Muriel Bowser has given Donald Trump everything a blue-city mayor could possibly give a MAGA president. And he kicked her in the teeth anyway.
But what’s most telling about the power dynamics between Washington’s mayor and Trump’s administration is that the Bowser allies I spoke to think Trump’s furious White House press conference on Monday actually represented a victory of sorts.
Yes, Trump unilaterally took control of the Metropolitan Police Department, a power that is supposed to be Bowser's. But he didn’t impose a financial control board to take over her entire government, as happened during a financial crisis under former mayor Marion Barry.
Yes, the president and his team blamed the local government for creating the supposed crime crisis. But he didn’t name-check Bowser, instead pointing a finger at the mayor’s progressive rivals on the city council, which he said was dominated by radical-left lunatics.
And yes, Trump repeatedly maligned her city as a crime-infested hell hole, despite statistics to the contrary. But he didn’t say anything about repealing the Nixon-era statute that established the limited local democracy Bowser leads. At the end of the day, Bowser was still the mayor.
“The feds have an outsize role in D.C., we all know that,” Bowser told me Wednesday morning, striking a decidedly philosophical tone. "Right now, having a surge of officers enhances our MPD forces on a temporary basis. We're going to stay focused on hiring more MPD or, when this temporary surge is over, figuring out more permanent partnerships to tap into when we need a surge of officers.”
Even the shocking takeover, it seems, hasn’t changed Bowser’s conciliatory approach to the president.
Soon after Trump’s return to the White House in January, her administration agreed to tear up a Black Lives Matter mural that displeased Republicans. At the peak of Trump’s bromance with Elon Musk, her police department launched a hate-crime investigation over anti-Tesla graffiti. Just last month, she personally muscled through a football-stadium subsidy that was on the GOP wish list. All the while, even as thousands of her constituents were thrown out of federal work, she held her tongue, declining to play to the gallery in an overwhelmingly blue city.
Playing ball on the optics is still her default move. At a hastily-arranged meeting with the city council shortly after Trump’s announcement, the mayor was asked what councilmembers should say about it. According to a participant, she initially advised them to say nothing.
It was unlikely advice for local elected officials. Trump’s action had already drawn apocalyptic criticism from a slew of national Democrats. It would seem strange for city councilmembers to stay mum. Members balked, and the mayor herself wound up holding a press conference where she made clear that she was unhappy about the “unsettling and unprecedented” takeover, reiterating that violent crime is at a 30-year low. But she avoided histrionics, speaking in measured tones and vowing to work with the feds. She didn’t threaten legal action, acknowledging that her city’s unique constitutional status means citizens don’t have the same rights as other Americans.
In a live online constituent meeting Tuesday night, away from national media, she was more forceful in pushing back against falsehoods about Washington, declaring that “we are not 700,000 scumbags and punks” but rather “proud Americans who call D.C. home.” She said she hoped for a Democratic Congress to put a brake on an “authoritarian push.” But a defense of her city’s image is different from the sort of performative resistance that a lot of blue politicians might opt for. In the same meeting, she referred to the federal officials who just usurped her authority as “partners.”
“I’m sure nobody’s worried about my feelings,” Bowser told me in an interview. The main thing she would cop to feeling angry about were the media attacks on Washington’s image. “The characterization of our city being dirty and slum-filled and our people are ‘scumbags’ and things like that — that language is maddening and false.” Like a good big-city pol, she pivoted to statistics about the city’s rapid 21st century population growth and vibrant hospitality industry.
That non-emotional tone, and focus on litigating wonky details of crime stats, seems to have set the standard for many of the city’s elected officials. Even frequent critics of the centrist mayor have mostly avoided calls for resistance-style posturing. The city council’s collective statement on the takeover was a word salad that didn’t include the word “Trump.”
Councilmember Robert White, a former Bowser mayoral challenger, slammed the takeover as “a dangerous political stunt that is going to have the reverse impact on public safety” because Trump’s exhortations for cops to rough up suspects could destroy hard-won police credibility. But even though he’s widely expected to challenge Bowser from the left in next year’s election, White declined to take shots at her handling of the president. “This isn’t the time for that,” White told me.
