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Donald Trump is famously reluctant to commit troops abroad but salivates at the prospect of using them against Americans at home. That is the context in which one must understand his takeover of the Washington, D.C., police force; his deployment of the National Guard; and his threats to occupy other cities.
Trump claims that he is acting to quell a spike in violent crime. And although he might very well feel sincere concern about crime, this does not explain his actions any more than concern about fentanyl smuggling (which he no doubt also genuinely opposes) motivates his trade restrictions against Canada.
The most obvious reason for skepticism about Trump’s desire to fight crime is that he is the most pro-criminal president in American history. He has treated laws as suggestions throughout his career, beginning with his defiance of Justice Department orders that he and his father stop discriminating against Black prospective tenants. Trump is a felon who has surrounded himself with criminals and promiscuously extended clemency to criminals who support him.
When Trump talks about “criminals,” he doesn’t mean people who violate the law, or even people who violate the narrower and more serious set of laws against violence. (One of the first acts of his second term was a blanket pardon of violent criminals convicted of assaulting police officers on January 6, 2021. He even appointed to the Justice Department one of the instigators of the violence.) Trump’s idea of criminality excludes himself and his supporters; includes noncriminal states of being, such as homelessness; and focuses heavily on categories of street crime that he seems to associate with Black people.
Even by this skewed definition of crime, however, Trump’s D.C. takeover makes little sense. His executive order announcing a state of emergency claims that crime is “rising” and “out of control,” but in reality, it has been falling since its post-pandemic spike two years ago. His defenders might correctly respond that crime remains too high. But imagine if Trump were declaring an emergency on the slightly more honest basis that crime in Washington was not falling quickly enough for his tastes. What would be left of the concept of an emergency?
Serious policy experts, some of them conservative, have proposed solutions to bring down crime levels in Washington. The most straightforward remedy is to fill vacancies in the city’s courts to speed up the processing of criminal cases. At Trump’s press conference, the Fox News host turned (God help us) U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro denounced the District of Columbia’s laws restricting sentencing for juvenile offenders. That’s a reasonable complaint, but one that could be addressed by legislation, not by putting troops on the streets.
[Gilad Edelman: Just don’t call her unqualified]
Trump’s plan bears little resemblance to any of these remedies. His big idea is to flood the streets with troops. Yet the president himself does not appear committed to the belief that this will solve crime. In his press conference, Trump said that, by his reckoning, Washington already has more than enough police officers (3,500) to deter criminals. If that’s true, why would adding more bodies—specifically, members of the military who lack training in law enforcement—improve the situation? Nothing about this proposal makes sense.
The fact that Trump has proposed something illogical does not automatically imply that he is concealing a hidden motive. Anonymous White House sources assured Politico that the president is acting out of revulsion at scenes of crime and disorder that he has spotted while driving around town, and that might be true.
But the obvious reality is that Trump has consistently and openly displayed a lust to use the power of the state against his political enemies. During his first term, he constantly described protesters as an unruly mob. He did this well before the George Floyd demonstrations, which did include pockets of vandalism and violence. He raged at the leaders of the military for failing to carry out his orders to have troops shoot protesters. More recently, before staging his June birthday parade, he warned, “If there’s any protester that wants to come out, they will be met with very big force,” making no distinction between violent and peaceful protests.
At the press conference, Trump appeared with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Attorney General Pam Bondi, both of whom have followed the second-term Trump mandate to place personal loyalty to the president above all other considerations. Hegseth’s worldview, judging by his written output, is predicated on erasing the difference between foreign enemies and domestic critics. The Justice Department has lately been leaking splashy investigations of various Trump critics who obviously did nothing illegal.
Activists on the post-liberal right, who yearn for Trump to use state power to crush their opponents, have barely disguised their glee. “Trump has the opportunity to do a Bukele-style crackdown on DC crime,” Chris Rufo, a conservative activist who has influenced the administration, wrote on X. “Big test: Can he reduce crime faster than the Left advances a counternarrative about ‘authoritarianism’? If yes, he wins. Speed matters.”
Note that Rufo is putting authoritarianism in scare quotes while holding up as a model Nayib Bukele, the thuggish president of El Salvador whose gulag-style prison employs torture, and who just recently smashed a constitutional term limit that represented one of the few remaining checks on his power. Bukele no doubt dislikes crime. But he has also used crime as a wedge to delegitimize all opposition. Rufo’s invocation of him as an aspirational archetype is revealing.
This morning, Trump depicted the Washington deployment as essential to securing the nation’s capital, which hosts important foreign and domestic visitors. (He did not even claim to care about the needs of the city’s residents.) He proceeded to mention, almost casually, that he would like to follow the occupation of Washington with similar action in a host of other cities. It should be abundantly clear that his stated motives do not align with his actual ones. His plans for Washington, D.C., are a warning to us all.
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