Republicans are embracing President Trump’s bare-knuckled fight with Washington, D.C., as a winning issue for the embattled president and say that Trump will use federal funding for the city as leverage to get Mayor Muriel Bowser and the City Council to crack down on local crime.
Conservatives on Capitol Hill are calling for Congress to end the District of Columbia’s era of home rule and federalize the city, something that has little chance of happening since legislation to do so would need 60 votes and the support of at least seven Democrats to pass the Senate.
Trump and his Republican allies in Congress, however, could extract significant concessions from the mayor and City Council in return for critical funding, as a proposal to restore more than $1 billion in funding for Washington remains stalled in the GOP-controlled House.
Republican aides say that one of Trump’s top priorities would be to press D.C. to eliminate no-cash bail, a policy whereby individuals arrested on criminal charges do not need to post cash bonds to avoid pretrial detention.
Other priorities would be to prosecute teenagers accused of serious crimes as adults and to implement stricter policies mandating pretrial detention of adults and teenagers accused of such crimes.
Some Republicans on Capitol Hill, including Sen. Mike Lee (Utah) and Rep. Andy Ogles (Tenn.), are pushing for more drastic action.
They are backing legislation to repeal the 1973 District of Columbia Home Rule Act, which gives the city the right to elect its own government and manage local affairs.
Lee in an op-ed for The Spectator cited several high-profile attacks, including the fatal shooting of congressional intern Eric Tarpinian-Jachym in July and the 2023 knife attack that left a staffer for Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) with a punctured lung and penetrated skull.
“This isn’t just a local issue — it’s a national embarrassment, and the Constitution itself makes it a national issue. Federal oversight will restore order and make DC a model city again,” Lee posted on the social platform X.
Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kan.) in an interview on Fox Business applauded Trump’s takeover of D.C.’s police and predicted: “If there’s a significant law enforcement presence, these crimes are going to go down.”
He said a car belonging to one of his staffers got shot up in a gang fight while it was parked six blocks from the Capitol.
“We spent one of our Steering Committee meetings talking about what we should get our employees to protect themselves when they’re walking home. This is our nation’s capital, for crying out loud. This is where you bring your family, and you become a patriot, and it’s not safe to be here,” he said. “I’m saluting President Trump. More power to him to do whatever it takes to secure our nation’s capital.”
Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.), the chair of the Senate Steering Committee, told reporters Tuesday he hoped Democratic mayors from major cities would follow Trump’s lead and increase law-enforcement activities.
“I’m optimistic this will show D.C. you can have safety,” he said. “The first thing I say to everybody when they’re coming to D.C. is, ‘You better think about where you’re staying, you’ve got to think about every street you’re on, you’ve got to think about you can’t be out at night.’ Hopefully that will change.”
Early polling is mixed on Trump’s takeover of the capital’s police department and plan to deploy 800 National Guard troops, along with dozens of FBI agents, to step up law enforcement activity around the city.
An Aug. 11 YouGov survey of 3,180 U.S. adults found that 47 percent of respondents strongly or somewhat disapproved of Trump’s actions, while 34 percent strongly or somewhat approved. But the poll also found that 67 of respondents said that crime in large American cities is a “major problem” while 23 percent described it as a “minor problem.”
Focusing on crime in Democratic-run cities has been a successful political tactic for the president going back to his first term and comes at a time when his approval rating has sunk to 37 percent, according to a recent Gallup poll.
Democratic lawmakers slammed Trump’s action.
Senate Judiciary Committee ranking member Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) asserted “there are currently no ‘special conditions of an emergency nature’ in D.C., which the president has to claim in order to take federal control of MPD under the Home Rule Act.”
“This is unprecedented,” he said.
Jim McLaughlin, a Republican pollster who has done work for Trump, said that Trump’s takeover of the police force and deployment of National Guard is a popular move but argued it’s not motivated by politics.
“He’s doing it because he thinks it’s really important to keep people safe,” he said, noting that crime and law enforcement in major cities was an issue that Trump identified as a top priority when he was thinking about running years before the 2016 presidential election.
“I know there are a lot of people looking at the political angle here, but it’s not politics, it’s about doing what he thinks is right,” McLaughlin said. “D.C. is a special place. We have people not just from all over the country but all over the world come to visit D.C., and they should be safe there.
“We’ve got members of Congress and their staff getting attacked there,” he said, referring to the assault on Rep. Angie Craig (D-Minn.) in 2023.
Trump will have an opportunity to press his demands ahead of next month’s government funding deadline, Sept. 30, when Democrats in Congress and advocates for the District will call for the restoration of the funding held back in the March funding deal.
“I can see that being an anomaly in a [continuing resolution],” said a Republican strategist, who suggested that Trump could also request more federal oversight of Washington’s Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) in exchange for funding to hire more police.
“You’re working within the confines with what will probably be a” continuing resolution, the strategist said of the expectation that Congress will need to pass a stopgap funding measure to avoid a government shutdown. “You could do it via a handshake agreement,” the strategist added, referring to concessions Bowser would make in exchange for more federal funding.
Bowser “already opened the door” to a potential deal with the White House, the strategist noted, by acknowledging in a recent statement that beefing up policing in some parts of the city could be a good idea.
Bowser at a press conference Monday acknowledged that “we experienced a crime spike post-COVID” but argued “we worked quickly to put laws in place and tactics that got violent offenders off our streets and gave our police officers more tools, which is why we’ve seen a huge decrease in crime.”
The mayor pointed out that crime is down compared with 2023 but pledged: “We’re not satisfied, we haven’t taken our foot off the gas, and we continue to look for ways to make our city safer.”
Bowser met with Attorney General Pam Bondi on Tuesday, a meeting that Bondi called “productive.”
“I just concluded a productive meeting with DC Mayor Bowser at the Department of Justice. We agreed that there is nothing more important than keeping residents and tourists in Washington, DC, safe from deadly crime,” Bondi posted on social media.
Trump on Monday vented his frustrations over no-cash bail and what he views as the lenient treatment of teenagers accused of felony crimes.
“Every place in the country where you have no-cash bail is a disaster,” Trump declared at a White House press conference where he announced a federal takeover of D.C.’s police department and the deployment of 800 National Guard troops to the city’s streets.
The president called for the District to change its laws to allow for teenagers 14 and older to be prosecuted as adults, complaining of juvenile offenders: “They are not afraid of Law Enforcement because they know nothing ever happens to them, but it’s going to happen now!”
Al Weaver contributed.
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