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WaPo Editors Doing Their Best to Conceal Reporters' Vital Work on DC Occupation Pete Tucker ([link removed])



WaPo: We asked 604 D.C. residents about Trump’s takeover. Here’s what they said.

When the Washington Post (8/20/25 ([link removed]) ) asked 604 DC residents about Trump's takeover, Post editors didn't like what they said, so they took it out of the headline.

As President Donald Trump commandeered DC’s police, and placed tanks, troops and federal agents on the city’s streets, DC’s hometown paper took the pulse of residents. The results from the Washington Post poll were unmistakable.

DC residents “overwhelmingly oppose” Trump’s moves, with around 8 in 10 opposing Trump’s takeover of DC police, the Post reported (8/20/25 ([link removed]) ).

“We’re becoming a police state. I’m afraid of that, I really am,” Joseph Clay, an 89-year-old Black veteran who’s lived in his Northeast DC home since 1966, told the Post. “I wonder if they’re looking at Blacks and browns, and if I myself could be stopped and asked for my credentials.”

The Post noted that “nearly 9 in 10 Washingtonians say their neighborhood is an excellent or good place to live.”

These findings provide a stunning refutation to the stated premise for Trump’s takeover: that DC is experiencing a crime emergency. DC violent crime is, in fact, at a 30-year low ([link removed]) .

But what most caught my eye in the Post story was DC resident Joseph Clay’s other quote. “The only crime I hear about is what I read in the Washington Post,” he said.

The story’s reporters—Joe Heim, Scott Clement and Emily Guskin—surely didn’t need to include this quote. My guess is they did so as a shot across the bow to their colleagues on the Opinion Page, who’ve echoed Trump’s false DC crime narrative (FAIR.org,8/14/25 ([link removed]) ).

But it’s not just the Opinion Page who needs a wake-up call; so do editors on the news side, at least those responsible for writing headlines.

The poll results story’s strong opening stated DC residents “overwhelmingly oppose” Trump’s moves, but the headline only read “Most DC residents oppose” them. And even this downgrade, from “overwhelming” to “most,” wasn’t enough for Post higher-ups, who further weakened the headline to “We Asked 604 DC Residents About Trump’s Takeover. Here’s What They Said.”


** 'First day of school to look different'
------------------------------------------------------------
WaPo: For some in D.C., first day of school to look different under Trump crackdown

The Washington Post (8/24/25 ([link removed]) ) put a "please don't read me" headline over Lauren Lumpkin's harrowing story of children terrified by a state of siege.

This isn’t the only time Post editors slapped on a misleading headline. Monday was the first day of school in DC, and in addition to the normal jitters, students and parents had new ones to navigate.

“I’m kind of scared of being stopped,” Zoe Amen, a 17-year-old high school senior, told the Post (8/24/25 ([link removed]) ).

“I’ve heard from several parents that have decided not to send their children to school because they’re afraid of being detained on the way or on the way back,” Vanessa Rubio, an elementary school mom, told the Post. “I know police and ICE have been present today in our neighborhood.”

Even though students can ride free to and from school on Metro, Yolanda Corbett told the Post she’s considering sending her Black teenage son to school via Uber for as long as she can afford to do so—two, maybe four weeks if she stretches things. Corbett is considering this at a time when federal agents, including masked ones, are lurking around Metro stations ([link removed]) .

Rather than make DC residents feel safe, Trump’s takeover has struck fear in parents and students alike. (A worried five-year-old “asked if Donald Trump was going to come into his school,” the Wall Street Journal reported—8/20/25 ([link removed]) .) The Post’s eye-opening story, by Lauren Lumpkin, ran under the anodyne headline, “For Some in DC, First Day of School to Look Different Under Trump Crackdown.”


** 'Trump fulfills dream role'
------------------------------------------------------------
WaPo: Donald Trump fulfills a dream role: Big-city mayor

The Washington Post's Paul Schwartzman (8/23/25 ([link removed]) ) whitewashed the military occupation of DC as Trump "inserting himself into the hurly-burly of city life."

The headline and framing of another Washington Post story—“Donald Trump Fulfills a Dream Role: Big-City Mayor” (8/23/25 ([link removed]) )—“gave a light-and-frothy treatment” to Trump’s takeover, wrote former Post media columnist Margaret Sullivan (Substack, 8/25/25 ([link removed]) ).

Sullivan took issue with the “soft-pedaled” subhead as well, which read, “The president’s showy effort to ‘clean up’ DC crime, streetlights and even the Kennedy Center has ruffled city leaders who say he has overstepped his authority.”

