In federalizing the D.C. police, Trump seeks some state-sponsored violence.
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AUGUST 12, 2025

On the Prospect website

Plenty of Room for Lawmakers to Profit Under Proposed Stock Ban

A better way to stop politicians’ insider trading is by allowing them to invest only in plain-vanilla mutual funds, Wall Street insiders told the Prospect. BY WHITNEY CURRY WIMBISH

The Museum of the Trump Resistance

Someday, we will honor those who resisted Donald Trump. But first, we need far more courageous resistance. BY ROBERT KUTTNER

Back to Basics

A new book makes the case for a multigenerational commitment to rebuilding democracy. BY JANET HOOK

Meyerson on TAP

Trump: Now the cops can ‘do whatever the hell they want’

In federalizing the D.C. police, Trump seeks some state-sponsored violence.

Some tweets on The Washington Post's website today reported that FBI and ICE agents were on Washington’s U Street corridor (a center of Northwest D.C. nightlife) last night, and made an arrest at 15th and U. My own one-man U Street patrol last night, however, came too late to find any action at all, though I traversed that same 15th Street corner. Even U Street, apparently, is quiet on Monday midnights. I flagged down one cop in a passing patrol car and asked if there were National Guard or other agents out there. She told me if there were, I wouldn’t see them; they’d be “blending into the walls.” Which meant no Guards, but maybe plainclothes FBI, whom perhaps I had mistaken for the handful of guys sitting on bus benches waiting disconsolately for the 12:20 to Anacostia. An FBI agent dragooned into midnight outdoor duty on a steamy D.C. August night wouldn’t have to work hard to look disconsolate.


So far, Trump’s takeover of the D.C. cops and militarization of the city is conceptually both outrageous and dangerous, while in actuality, a good share of it is still blending into the walls. The number of uniformed Guardsmen who’ll be deployed at any one time is supposed to number 200, clustered around prominent intersections and providing some kind of ill-defined support for the police. They have no power to make arrests, while roving FBI and ICE agents do have that power. What that means is that, as was definitely not the case in Los Angeles in June, Trump’s legions will not be assembled en masse or storming places of work to make mass arrests. Their deployment is a wholesale outrage on a retail scale.


As was absolutely the case in Los Angeles, Trump sends in the troops in hopes of provoking a backlash in a city he knows hates his guts, which he uses to justify further deployments and a drift toward martial law. D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser all but openly said yesterday that that was her primary fear. The way to protest, she told D.C. residents, was to revive the cause of D.C. statehood in Congress (though that would require a Democratic majority in the House and a 60-vote supermajority in the Senate). What “would be a disaster,” she said, would be “if people who aren’t committing crimes are antagonized into committing crimes. That would be a disaster.”


Antagonized into committing crimes. Her fear is Trump’s hope; it would pave the road to the militarization of civil life. Unlike L.A., as of now there won’t be the massive deployment of Guards that brought thousands of demonstrators to confront them, nor will individual arrests here have the same effect that the ICE raids have had on California. Also unlike L.A., of course, D.C. is the site of the White House, where there are sure to be angry demonstrations. Trump doubtless hopes they’ll turn violent, opening the door to a more violent repression. The cops and the feds will surely stage shows of force at busy nightlife centers when they’re busy (if I’d gone up 18th Street instead of along U Street last night, I’d have seen them), but whether those assemblies will become flashpoints is as much, if not more, up to the cops and their new federal helpers than it will be to any protesters.


D.C.’s police union reacted to Trump’s takeover with unconcealed glee; like many cop unions, it gives voice to those officers who see themselves as occupying hostile territory and being held back from sufficiently forceful action. The union, in an official statement it released yesterday, said it “acknowledges and supports the President’s announcement this morning to assume temporary control of the MPD in response to the escalating crime crisis in Washington, DC. The Union agrees that crime is spiraling out of control, and immediate action is necessary to restore public safety.”

In actuality, the rate of crime in D.C. is spiraling downward, in 2024 to its lowest point in the past 30 years, and lower still in the first half of 2025. D.C. residents clearly remain concerned about crime. A Washington Post poll from May showed that 50 percent of D.C. residents believed the problem of local crime was “extremely” or “very” serious, while 41 percent termed it “moderately” serious. Blacks and lower-class residents were more concerned than other D.C. residents; 65 percent of Black women considered it extremely or very serious—though that was down from 82 percent in the previous year. These numbers echo numerous other polls from across the nation showing that concern over crime is markedly higher among working-class residents than it is among more affluent Americans, and validate pollster Stan Greenberg’s argument that crime suppression has to be part of any Democratic outreach to working-class voters.


Trump’s offensive also includes the breaking up of homeless encampments, with their residents sent to shelters or, if they refuse to go, then to jails. Giving voice to his larger desire to make poor people invisible, he remarked yesterday, “We’re getting rid of slums, too.” This shouldn’t be interpreted as his desire to build affordable housing; I suspect it’s more like his wish for a class-based ethnic cleansing of D.C.’s struggling lower-class Black community. That struggling should be no mystery. As American cities go, D.C. is at the top of the list for metro areas that offer almost no opportunities for remunerative blue-collar work or manual labor. It’s pre-eminently an office city with an office culture, which comes with a side of low-wage jobs in retail, hospitality, and other services. Outside of construction, opportunities for blue-collar men are few and far between—a growing national problem of which the nation’s capital is at the cutting edge. Rather than grapple with this problem, Trump’s default solution appears to run the micro-gamut from banishment to imprisonment.


Despite the falling rate of D.C. crime, the District is low-hanging fruit for a federal takeover. The D.C. home-rule law explicitly permits the president to take over the police force if he deems the city to be in an emergency and gives him unchecked authority to deploy the National Guard in those circumstances as well. The federalization can only last for 30 days, however, unless Congress votes to extend it. That would require 60 votes in the Senate, and its Democratic members aren’t going to let that total reach 60, though Trump would like to provoke so much protest that he can hammer the Democrats for being soft on crime. Then again, he’ll hammer the Democrats for being soft on crime even if there are no protests, which there doubtless will be and doubtless should be.


Trump knows that the vast majority of residents in America’s metropolises are dead set against his policies and hold him in contempt. (In the 2024 presidential election, Kamala Harris got 90.3 percent of the D.C. vote; Trump got 6.5.) What we saw in Los Angeles and are now seeing in D.C. is his way of punishing them for opposing him, as well as his attempt to agglomerate more power for himself over his opponents. These are the most dangerous displays yet of his authoritarian impulses and agendas.


Just as the presence of troops in L.A. provoked protests, so Trump is hoping that the quality of his now enhanced D.C. policing will provoke protests even if the quantity of newly deployed troops and agents isn’t in itself up to the task. In his press conference yesterday, he all but ordered the cops to run amok. Currently, he said, “they’re not allowed to do anything. But now they are allowed to do whatever the hell they want.”

– HAROLD MEYERSON

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