The president says he’s facing an emergency situation. Citing a handful of anecdotes and some flimsy statistics, he claims unprecedented powers, daring Congress and the courts to challenge him. If he gets away with it, he goes further.
This week, the emergency was a “wave” of juvenile crime in Washington, D.C., and the supposed remedy was ordering 800 National Guard troops into the city and placing the Metropolitan Police Department under federal control.
It’s too soon to tell how this will end. But we know that it won’t stop here.
Since taking office again in January, Trump has claimed broad new powers after making exaggerated claims of emergencies on everything from the economy to immigration. In each case, the handful of facts that he cites are not nearly persuasive enough to justify the powers he claims.
This one is personal for me. I’ve lived in D.C. for a decade. My husband runs the restaurant association of the region and once served as the city’s first “night mayor” — a liaison between the mayor’s office and the businesses that are the backbone of its nightlife.
We own a home in the district and have made a conscious decision to raise our family here. Public safety isn’t an abstraction, it’s personal. So let me be clear: D.C. is not the war zone Trump describes. His own Justice Department reports violent crime is has dropped to some of the lowest levels its been in decades.
Sound familiar? On immigration, Trump exaggerated solvable border challenges into a supposed “invasion” that he used to authorize sweeping raids and mass detention. In California, that led to immigration officials hitting Latino communities with tear gas and flash bangs.
Now that his efforts in Los Angeles have died down, Trump has turned his sights on his own backyard.
In a recent appearance on “The Weeknight,” MSNBC legal analyst Lisa Rubin said that the nation’s capital is the “perfect laboratory” for Trump’s authoritarian experiments because Congress and the president have certain powers over it. It also happens to be a big city with a sizable Black population, making it even more of a target for Trump.
The history is sobering. From the Red Summer of 1919 to civil unrest after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., federal forces have been deployed in American cities under the banner of restoring “order” almost always in communities of color.
In the 1980s and ’90s, myths about young Black “superpredators” fueled punitive sentencing laws that decimated Black families without making communities safer.
Throughout all this, white political leaders have used these moments to question the very capacity of locally elected Black leaders to govern, in an echo of the colonial mindset so often used to justify taking over other countries.
Trump didn’t invent this strategy. He’s just updating it for the age of social media.
Trump claims he’s doing all this to make the city safer. But putting more uniformed officers on street corners don’t make people feel safer — especially when they are wearing military fatigues. In some communities, they can actually make people feel less safe.
D.C. may be a target of convenience for now, but Trump will try this tactic again in other major cities. He’s already mentioned Baltimore and Chicago, two other Democratic-leaning cities with sizable Black populations.
Each time, the playbook is the same: paint a distorted picture of urban “chaos,” question the competence of local Black leadership, and then push for federal intervention that strips away local control. It’s political theater with a dangerous racial subtext that is designed to undermine not just the city in question, but the very idea that diverse, Democratic-led cities can govern themselves.
If Trump can federalize policing on a flimsy pretext in D.C., he can do it anywhere — not just Baltimore and Chicago but also Philadelphia, Milwaukee and Oakland, California.
If he succeeds, Trump will have essentially overturned local elections, taking powers for himself that voters had chosen to give to people who stand against everything Trump says and does. That’s the real public threat, and it’s spreading.
This article was originally published on MSNBC.com