“With Trump in full dictator mode…mild words like ‘ruffled’ are absurd,” noted Sullivan. If Post readers felt similarly, they could post their concerns beneath the story—under a prompt asking, “What are your thoughts on Donald Trump's approach to managing DC as if he were a big city mayor?”

Despite the “offensive prompt ([link removed]) ,” over a thousand Post readers weighed in, “overwhelmingly [to] criticize” Trump’s approach, “likening it to an authoritarian power grab,” according to the Post’s AI summary of reader comments.

Others took to social media to voice their displeasure with both Trump and the Post. “Stop minimalizing and attempting to normalize this shit,”wrote ([link removed]) one commenter. “He’s a wannabe dictator… This is about asserting control like any strongman would.”


** 'Tactics employed by Franco'
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Washington Post:

The original headline on Kathleen Parker's column (8/15/25 ([link removed]) ) was "DC Residents Should Be Outraged Over Trump's Takeover"—so Post editors changed it to one less likely to outrage them.

But the most head-scratching headline appeared atop one of the only Post columns to meet this fraught moment.

Kathleen Parker began and ended her column (8/15/25 ([link removed]) ) noting how Trump’s DC takeover serves as a distraction from a certain other news story: “Ever since he sent in the National Guard, hardly anyone has been talking about the Jeffrey Epstein files,” Parker wrote. (Trump was closely tied ([link removed]) to the late child molester.)

Parker also called out the racialized nature of Trump’s targets. In addition to DC, Trump is going after “other liberal-leaning cities: New York, Baltimore, Los Angeles, Oakland and Chicago—all places where the mayors happen to be Black,” Parker wrote.

But it’s on the subject of Trump’s authoritarianism that Parker soared:

I don’t want to suggest that Trump is acting like a military dictator. But I have seen—and felt—this type of intimidation before, when I was a student in Spain and witnessed tactics employed by Gen. Francisco Franco, who ruled from 1939, at the end of the Spanish Civil War, until his death in 1975. Franco and Trump share not only an obsession with loyalty but also a willingness to use military force to maintain civilian order.

The inexplicable headline atop Parker’s searing column? “Trump Has Brilliantly Orchestrated a Legal Coup.”

(Parker’s column marked such a departure from the rest of Post Opinions that I reached out to ask if she was leaving the paper, as record numbers of her colleagues have recently done ([link removed]) . I didn’t hear back.)


** 'Scale it up beyond DC'
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WaPo: How should Trump fight crime in D.C.?

Washington Post Opinion (8/21/25 ([link removed]) ) framed a discussion of Trump's occupation of Washington the way he wants it: He's there to "fight crime" and DC is a "crime scene."

Despite these misleading Post headlines, the reporting they sit atop has often been invaluable. But it’s unclear if Post Opinion columnists even bother to read their colleagues’ reporting.

“Many” view Trump’s DC takeover “positively,” Post columnist Shadi Hamid (8/22/25 ([link removed]) ) wrote. Instead of the Post poll from two days earlier—which showed the opposite to be true—Hamid opted to cite another survey. But when I clicked on the link to the survey, I was met with a surprising headline: “Voters Oppose Trump’s Military Deployment in Washington, DC” (Data for Progress, 8/20/25 ([link removed]) ).

Deputy Opinion editor James Hohmann took a different approach to negating his own paper’s poll. “Despite the polls, I think there’s a silent majority that is quite happy to have this packet of Band-Aids,” Hohmann (8/21/25 ([link removed]) ) wrote in regards to Trump’s DC takeover.

“Something is clearly rotten in society when 14-year-olds from out of state are routinely carjacking people,” Hohmann falsely asserted ([link removed]) , before calling on Trump to take his DC putsch to other cities:

This is a chance to come down hard on the gangs and hopefully make the whole community safer, with help from Uncle Sam. Then we just have to figure out how to scale it up beyond DC.

Hohmann’s responsibilities ([link removed]) include “overseeing the Editorial Board.” His boss is the Post’s new 33-year-old Opinions editor Adam O’Neal, who’s promised an opinion page that’s “unapologetically patriotic ([link removed]) ” and conveys “optimism about this country ([link removed]) .” O’Neal is only parroting the edict from billionaire Post owner Jeff Bezos, who has been open about aligning his paper with Trump (FAIR.org, 1/7/25 ([link removed]) , 1/22/25 ([link removed]) , 2/28/25 ([link removed]-
banishes-dissent-from-wapo/) ).

The Post is rotting from the head down. It’s a credit to the paper’s reporters that they continue to produce such quality reporting in this fraught moment, even as Post opinion writers and higher-ups debase themselves and the city they call home.
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