[[link removed]]

TRUMP IS TAKING OVER D.C. POLICE BECAUSE HE’S A RACIST THUG  
[[link removed]]


 

Melissa Gira Grant
August 12, 2025
The New Republic
[[link removed]]


*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ Trump doesn’t care about “crime.” He cares about the right
white people being in charge. On his first day in office in 2025, he
pardoned 1,500 people convicted of assault and property destruction on
January 6. _

President Donald Trump speaks to the press, accompanied by Attorney
General Pam Bondi and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, about deploying
federal law enforcement agents in Washington to bolster the local
police presence, in the Press Briefing Room at the , at the White
House, Aug.11, 2025, (Photo: Jonathan Ernst, Reuters // USA Today)

 

It’s still possible, despite my daily exposure to horrific
announcements from the Trump administration, for a White House press
conference to make me sick with dread. On August 11, the president
announced that he was taking federal control of the police force in
Washington, D.C., and deploying the National Guard to its streets. As
has become routine, Trump attempted to give legitimacy to his entirely
gratuitous actions with executive orders, one declaring a nonexistent
“crime emergency
[[link removed]]”
in Washington, the other “restoring law and order
[[link removed]]”
by directing Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to activate the D.C.
National Guard. As Trump’s press conference meandered on, various
Cabinet members peppered their remarks with praise—that Trump is
“saving” the city, etc. Some blocks away, at Lafayette Square,
residents of our nation’s capital protested
[[link removed]] the
coming occupation of the district. “While this action today is
unsettling and unprecedented,” said
[[link removed]] D.C. Mayor Murial
Bowser, “I can’t say that given some of the rhetoric of the past
… we’re totally surprised.”

In the response to this takeover of Washington’s law enforcement,
there has been a tendency to hit back with fact-checks. News
stories cite
[[link removed]] statistics
showing that crime in D.C. is at record lows
[[link removed]].
There is no evidence, contrary to Trump’s claims
[[link removed]], that
“caravans of mass youth rampage through city streets at all times of
day.” However, as a political response to such lies, or to
Trump’s invocation
[[link removed]] of
“violent gangs and bloodthirsty criminals, roving mobs of wild youth
and drugged-out maniacs,” along with the other racist tropes that he
regularly invokes, crime numbers alone are inadequate. Uniting the
blundering theater of the White House press room and the careless
bombast of the executive orders is a deeper story: Today Trump has
claimed the power to take over an American city, casting the city’s
leadership as inept and its police as powerless “because of woke,”
which is another way of saying _because the right white people are
not in charge._

At the press conference, an array of the right white people could be
seen flanking Trump on the cramped riser. Hegseth and Attorney General
Pam Bondi were there, along with other Cabinet and top law enforcement
officials. But Trump’s invocation of the dangers of “woke” was
evidenced by more than just the identities of the people he hired to
praise him and carry out his decrees. “The radical left got out of
control, and they started trying to rip down statues,” Trump said
[[link removed]]. “I
found an old statute, very old, early 1900s, that said if you so much
as touch or think about destroying a statue or a monument in
Washington, D.C., you go to jail for 10 years, no probation, no
anything.” Setting aside whatever this “very old” statute
actually says or does or means, its mention showed that Trump was
attempting to link his seizure of Washington’s law enforcement and
his decision to send in the Guard to the very recent removal of some
Confederate statues. “This was a sick, woke culture that I think
we’ve largely ended,” Trump said
[[link removed]].

Why would Trump turn to this story when announcing a police crackdown
on Washington? The reference was a pointed throwback to the summer
uprisings of 2020, after police in Minneapolis murdered George Floyd.
But it was also a way of emphasizing that for Trump, what divides
“law” from “lawlessness” is power. He’s far more invested in
defending symbols of white rule, not to mention actual white rulers,
than in defending people’s safety, in any city.

