David’s view
Nobody, or nearly nobody, plans to end his day at the Subway on 14th and U Street. Plopped next to a long-abandoned smoke shop, over a gay bar that will soon host its “Caked Up” pageant, the restaurant stays open 24/7 for people who need hearty, unsurprising sandwiches to pre-empt their hangovers.
The U Street Subway is now the most famous franchise in the country, and Sean Dunn its most famous patron. On Sunday night, a bystander filmed Dunn arguing with federal officers who had been dispatched to the intersection, then hurling a sandwich at one of them, then fleeing in his pastel polo and shorts. Dunn lost his job at the Justice Department, tried to turn himself in, and was instead apprehended by 20 officers, according to his attorney, and to the White House’s fancam video of the arrest.
The “federal takeover” of DC — the scale is being litigated, but that’s good shorthand for it — is likely to succeed on the administration’s terms. According to the president, he had to invoke Section 740 of the Home Rule Act, written a few years after rioting burned down part of the city, to stop the “bloodthirsty criminals” who were making it ugly and unlivable.
Success, on the White House’s terms, would mean residents and tourists going about their day without being victims of crime, or catching sight of a homeless encampment.
To be sure, that was possible even before the takeover. DC staggered out of COVID with a weakened civil society, a ghostly business district, and a surge of car-jackings by teenagers who exploited the well-intentioned errors of criminal justice reform. But the city had visibly recovered since 2023. Homeless encampments that sprouted around Union Station during the pandemic were cleared long before the National Guard rolled in, parking vehicles on land that has always belonged to the federal government.
Urban liberals put up with more crime and disorder than suburban conservatives. The administration knew it could trap them by getting them to defend DC’s status quo, and the fishy data they used to defend it. It surely also knew that the credit for the city not sliding into chaos would now belong to the president, not to Mayor Muriel Bowser, or other city officials who had been making progress on crime.
That’s where the sandwich comes in — a mockery of the military presence, so obviously ineffective that it was supposed to make the whole situation look stupid. Trump and his GOP, who argue that liberals can’t govern themselves, have spoken rhapsodically about military crackdowns on cities. “Our military has been in many countries around the world for the past two decades walking the streets trying to reduce crime,” House Oversight Chairman James Comer told Newsmax this week. “We need to focus on the big cities in America now.”
There was no worry there about overkill, or the appearance of overkill, which is what has undermined public support for policing before — and very recently. Just a decade ago, Comer’s fellow Kentuckian Rand Paul was asking if small towns were wasting money on military equipment. It was big and imposing, but it was built to protect Americans overseas, not intimidate teenagers out of misbehaving at a pumpkin patch festival.
That was a popular position in 2014. Not anymore, after so many criminal justice reforms that were sold as common-sense, low-cost corrections to over-policing led to more crime. The Biden administration, and Bowser, favored (and funded) more police officers, as red state governors enticed them to leave blue cities for places where they’d get bonuses, respect, and rock-solid qualified immunity. The Trump administration identified Bowser as a politician who would welcome federal assistance to stop crime, even as protesters complained about it — a lesson re-learned when the administration swapped out a US attorney obsessed with revenge for Jan. 6 defendants with one obsessed with crime.
Now, the administration is putting on a show of force in DC with no fear of backlash. It sees an enormous national constituency not just for crime-stopping, but for humiliating urban liberals with overwhelming force. Cleaning up DC is not enough; engage in anti-social behavior, throw salami at a cop, and you’ll be raided like a drug lord. There’s no concern that it could backfire. Not right now.
Notable
On his Substack, progressive organizer Waleed Shahid and colleagues see the DC mobilization as a “distraction” that the media fell for. “When a president manufactures a crisis the press, in their unique role in any viable, thriving democracy must find a way to produce coverage that isn’t instrumentalized to amplify the spectacle without scrutiny.”
In The Bulwark, Jonathan V. Last asks why the conservative movement has embraced more outwardly “authoritarian” tactics than the left. “The danger of conservatism is revanchism and the danger of liberalism is utopianism.”
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