Keep in mind “I alone can repair it”? Donald Trump, who made that laughable assertion in his 2016 conference acceptance speech, is now testing the idea in Washington.
Trump and his get together have been threatening a D.C. takeover for years and made it a part of the Republican platform final yr. But it surely was all simply empty discuss and random uppercase phrases till a former staffer on the Division of Authorities Effectivity was reportedly attacked in an tried carjacking within the wee hours of Aug. 3 in a busy space of bars and eating places.
It doesn’t matter in any respect to Trump that D.C.’s violent crime price fell to a 30-year low final yr and is down one other 26% to date this yr in contrast with 2024, or {that a} police report suggests police noticed the incident and intervened. This specific sufferer — a teenage Elon Musk protégé and infamous DOGE operative — gave this specific president the “emergency” he wanted to declare a “public security emergency.”
After all, he referred to as it “a historic motion to rescue our nation’s capital from crime, bloodshed, bedlam and squalor and worse.” He has federalized the town’s Metropolitan Police Division and deployed 800 members of its Nationwide Guard (to start out). Over the weekend he despatched 450 federal law enforcement officials from 18 businesses to patrol the town.
It’s the second time this yr that Trump has performed the Nationwide Guard card to indicate who’s boss. He despatched 4,000 Guard troops and 700 Marines to Los Angeles in June, over the objections of Gov. Gavin Newsom and Mayor Karen Bass, ostensibly to revive order amid immigration raids. However the transfer sparked new tensions, protests and a minimum of one surreal foray by armed, masked brokers right into a park the place kids had been attending summer season camp. It additionally drew a authorized problem from Newsom, which is unfolding in court docket this week.
There will likely be no comparable lawsuit in D.C., the place I’ve lived for many years. That’s as a result of the U.S. president controls our Nationwide Guard. The onerous fact is that although Wyoming and Vermont every have fewer individuals than D.C.’s 700,000-plus residents, D.C. isn’t a state. It’s nonetheless in a semi-colonial standing, with a mayor and metropolis council whose actions might be nullified by Congress, and with no voting illustration in that Congress.
The truth is, Congress by chance slashed $1.1 billion from D.C.’s funds — our personal cash, not federal {dollars}! — in its cost-cutting frenzy final spring. A promised repair by no means got here, forcing cuts that have an effect on public security and far else. And but the town’s crime price has continued to fall.
In contrast with California, an financial juggernaut of greater than 39 million individuals situated hundreds of miles from Washington, D.C. is a minuscule and all too handy goal for an govt aiming to show his manhood, showcase to autocrats in different international locations or create headlines to distract from information he doesn’t like.
I may go off on Trump for his lies, overreach and disrespect for D.C. and its proper to control itself. Or the varied Republicans who’ve imposed conservative insurance policies on D.C. for years and now try to repeal its house rule legislation.
However what actually enrages me is the dearth of Democratic nerve — and even bravado — that has left D.C. so susceptible to Trump and conservative-run Congresses. The place was the modern-day Lyndon Johnson (the “grasp of the Senate,” in Robert Caro’s phrase) in 2021, to whip help within the narrowly Democratic Senate after the Home handed a D.C. statehood invoice for the second yr in a row?
Trump has no mastery past bullying and bribery — however these techniques are working tremendous with Congress, firms, legislation corporations, academia and sovereign nations throughout the globe. As former Home Speaker Newt Gingrich put it final week: “You’ve got this rock standing in the course of historical past referred to as Donald Trump. And he’s saying: ‘Do you need to do it my manner, or do you need to be crushed? I want you do it my manner, but when you must be crushed, that’s OK.’ ”
Gingrich appropriately characterised most responses to Trump as “You already know, I’ve at all times wished to be a part of the group,” and added: “If he can maintain this, he’s transferring right into a league that, apart from Washington and Lincoln, no person has gotten to the extent of vitality, drive and effectiveness that we see with Trump.”
Sadly, Trump is aiming to speed-raze what Washington and Lincoln constructed. (He retains claiming it’s “Liberation Day” for D.C., however the final “Liberation Day” — his April 2 tariff bulletins — tanked the inventory market.) The one conceivable antidote is to elect a mad-as-hell Democratic Congress in 2026 and, in 2028, an arm-twisting, strong-arming, terror-inspiring Democratic president who’s in a rush to get issues achieved. Somebody who’s forceful, persuasive and resolved to make use of the ability they’ve whereas they’ve it.
The highest priorities, past reversing as a lot institutional and constitutional harm as doable, must be structural: Supreme Courtroom time period limits and ethics guidelines with enamel, a nationwide gerrymandering ban, a wise and uniform nationwide voter ID coverage, and minimal nationwide requirements for early voting and mail voting — to guard the desire of the individuals and the republic itself.
Equally vital, make D.C. the state of Douglass Commonwealth, named after the abolitionist Frederick Douglass moderately than the colonizing Christopher Columbus. Rural America has wielded disproportionate energy for the reason that late 1800s, when Republicans added sparsely populated states and completely skewed the Senate. Two new D.C. senators would assist appropriate that imbalance.
The issue is that the following president, and even the following Congress, would possibly arrive too late for D.C. Trump has already begun the federal takeover he has threatened so usually for thus a few years. He took over the Kennedy Middle. He took over Congress. We must always have anticipated we’d be subsequent.
Again in March, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) proposed that D.C. search non permanent sanctuary with Maryland, which ceded many of the land to create the capital within the first place. “You’d undoubtedly be safer,” he mentioned he advised Mayor Muriel Bowser.
That supply, joke or not, sensible or not, is trying more and more inviting by the day.
Jill Lawrence is a author and creator of “The Artwork of the Political Deal: How Congress Beat the Odds and Broke By Gridlock.” @jilldlawrence.bsky.social
