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PORTSIDE CULTURE

SETH MEYERS ON DONALD TRUMP’S DC POLICE TAKEOVER: ‘THIS IS ALL
JUST THEATER’  
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Guardian Staff
August 14, 2025
The Guardian
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_ Late-night host discusses Trump’s rambling Kennedy Center speech
and his deployment of the national guard in DC as a playbook for other
cities _

Seth Meyers: ‘The right has created this myth about crime in big
cities that isn’t true.’ , Photograph: YouTube

 

With several late-night hosts on holiday, Seth Meyers
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look at the Trump administration’s deployment of the national guard
in Washington DC
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for other cities
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“Donald Trump [[link removed]] is
always laser-focused on the important stuff – no, not inflation, not
healthcare, not jobs,” said Seth Meyers on Wednesday evening.
“He’s focused on giving himself an award.”

On Wednesday, Trump gave a typically rambling speech
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the John F Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the formerly
prestigious performance hall that he took over early in his term,
purging the board and replacing it with loyalists. Presenting the
center’s annual honorees, the president said: “I always wanted
one, I was never able to get one … I would’ve taken it, if they
would’ve called me. I waited, and waited, and waited, and then said,
‘To hell with it, I’ll become chairman and I’ll give myself an
honor.’ Next year we’ll honor Trump, OK?”

“I like how everyone laughs at him, and then he says, ‘No, it’s
true, actually,’” the Late Night host responded. “Second, he’s
definitely not joking about giving himself an award. This is the guy
who made a fake Time magazine cover for himself to hang on his wall.

“I have no trouble believing that he’d give himself a made-up
award called the ‘Kennedy Center Lifetime Achievement Nobel Prize
EGOT Award for Most Everything’,” Meyers added.

Trump also announced that he would host the annual Kennedy Center
Honors, and claimed he had to be talked into it by his team because he
has better things to do as president. “Well, I think you deserve the
award for best original screenplay, because that’s definitely a fake
conversation that did not happen,” Meyers laughed.

Meyers then turned to the other major political story this week: Trump
taking over the Washington DC Metropolitan police and deploying the
national guard to combat a made-up crime wave in the city. Meyers
noted that Republicans see this action as a playbook for other cities,
despite the fact that, in truth, violent crime rates are down in most
major cities. The states with the highest crime rates, such as
Louisiana and Mississippi, are largely controlled by Republicans.

“The right has created this myth about crime in big cities that
isn’t true,” Meyers said. “It’s a playbook that Republicans
have used for decades, and Trump repeated it in 2024.

“In a clear sign that this is all just theater, Trump is threatening
to only send the national guard to cities controlled by Democrats,”
calling the DC action a “beacon for New York, Chicago, Los Angeles
and other places all over the country”.

“The myth of urban crime is central to the right’s worldview,”
Meyers noted. “For years, they basically made it their whole thing
to be afraid of cities.” He pointed to the example of the US
transportation secretary, Sean Duffy, on Fox News, complaining about
crime rates on the New York City subway and also taking a shot at its
cleanliness.

Meyers got defensive. “Only New Yorkers are allowed to shit on the
New York City subway. I mean that figuratively and sadly sometimes
literally,” he said.

“Trump doesn’t want to fix problems in big cities, because he
loves problems in big cities,” he concluded. “He loves problems
anywhere that can distract from his problems. And he definitely has
problems – his polling numbers are not great, his Maga base is
questioning his ties to Jeffrey Epstein and voters are starting to
suspect that the Trump administration might be,” to quote Trump
himself, “a crime pot.”

* Donald Trump
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* Authoritarianism
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* Washington DC
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* Police
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