The News
President Donald Trump used a template for his takeover of DC policing that’s worked for him before: Move quickly, establish a large and visible security presence — then wait for Democrats to splinter over how to respond.
Democrats in Congress denounced the 30-day mobilization inside the capital, which Trump previewed during the 2024 election, as an “unjustified power grab” and vowed to block an extension. The city’s elected attorney general called it an “unlawful” abuse of emergency powers to lower crime rates that the administration itself said had fallen.
But DC Mayor Muriel Bowser was more cautious, denouncing Trump’s takeover as “authoritarian” while also suggesting that the city could work with him. “What I’m focused on is the federal surge and how to make the most of the additional officer support that we have,” the mayor told reporters on Tuesday, after meeting with Attorney General Pam Bondi.
Hours later, in a video “conversation with community leaders,” Bowser said that the intervention was legal; the president had invoked “a part of the charter that he has the prerogative to invoke.” She acknowledged the city had long-standing problems, like illegal gun trafficking and violence in nightlife areas, and said the federal government could now help with them.
“Just imagine if we had the number of [DC police] officers that we should have — if we were at 3,800, instead of 3,100 and some,” said Bowser.
While protesters rallied near the White House, denouncing the administration’s “colonialism” and demanding DC statehood, Bowser was trying to effectively co-own the takeover.
In Bowser, the president has found an unlikely partner — a Democrat who had repeatedly clashed with progressives on crime, denouncing the “defund the police” movement that flourished in 2020 and stalling a criminal justice bill that Republicans in Congress later repealed.
On Wednesday, after announcing that he’d host this year’s Kennedy Center Honors, the president suggested that more rollbacks of the capital’s criminal code were on the way.
“We’re going to need a crime bill that we’re gonna be putting in,” Trump told reporters, “and it’s going to pertain initially to DC.”
Know More
Congressional Democrats lined up to criticize Trump’s move on the capital, which gave the president just 7% of its votes last year. Many of them linked this week’s crackdown to his deployment of troops into Los Angeles earlier this year to quell anti-ICE protests.
But those protests happened in a small section of the city, giving the Marines very little to do, at great expense.
But DC’s legal status is unique; it’s a city with “home rule” powers limited by Congress and the Constitution. Republicans had already moved legislation through the House that would scale back policies supported by the council and voters, like non-citizen voting in local elections.
DC politicians agree on the need for full statehood, which faces constitutional hurdles that no Democratic Congress has overcome. They disagree on how to get there.
Ken Cedeno/Reuters
Activists in groups like Free DC, a statehood group formed in the unsuccessful fight to save the Revised Criminal Code Act two years ago, have made a basic human rights argument for statehood. As they see it, no Americans should be denied representation in Congress or full control over their laws.
Other Democrats, Bowser included, see statehood moving even further out of reach if voters outside the district see it as dangerous and poorly led.
The Trump administration has exploited that division and previewed the sort of changes it wants to force on the city, potentially with some Democratic buy-in. Trayon White, an indicted Democratic city council member who in 2023 called for the National Guard to enter the DC “war zone,” wrote on Instagram that the president could be fixing a problem.
“It’s not popular, but I hear from our senior citizens and they are afraid,” White wrote. “I am not against additional support led by DC (not a takeover) in the community, especially when AK47s and 30-40 rounds are prevalent at these crime scenes and MPD numbers are low.”
In a press conference and a Washington Post column, DC US Attorney Jeanine Pirro previewed several changes that Republicans are seeking to the city’s criminal justice laws: a repeal of the Youth Rehabilitation Act, a revision of the Incarceration Reduction Amendment Act, and a repeal of the Second Chance Amendment Act.
Bowser has been critical of the first law, which exempts defendants under age 25 from mandatory minimums; she supported the other laws. But she has clashed with the council over a law that decriminalized fare evasion on public transit and vetoed the reform of the district’s criminal code that later became a soft GOP target in Congress.
At the same time, she has lobbied hard for a deal that would bring a football stadium to the city. That’s become another valuable point of leverage used by Trump against DC’s government.
Room for Disagreement
Free DC’s rally against Trump’s move was the highest-profile act of protest in the city since he made his announcement, and it clarified where the most active resistance was coming from.
“If Trump cared about DC, he would acknowledge that our babies, our 14-year-olds, our children — he would not be demanding that they be prosecuted as adults,” said Free DC director Keya Chatterjee.
“We will not sacrifice our children to a tyrant,” said Samantha Davis, the founder of the Black Swan Academy. “Harsher punishment does not improve outcomes for young people in DC or anywhere. We know this. History has shown this. Research has shown this.”
The protest took place not far from the White House, on a stretch of 16th Street NW that had been painted with the words BLACK LIVES MATTER during the 2020 protests against police violence. After a group of protesters added “= DEFUND THE POLICE” to the mural, Bowser had the extra words removed.
She removed the entire mural in March, bowing to pressure from Republicans in Congress.
Jonathan Ernst/Reuters
David’s view
The major project of modern Democratic politics, from the pages of to California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s campaign stops in South Carolina, is convincing people that their party can be trusted to govern without messing things up.
That’s what some Democrats have tried to do in DC, highlighting the falling crime rate and asking why the $1 billion in local cash that got swiped by the GOP during congressional budget negotiations this year can’t be restored.
Why can’t DC tell the same success story as San Francisco — criminal justice reforms that got too lax, followed by aggressive community policing that put repeat offenders in jail? Does the administration want a solution or a campaign issue?
If you take the president and Pirro at their words: They want both. The White House wants to tell the story of a city wrecked by incompetent progressives, then rescued by men who weren’t scared by the optics of armored vehicles parked next to the Washington Monument.
Just as Los Angeles was “liberated,” the capital can be “liberated” from Democrats with crazy ideas who think crime and vagrancy are just part of living in a city.
Bowser’s willingness to work with the administration could complicate that. Democrats are not just competing over crime statistics; they are competing against TV images of crime, TV interviews with victims’ families, and a police union — hated by protesters, credible to voters — that supports the takeover. The long tail of the 2020 protests is a consensus between nervous Democrats and confident Republicans that cities need more police, with more resources. And if they can’t get that, they might lose their sovereignty.
Notable
In Politico, Michael Schaeffer talks with the mayor and tries to understand why she is so “zen” about the takeover. “The appeasement approach hasn’t worked,” says former council member Elissa Silverman. “We’re trying to hold onto the limited home rule that we have,” says DC council member Christina Henderson.
In the Associated Press, Ashraf Khalil and Lindsay Whitehurst report on how the mobilization is working so far.
In The Washington Post, Colbert King argues that a “distracted and clueless city hall” gave Trump more DC targets to hit.
