Trump's D.C. clampdown is an affront to America, and Democrats should act like it
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This piece was previously published at The Hot Screen.
Last week, President Trump announced a federal takeover of Washington, D.C.’s police force, along with the deployment of National Guard troops to the city, all to allegedly counter what he described as out-of-control crime and homelessness. I tried to capture the blend of racist fantasy, strongman menace, and bloodthirsty provocation behind these acts, which by any objective analysis show a president eager to find any possible pretext to depict a nation in chaos and his brutal strength as its salvation. In the days since, authoritarian spectacle and reality have arrived on D.C. streets, as government agents harass the unhoused, Homeland Security sets up checkpoints, and Army vehicles roll down civilian avenues.
But while it has not entirely faded from the headlines or discussion by the opposition (including among Democratic elected officials), it’s fair to say that the D.C. deployments are not dominating either news coverage or public discussion to the degree they arguably should. On the one hand, part of the issue is the classic Trump II conundrum: when the onslaught is constant and serious on so many fronts, how do opponents prioritize what to highlight and concentrate their efforts on? What is the case for Trump opponents putting up a fight specifically over events in D.C.? And if they do engage, what should they say, and what strategies should guide them?
Trump’s actions against the District of Columbia merit both concentrated attention and counter-attack because they bring together so many elements of Trump and MAGA’s overall threat to the United States in such a highly visible way: the lawlessness; the eagerness for violence; the racism; the claims of rampant crime and chaos to justify repression; the desire to stamp out dissent and protest; the disregard for the self-determination of ordinary citizens; the utter ease with telling lies to further their power grabs.
Not only are events in D.C. exemplary of what makes Trump so dangerous, they’re also an escalation of a path that the president had already embarked on, given his previous deployment of Marines and federalized National Guard troops to Los Angeles. The president himself has made clear that the dispatch of troops to Washington, D.C. is a template for future military missions to other cities. On top of this, there’s the obvious point that the nation’s capital is involved, with both symbolic and practical resonance. As others have pointed out, Washington, D.C. is our primary city for national protests, the one place more than any other that Americans go to to make their collective voice heard. The D.C. clampdown is an obvious attempt to crush Americans’ single biggest megaphone.
Taking a broader view, the D.C. deployments amplify Donald Trump’s attempts to portray the United States as under siege by implacably violent criminals and foreign invaders. This fiction is central to his claimed right to act as a de facto dictator dispensing whatever violence is necessary on whomever he deems deserving. The deployments, in turn, epitomize the heavy-handed and authoritarian response he prescribes for this supposed attack on America. Since his mistreatment of D.C. is so central to the story Trump wants to tell about the U.S. and his fraudulent solutions, opponents would be foolish not to see the deployments as an opportunity to call out and contest the president’s twisted view of the country.
So if what’s happening in D.C. is worth taking a stand on, then how should opponents of MAGA convey its importance to the public, maximize the possibility of a backlash, and ensure it advances the larger battle against this reactionary presidency?
First, we should be sure to talk about Trump’s offenses as part of a larger, comprehensive story of his authoritarianism, lawlessness, and unfitness for office. On this score, D.C. is a tragically prime candidate for such framing. What we’re seeing in the nation’s capital echoes similar authoritarian deployments to Los Angeles on false pretenses (extreme lawlessness and mayhem), and apparent plans for more of the same in New York, Chicago, and other blue cities. This means that Democrats and others can place events in D.C. within an existing story they can tell about Donald Trump and MAGA. And it’s not just a static tale — what’s happening in D.C. is a new chapter, with the president defiling the people’s capital out of a desire to act as a violent dictator, with clear foreshadowing of more to come, possibly in your very own city. At a very basic level, failure to contest Trump’s actions in D.C. would maximize his ability to further inject MAGA propaganda into America’s bloodstream, while also blowing past red lines regarding the exercise of presidential power.
This leads to a closely related point that’s also relevant to the D.C. situation: More than ever, opponents of MAGA need to understand that this fight can’t be restricted to calling out Trump’s specific law-breaking or blatant lying, or fighting him in the courts — as important as both those approaches can be. Among other things, the federal judiciary has been severely compromised by the Supreme Court’s lawless right-wing majority, while Trump has shown himself more than willing both to ignore court rulings and to adhere to their letter while evading their spirit. In the case of D.C., the issue of whether Trump can legally or technically do what he’s doing feels beside the point: just because he might tenuously have the legal authority to take over the D.C. police and send in the National Guard pales next to the fact that his claimed basis has no relation to his true reasons for doing so. No president should send troops to an American city under false or unacceptable pretenses, full stop. Getting tripped up in his legal authority around D.C. and home rule is to lose the thread of what this fight is about.
Michael Podhorzer frames this well when he notes the problem of Trump’s opponents “conveying that we should continue to think about this in normal terms, that the normal rules apply,” when in fact Trump is simply not acting within a democratic context and will not be constrained by worries that his moves are deeply unpopular with Americans. Donald Trump is maneuvering to replace democracy with dictatorship, in a political system that he has already significantly corrupted in the direction of lawlessness; Democrats can’t expect to defeat him by relying on a playbook that assumes all parties will adhere to the rule of law, or that direct assaults on Americans’ sovereignty and safety are mere “distractions” from supposedly more pressing issues like his corruption or the Jeffrey Epstein cover-up. Here’s Podhorzer again, rejecting the notion that the D.C. deployments are a distraction and articulating the actual political landscape we’re operating in:
It’s not a “distraction” when Trump deploys military and federal law enforcement against the residents of Washington, D.C.—it’s part of MAGA’s fascist project to turn the government into a weapon against the American people. We must act as if we believe this is true, because it is, and because doing otherwise makes it impossible to think strategically about how to fight back. Just as we wouldn’t think of Pearl Harbor as an isolated attack unrelated to World War II, we must see each of Trump’s power grabs in their full context.
Next, we also need to bear in mind that MAGA fascism is heavily rooted in, and dependent on, highly emotional appeals to Americans’ darkest fears and insecurities: worries about crime, anxieties about
United States
