Sending in troops against made-up mayhem, Trump plays little dictator in D.C.
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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
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