Sending in troops against made-up mayhem, Trump plays little dictator in D.C.
Four and a half years after his attempted coup, the president is sending in the military to secure the city against criminals — excluding himself, of course
This piece was previously published at The Hot Screen.
Today’s announcement by President Trump that he’s deploying National Guard troops to Washington, D.C. and asserting federal control over its police needs to be seen in the context of the president’s authoritarian aspirations over the United States more generally. Using the false pretext of out-of-control crime in the District, his actions are better understood not as a response to reality, but as a project to conjure for the public a mythical world: on in which military force is needed to defeat domestic baddies, presidential power is supreme and without limit, and states and cities not governed by MAGA are lawless hellholes where Democratic elected officials have lost their political legitimacy.
As D.C.’s attorney general noted in response to Trump’s announcement, “Violent crime in DC reached historic 30-year lows last year, and is down another 26% so far this year.” In other words, civil authorities and regular policing have been sufficient to usher in declines from spikes in crime that were experienced not just in D.C., but across the United States as a side effect of the covid pandemic’s economic and social disruptions. But where other elected officials see progress and basic facts, President Trump has invented an alternate reality, rooted in racism, bloodlust, and a desire for domination. In this alternate reality, D.C. is beset by “bloodthirsty criminals” and “roving mobs of wild youth,” and is in danger of becoming a “wasteland.”
Given Washington, D.C.’s majority-black status and Trump’s fundamental white supremacism, the takeover of D.C. security based on invocations of total lawlessness is shot through with a racism that is both shockingly deliberate and depressingly casual. The idea that the city is home to “roving mobs of wild youth” who recognize only force (“They fight back until you knock the hell out of them, because it’s the only language they understand,” the president noted) feels like a callback to the “superpredator” discourse of the 1990’s — but to be fair, this is the way that Trump has long talked about (minority) criminals. Not only is their full human status questionable, but their citizenship and accompanying rights are subjects to laugh off.
And this is where the racism towards an alleged, irredeemable criminal class blends seamlessly into an underlying assertion that blue cities and states can’t be trusted to govern themselves. After all, what sort of mayor or governor would let their city be overrun by barely human predators? In this way, the attempt to deny the constitutional rights of both elected officials and those who put them in office can more easily be set to the side: these are people who don’t even know how to protect themselves, let alone govern themselves.
Back in the real world, though, the idea that you’d send in the military to fight crime has generally been recognized as a measure of last resort — the paradigmatic example may be when a governor sends in the National Guard to assist the police to control large-scale, violent rioting that law enforcement legitimately cannot check on its own. Absent such a situation, we should name the deployment of military forces (and the takeover of police by federal authorities) to the streets of an American city for what it is: an authoritarian abuse of power. We can say this with confidence because Trump’s actions have hardly come out of nowhere; not only did he and his allies talk about sending troops into U.S. cities during his first term and in the following four years, but he has already in his second term nationalized Guard forces and even sent in Marines based on false claims of out-of-control violence in Los Angeles. And sure enough, in his remarks today, President Trump indicated that his administration is looking at replicating such deployments in other supposedly crime-ridden cities like Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles (and which all happen to be governed by Democrats).
The deployment of U.S. troops to blue cities is the most ostentatious manifestation of what political analyst Ronald Brownstein has described as a de facto MAGA war on blue America; as he wrote in response to the president’s D.C. announcement, “Trump governs as a wartime president, with blue America, rather than any foreign adversary, as the enemy. Arresting officials, rescinding funds, targeting for mass deportation, inserting federal forces-maybe redoing Census?” As we must always hold in mind, context is key: we can’t view these D.C. deployments in isolation, but as key parts of a larger MAGA war to remake America in its retrograde image, which means diminishing and subduing the power of blue cities and states. Such a diagnosis might still have seemed outlandish before Trump’s second presidential victory, but the evidence of this crusade has grown overwhelming. While D.C. might have provided an especially vulnerable target, given its lack of statehood and substantial federal control over its governance, it would be deeply naive not to see the current melange of lies and illegitimate force being a test run for further incursions into “hostile” territory.
Reporting by Greg Sargent at the New Republic last week also drives home that martial intimidation for reasons of political domination is the true purpose of actions like the D.C. deployments. Sargent parses a leaked internal Department of Homeland Security memo, whose “upshot seems to be that DHS is urging top Pentagon officials to prioritize using the military against illegal immigration to a substantially greater and unprecedented degree, and that discussions are underway to accomplish that, with Defense Secretary Hegseth’s blessing.” Significantly, he adds that, “The larger context here is that the administration has taken extraordinary license in its invention of pretexts for draconian domestic operations,” including “numerous fake pretexts for sending troops into L.A.” Whether the supposed reason is crime or immigration, the Trump White House seems obsessed with finding ways to send troops into Democratic-controlled cities and states.
