Nothing in President Trump’s second term has captured his autocratic imagination quite like turning federalized police and military troops against the Black mayors of Democratic cities.
Trump’s target list expanded on Monday, when he seized control of Washington, D.C.’s local police and deployed 800 National Guard troops to patrol the streets.
Trump spared no bluster in portraying the people of the District of Columbia as animals consumed by violent criminal instincts, remarking to reporters that they “fight back until you knock the hell out of them, because it’s the only language they understand.” That would come as a shock to the D.C. police, who confirmed that violent crime is down 26 percent in the city this year and currently sits at a 30-year low.
Of course, it shouldn’t surprise anyone to see Trump portraying a majority-minority city as a haven of crime and thuggery. He did the same in Los Angeles, where he dispatched the National Guard in June to terrorize the city’s mayor — his long-time political foe Karen Bass. Now Trump is hinting at expanding his deployments to Chicago and New York, two more Democratic cities with Black mayors and large minority populations.
Are you noticing a pattern?
Trump’s federal takeover of Washington blends the president’s love of strongman authoritarianism with his passion for spreading toxic lies about nonwhite people, as he did in grand fashion at his hate-filled October 2024 rally at Madison Square Garden, or as he continues to do in his threats to arrest New York’s Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani. After rolling over LA and Washington with minimal resistance, it’s naive to think Trump will ever stop at threats.
Worse still, many of the bigoted sycophants who boosted Trump’s hateful rhetoric during the campaign are now seated in positions of real power, especially at the Department of Justice and the FBI. This time Trump has ensured the loyalty of his officers. This time there won’t be a Gen. Mark Milley with the moral courage to publicly condemn Trump for his first-term militaristic excesses.
Democratic lines about Washington’s low crime rate won’t make a difference to the White House because what Trump is doing has fundamentally nothing to do with crime. Trump loves the way deploying troops makes him feel. He loves the raw, unadulterated power of moving hundreds or thousands of soldiers into cities as civilian authorities ineffectively try to stop him. In a second term marked by a string of high-profile fumbles, sending out the troops makes Trump feel like he’s actually doing something.
The president’s fixation on being seen as a hard-nosed military leader is one reason why his immigration raids have grown in theatricality and severity — even as more than 55 percent of Americans (including 15 percent of Republicans voters) say his Immigration and Customs Enforcement has gone too far. It’s also why a growing number of political observers are sounding alarms about how Trump is misusing the nation’s nonpartisan military to settle domestic political fights.
In a sign of just how far Trump is willing to go to realize his autocratic dreams, he also asked the Supreme Court last week to allow racial profiling in California ICE raids under the bogus argument that it’s simply too hard to deport illegal immigrants without it. Instead, Trump is proposing a standard where simply speaking Spanish would be sufficient grounds for arrest — an idea so repulsive that a majority of Americans have opposed it for four decades.
It took less than a year for a second Trump administration to fill the streets of major cities with soldiers, ICE agents and heavy armored vehicles. The cost of those military excursions to the taxpayer has been enormous, with initial Pentagon estimates of $134 million for Los Angeles alone. Those numbers have almost certainly swelled as ICE raids have grown to match Trump’s fury at Mayor Bass, Gov. Gavin Newsom and other California Democrats.
The skyrocketing cost of Trump’s deployments is secondary, to be sure, to the imminent threat they pose to the growing number of American citizens caught in ICE’s overly broad immigration dragnets. Since Trump’s military mobilizations are driven by optics and ego instead of policy, Trump is free to declare them successful even if the raids fail to net a single legal arrest.
Trump’s latest incursion into Washington won’t be the last. But this is not Russia or Venezuela. Americans get to vote in elections as early as this November, and millions of those voters plan to use their ballot to oppose Republicans’ growing police state. None of that seems to matter to Trump. After all, the ratings are huge.
Max Burns is a veteran Democratic strategist and founder of Third Degree Strategies.
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