Trump’s military takeover of Washington, D.C. is a huge power demonstration | Moira Donegan

pResident Trump conducted a military takeover of the national capital on Monday, sending the National Guard to Washington. He also seized control of the DC City Police Department, citing an obscure part of the 1973 DC Home Rule Act, which allowed the president to control local law enforcement in the area for a month in an emergency.

No emergency is irrelevant: Trump declared a person to exercise powers that can only be used in exceptional circumstances, and of course, the whole country increasingly experienced its own experiences as the president expanded his post from the position of a constitutional executive.

The move comes after the Trump administration deployed the National Guard and Marines to Los Angeles earlier this year. In a press conference announcing the move on Monday, Trump suggested that he also intends to deploy the military to cities such as Baltimore, Oakland and New York. “This will go further,” he said. Deployment “We start very strongly with DC”, reflecting Trump’s continued determination to further erode long-standing American taboos to prevent deployment of military personnel for domestic law enforcement.

The excuse for such a move is almost irrelevant. In Los Angeles, Trump claims protests against his administration’s kidnapping of immigrants have led to unsustainable chaos in the city. no. In Washington, D.C., Trump also claimed that the crime was out of control. It’s not. (In fact, crime has dropped dramatically in Washington over the past decade, and violent crime has fallen. More than half Since 2013; the decline in crime rates has dropped particularly sharply since 2023. )

In some dark comedy, Attorney General Pam Bondi appeared in a press conference and stood on the podium to announce that on both sides of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and President Trump, the District of Columbia crimes will soon end, with two men charged – in the Trump case – convicted – with many crimes themselves.

But no one should really believe that deploying troops to the most liberal, diverse, and prosperous cities in the United States is a practical response to the actual crisis. On the contrary, the thinness of excuses is itself a proof of power. The Trump administration and the National Republicans are more widely willing to argue that democratic rule is illegal even if democratic politicians are formally elected. Starting from this premise, the nationalization of law enforcement in DC seized the authority that correctly belonged to local Democratic officials and distributed it to Republican national figures who would not disagree and would not tolerate policies that disagree with them.

Ultimately, such a move may not lead to widespread violence: In addition to the lack of too much actual crime for them to respond, the capital is incredibly hot in the summer, and one imagines sleepy National Guard units wandering aimlessly in the August swamp heat, lingering over the August swamp heat, withering, waving tactical gears. But in a country with sufficient civic virtues, efforts should be solicited to spawn mass protests.

After all, the troops did not solve the real problem. Trump has no actual crisis. Instead, they were there, because the President wanted to send a message: cities and states that were not legally respected him would impose his will by force. The result is Trump so successful in waving the shaky and threatening politics University and Main business: He will exert pain on anyone who disobeys his will.

A strange aspect of the Trump era is the constant retreat of terms such as “dictatorship” and “authoritarianism.” If regulations technically grant him legal powers, is Trump’s “authoritarian” move to seize control of DC police forces? If the mechanisms used to extend the presidential control to things like private university admissions policies, is it a “dictatorship”?

If soldiers marched on the streets of the Capitol, would it really be a collapsed democracy? These questions sound ridiculous when you say it out loud. When efforts to sustain denial become desperate, they sound like an excuse. They are also often debates involving some semantic issues, which are a bad sign when they appear: if the answer is good, no one will ask this question.

However, the militarization of DC also illustrates the core characteristics of the fascist regime, namely their rhetoric and realistic collapse. Symbolism, language, images: These are the core of Trump’s political project, which is as much as material. Trump’s claims about crime and chaos are simple lies. But the power of making your lie have the power of fact is a terrible power. No one can suspect that Trump has caught it.