Eight years ago, on August 11, on the University of Virginia campus in
Charlottesville, dozens of people—mostly men, mostly white—came
bearing flaming tiki torches and chanting antisemitic and racist slurs
to attack a small group of anti-rascist demonstrators. For many, the
terrifying, indelible images from the Unite the Right
[[link removed]] rally
gave the violence of the nascent Trump administration an unmistakable
shape. Old-time KKK leader David Duke put it
[[link removed]] succinctly
at the time: “We’re going to fulfill the promises of Donald Trump
because he said he’s going to take our country back.”
Trump parroted
[[link removed]] the
self-justifications of this group of neo-Nazis, white nationalists,
and others of the so-called alt right, arguing that their presence in
Charlottesville was merely “to protest the taking down of, to them,
a very, very important statue” of Confederate General Robert E. Lee
[[link removed]].
Such hollow distinctions collapsed once some of the same people
[[link removed]] stormed
the Capitol on January 6, 2021, defacing the building, assaulting law
enforcement, and threatening members of Congress. In Trump’s
reasoning, whether they were defecating on congressional offices or
chanting, “Hang Mike Pence,” these people were protesting, this
time, the “taking down” of their president.

The recent talk of “law and order” among Trump and other officials
is, as it usually is in this country, a fearmongering political
maneuver. It is meant to link alleged incompetence and lawlessness
with the political participation or even the mere visibility of Black
people, immigrants, or women—all those whom our leaders have claimed
at multiple points throughout our history lack the capacity to govern
themselves, let alone others. Trump warned other “very bad”
cities—Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, Baltimore, Oakland—that
after D.C., they would be next. All of these cities have Black mayors.
“We’re not going to lose our cities over this,” Trump said
[[link removed]].

It’s been only around 50 years that D.C. residents have been able to
vote for president, or even for their own mayor and City Council.
Their fight for home rule is also a struggle for Black
self-representation, as Martin Austermuhle recounted
[[link removed]] at The 51st, a
nonprofit Washington news site. The fight stretches back to the days
of Reconstruction and through the Civil Rights Movement to this
moment. After the Civil War, it was white residents, Austermuhle
wrote, who “pushed back on an elected mayor and council altogether
because Black residents had been given the right to vote in those
elections—and were winning council seats.”

In the presser, Trump’s tough guy talk veered from D.C. museums to
the border, from disorder to dissent, from protesters to
“criminals.” He accused some of “spitting” in cops’ faces.
“And I said, ‘You tell them you spit and we hit,’ and they get
hit real hard.” He claimed, of police, “They’re not allowed to
do anything. But now they are allowed to do whatever the hell they
want.” Trump is purportedly empowering the police in Washington,
perhaps even some of the officers who surely remember that when they
were under assault on January 6, Trump took hours to call in the
National Guard.

The president is entirely consistent in his regard for the law. He
ordered D.C. police to “do whatever the hell they want” to
whomever he says is a “criminal,” and on his first day in office
in 2025, he pardoned
[[link removed]] 1,500
people convicted of assault and property destruction on January 6.
Crime is fine, if it’s for Trump. Then it’s not even
crime—it’s just power. And power is getting to define what crime
is.

_[MELISSA GIRA GRANT
[[link removed]] is a staff writer
at The New Republic and the author of Playing the Whore: The Work of
Sex Work
[[link removed]].]_

* Washington DC
[[link removed]]
* crime
[[link removed]]
* Donald Trump
[[link removed]]
* Trump 2.0
[[link removed]]
* Racism
[[link removed]]
* Executive powers
[[link removed]]
* police state
[[link removed]]
* National Guard
[[link removed]]
* Federal troops
[[link removed]]
* Fascism
[[link removed]]
* law and order
[[link removed]]
* Jan. 06 Capitol Insurrection
[[link removed]]
* Capital coup
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web
[[link removed]]

Submit via email
Frequently asked questions
[[link removed]]
Manage subscription
[[link removed]]
Visit xxxxxx.org
[[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 




[link removed]

To unsubscribe, click the following link:
[link removed]