So why this obsession? In one sense, such deployments effect a symbolic “dominance” of blue parts of the country, showing the MAGA base that Trump truly thinks of its opponents as actual enemies. His eagerness to send in the troops validates what logic and historical experience also tell us: these heavy-handed efforts aren’t just meant to intimidate criminals and immigrants, but are practically guaranteed to sweep up the innocent and the guilty alike. After all, soldiers aren’t trained to balance civil rights and public safety — they’re trained to kill America’s enemies. When troops are sent to U.S. cities on the false assertion that those cities have either been invaded by immigrants or taken over by criminals, they are essentially being invited to act as warfighters on America’s own streets. At a brutal, grotesque level, they’re a way to threaten citizens who “voted the wrong way” while maintaining a veneer of deniability that this is part of the reason for their domestic presence.
But the larger political purpose would seem to involve portraying Democratic leaders as weak and easily bullied. They couldn’t stop crime or immigration in their cities, and couldn’t stop the president from sending in the Marines, either! What cucks! And though it feels ominous to contemplate, there seems to be at least a tacit strategy of acclimating Americans to accept the presence of the military on their streets — a presence that could segue into a role in undermining the conduct of future elections under a pretense of protecting them (against the familiar baddies, bloodthirsty criminals and immigrants, but in reality against the casting and counting of votes). Given how lawless Trump and his minions have already been, how could they not be thinking of physically subverting the midterms (and other elections beyond)? Awareness of that threat isn’t being paranoid or overreactive, it’s reading the full intent and capacities of an authoritarian movement.
Beyond this big picture take on what we’re seeing in D.C., we shouldn’t overlook Trump’s consistent, if not always foregrounded, hatred and dehumanization of the homeless. For instance, during his first term, I believe while on a trip to Los Angeles, he spoke of homeless encampments almost as a purely aesthetic offense against the city, while evincing not a whit of sympathy for the actual human beings living with such deprivation. And a few months ago, I was not surprised to see reports that the Justice Department was looking at ways to clear homeless camps and to involuntarily hospitalize mentally ill people living on the street. Trump has alluded to his disgust with Washington, D.C.’s homeless population before, and it’s notable that in some ways these unfortunate citizens have been put on the same threat level as “bloodthirsty” criminals.
It’s also striking that in D.C., Trump’s vision is not to house the homeless but to make them disappear, in what he clearly sees as an actual cleansing of unworthy people from sight and public life. If such social purification isn’t a sign of his homespun fascism, I really don’t know what is. It’s also worth noting, as another piece of this toxic stew, that as with those of a criminal bent who don’t even need to commit crimes to deserve a crackdown, Trump and MAGA consider the homeless to be inherently beyond redemption. As in so many other areas, so with America’s homelessness crisis: Donald Trump saw it as an opportunity to exploit, not a problem to solve — and for him and MAGA, the fact that homelessness is so often associated with blue cities very much makes it a festering wound to poke and prod for political gain.
And speaking of festering wounds, this latest instance of Trump using the District and its citizens as a MAGA piñata should finally put to rest whatever lingering resistance to D.C. statehood still manages to feebly burn among Democratic politicos and voters. What is happening in D.C. is offensive and painful, but all the more so given its predictability and perverseness. Reading news articles that mention the “Home Rule Act” and Trump’s ability to take over the D.C. police is akin to reading about some hapless foreign colony deprived of basic sovereignty. Washington, D.C. is well beyond taxation without representation, into the dark territory of exploitation and repression without representation. But at least we know how to cure this absurd situation (and how to provide a banner day for the American flag industry in one go).
But somehow, an even greater absurdity than D.C.’s lack of statehood was highlighted today. For all his wild claims of lawlessness ravaging the District, Trump failed to acknowledge the city’s unforgettable day of infamy four and half years ago. On that day, of course, it was Donald Trump’s bloodthirsty hordes that sacked the Capitol, beat cops, and not simply broke the law but threatened the actual rule of law — all at Trump’s behest and in his name. This is how you know that Trump truly isn’t serious about fighting crime in D.C.: he declined to send the National Guard after the biggest mob boss of them all, living rent-free in the people’s house on Pennsylvania Avenue.