New Republic reported<\/a> on a Pentagon memo authored by Phil Hegseth, the Defense Secretary\u2019s brother, laying out the administration\u2019s plans to deploy active-duty troops around the country to aid in immigration enforcement \u201cfor years to come.\u201d<\/p>\n That memo would end once and for all this country\u2019s centuries-old tradition of keeping the military out of routine domestic law enforcement, it would eradicate one of the cornerstone principles that drove the American Revolution, and it could well end with U.S. soldiers firing their guns at U.S. citizens. (If you\u2019re wondering what \u2014 other than being the brother of the least qualified person ever to lead a Cabinet-level agency \u2014 makes Phil Hegseth qualified to plan and implement a policy that would fundamentally alter the relationship between America and its military, the answer is apparently that he once started a podcasting company<\/a>.)<\/p>\n Nothing conditions the public to accept restrictions on civil liberties and vast expansions of government power like fear.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n Tough-on-crime politicians have long used Washington, D.C., and its residents as political pawns<\/a> rather than real Americans with real constitutional rights. When Richard Nixon was pushing a crime bill that would make the D.C. the test city for his crime policies in 1970, his Justice Department suppressed statistics showing that crime in the city had been falling for five months. They needed people to fear the capital to get the bill through Congress. The bill passed, but D.C.\u2019s progressive police chief at the time refused to implement policies like no-knock raids, preventative detention, and aggressive crackdowns on protest. Crime would continue to fall in D.C. even as it rose in the rest of the country.<\/p>\n In 1989, in his first televised speech as president, George H.W. Bush held up a bag of crack cocaine<\/a> that he claimed had been seized by the Drug Enforcement Administration in Lafayette Park, just a few blocks from the White House. It had not. It hadn\u2019t even been \u201cseized.\u201d Undercover agents from the DEA had persuaded a small-time, 18-year-old drug dealer to sell them crack at the park so they could give it to the White House for Bush to use in his speech. In other words, the DEA arranged for an illegal drug sale near the White House that otherwise wouldn\u2019t have happened solely so Bush could say an illegal drug sale had just taken place near the White House.<\/p>\n Demonizing Washington, D.C., then, is an old tactic from an old playbook. But the threat today is uniquely authoritarian and dangerous. The Nixon and Bush administrations were pushing policies that were wrongheaded, counterproductive, and in a few cases unconstitutional. But they weren\u2019t attacks on democracy.<\/p>\n This most certainly is. <\/p>\n The memo reported by the New Republic seeks to replicate what Trump did in Los Angeles in other cities. It conflates peaceful, constitutionally protected protest with international crime syndicates and Al Qaeda or ISIS. And it puts heavy pressure on the Pentagon to scrap Founding-era principles about the role of a standing army in favor of a military increasingly directed inward, against U.S. residents and citizens, to do the president\u2019s bidding.<\/p>\n This is what Trump has always wanted. He has always expressed his envy of and respect for authoritarians who could sic the military on protesters and critics.<\/p>\n One of the healthier things about our democracy is that when politicians have advocated to get the Pentagon more active in domestic policing, the strongest resistance has tended to come from the Pentagon itself. It\u2019s long been a core principle in U.S. military culture that soldiers should not be deployed against their fellow citizens. It\u2019s a bright red line.<\/p>\n That line held in 2020, when Trump wanted to send the military in to shoot George Floyd protesters in D.C. Both his defense secretary and his Joint Chiefs chair refused to cross it and threatened to resign.<\/p>\n But Trump learned his lesson. This time around, he quickly purged the Defense Department\u2019s senior leadership and JAG officers<\/a>, replacing them with MAGA-devoted sycophants. Pete Hegseth wrote in his book that he wants to invoke the military in a holy war,<\/a> and Trump has boasted that his current Joint Chiefs chair, Gen. Dan Caine, once said he\u2019d kill for Trump<\/a>. So among the upper echelons of the Pentagon, the bright red line now appears to be gone.<\/p>\n That means the decision of whether to carry out illegal, unconstitutional orders to detain, harm, or even kill immigrants, protesters, or the president\u2019s perceived enemies will fall much lower in the chain of command, at ranks where defying orders won\u2019t mean dismissal from a political position, but a possible court-martial or prison time.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n\n