I was a mayor for 10 years. All mayors deal with crime, and we have learned a lot about what works to make cities safer for everyone.
That’s why so many cities, including Washington, D.C., are safer today than they were 10, 20, or 30 years ago. And that’s why we know President Trump’s send-in-the-troops stunt in Washington, D.C., is not really about public safety.
People sometimes argue about whether Trump’s actions are actually dangerous or merely efforts to distract people from news he wants to minimize. The truth is that all too frequently they are both.
I believe Trump taking control of D.C.’s police department and calling out the National Guard, based on false claims about crime, is both an attempt to distract voters from bad news about the extraordinary harm he is unleashing on the American people and an effort to further test the limits of his own power.
Let’s not forget how much of Trump’s second-term agenda — including the idea of undermining home rule for the citizens of Washington, D.C. and the deployment of troops against Americans — was envisioned and laid out in advance by the right-wing architects of Project 2025.
Trump’s ambitions to rule like the dictatorial strongmen he admires in other countries made him the perfect vehicle for a movement that wants to reverse a century of progress and legal protections regardless of how many workers, consumers, families and communities are harmed.
And they’re willing to use the military to quash inevitable protests.
“It’s pretty clear that the president wants his own domestic police force, and step by step he’s trying to create it,” Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.) observed. Smith called Trump’s maneuver “a huge step toward an autocratic government.”
Washington’s unique status as a federal district — not a state or part of any state — makes it especially vulnerable to the abuse of presidential power. But no city is safe.
Trump made it clear in Los Angeles that he will deploy National Guard troops over the objections of state and local officials. He has explicitly threatened to expand his tactics in D.C. to other cities where he has far less constitutional legitimacy to intervene.
And just to clarify how much contempt the MAGA movement has for urban voters, Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation and primary sponsor of Project 2025, recently called on right-wing state legislators to gut democracy in their own capitals and turn them into “state municipal districts.”
Trump and the movement behind him, the MAGA activists and the institutional muscle represented by the Heritage Foundation and the more than 100 organizations endorsing Project 2025, seem eager to dismantle the checks and balances that are meant to keep a corrupt and abusive president in line. And that is proving to be extremely dangerous.
The deployment of American troops against American citizens is illegal except in extraordinary emergencies. It can’t be done to intimidate dissenters. It can’t be done to make Trump feel good. It can’t be done to shift public attention from news that is unflattering to the president.
To be sure, Trump would like to distract us from scrutiny of his relationship with the late sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein — and the sweetheart treatment his regime is now giving Epstein’s accomplice and convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell.
The president would like to distract us from bad economic news on jobs and the price of groceries.
And, certainly, the president would rather that we not pay much attention to the astonishing levels of shady dealing that have made Trump and his family billions of dollars richer.
Trump abusing his power to shift the narrative is an aspect of his authoritarian rule. It’s not going to make the residents of D.C. or any other city safer.
Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott, whose city has been another Trump target, noted in a CNN interview that his city has had the fewest homicides in 50 years this year.
That kind of progress takes a thoughtful, collective effort — not just “get tough” rhetoric and more militarized cops. It takes smart strategic investments in communities and stronger relationships between communities and police.
“Mayors across the country have brought together law enforcement, the legal community, the actual community through community violence intervention work, to reduce violence across this country in cities to lows that we have not seen in decades,” Scott told viewers.
“The president could learn a lot from us instead of throwing things at us,” he added.
Listening and learning is not exactly the president’s strong suit. Throwing things — smears, tantrums, distractions — is much more his style.
That’s bad for America and all Americans, not just those of us who live in the cities Trump likes to vilify.
Svante Myrick is president of People For the American Way.
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