“There are things you want to fire off in a group text but you can’t say that out loud,” said Christina Henderson, another councilmember. “We’re trying to hold onto the limited home rule that we have. We want to make sure we will have another mayoral election where we get to vote. There are people who think we can act like California. We can’t.”
Still, the dramatic nature of Monday’s announcement has at least some people wondering whether it’s time for a different approach.
After all, barely a week after Bowser got the stadium deal past a skeptical city council — thanking Trump by name when she testified in favor of the project — her citizens find themselves subject to armed federal authorities who don’t answer to voters, and paying taxes to support a police force their elected officials don’t control. It’s the sort of trampling on self-government that would draw howls of protest in Tennessee, Missouri or Arkansas (all states where the largest city ranks as more dangerous than D.C.).
On the activist left, Bowser has long been caricatured as a proto-Republican, too cosy with business and too hostile to progressive causes. Even her most famous act of Trump 1.0 resistance — the Black Lives Matter mural that became a civic landmark — was derided at the time as a photogenic ploy to distract people from the mayor’s opposition to defunding police. “This is what you get for giving Trump anything,” scoffed Adam Eidinger, a longtime organizer on the left wing of city politics.
But the tone also worries some folks who — unlike Eidinger — have actually been in the business of passing laws, and who understand what a lousy hand Bowser has been dealt.
“She’s tried to appease Trump, believing that she is in a different position from any governor or mayor in the country,” said Elissa Silverman, a former councilmember who regularly crossed swords with Bowser in office. “The appeasement approach hasn’t worked. It just hasn’t. There needs to be a change of tone with Trump. The whole city needs to get stronger. We have been a site of many game-changing and historic protests. Now we need to call attention to what’s happening here, because it won’t stop here.” Yet on city streets Monday, the protest activity was small and didn’t involve powerful elected officials.
Silverman empathized with her former colleagues’ desire to avoid “criticizing your own family when your house is under attack,” but said the council’s muted outrage seemed particularly weird. “The council needs to think about a stronger tone, which would maybe allow the mayor to still have her approach, but maybe the council could play the bad guy.” The messaging goal, she said, ought to be about connecting the takeover to the rights of all Americans, not the unique predicament of one city. Trump, after all, also hinted at using federal force in a variety of other blue cities during his event on Monday. A more visceral appeal could help keep Democratic senators onboard to maintain a filibuster if Trump tries to make the takeover permanent.
“I have governed through many crises, and I will govern through this one,” Bowser said. “Having our chief engaged with them daily, hourly, recommending locations where additional presence is helpful, I think, is the best way at this point to try to manage that.” As if to underscore their thinking, several people in the government shared with me a warm social media post issued by Attorney General Pam Bondi following her “productive” Tuesday meeting with the mayor.
In fact, Trump’s takeover came so suddenly that few logistics have been worked out. City officials fear that deploying untrained federal agents and encouraging cops to “knock the hell out of” suspects could lead to an explosion between law enforcement and the public. So they very much want to influence what happens next by making sure the feds work with cops who actually know the neighborhoods. “We want to make sure there's not anybody out there who is provoking or harassing our citizens,” Bowser told me.
Playing nice may be the best way to do so. But playing nice, in the long run, may involve more than just avoiding calling Trump a fascist. The administration has cited specific local laws about youth prosecutions and no-cash bail as causes of crime. Changing them will require local politicians to reverse their votes.
Bowser, whose vetoes of several police-reform policies were overridden by the council, didn’t sound so worried about that. “We're going to be talking to the U.S. attorney about some of her specific concerns,” she told me. “Some of them I have shared when those bills went through our legislative process, and I'll have that discussion with the council.”
Though she’d like to see locals standing up for self-government and civil rights, Silverman also said Democrats shouldn’t treat the federal intrusion as an excuse to get out of difficult conversations about urban problems. Even if Trump wildly misstated the actual dangers in D.C., she told me, “I also think homelessness and youth crime is the transgender athletes of urban cities,” an issue where Trump’s foes can easily find themselves on the wrong side of public opinion. “We need to take it seriously too. It’s an Achilles’ heel for Democratic cities. Trump can create a dynamic where we wind up defending tents on the street. That’s not easy.”
Comments