The President’s Police State
https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2025/08/trump-national-guard-dc/683839/
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For years, prominent voices on the right argued that Democrats were enacting a police state. They labeled everything—a report on homegrown extremism, IRS investigations into nonprofits—a sign of impending authoritarianism. Measures taken by state governments to combat the spread of COVID? Tyranny. An FBI search of Mar-a-Lago? The weaponization of law enforcement.
Now that a president is actually sending federal troops and officers out into the streets of the nation’s cities, however, the right is in lockstep behind him. This morning, Donald Trump announced that he was declaring a crime emergency, temporarily seizing control of the Washington, D.C., Metropolitan Police Department and deploying the D.C. National Guard to the nation’s capital.
“This is liberation day in D.C.,” Trump said. Nothing says liberation like deploying hundreds of uniformed soldiers against the wishes of the local elected government. District residents have made clear that they would prefer greater autonomy, including congressional representation, and they have three times voted overwhelmingly against Trump. His response is not just to flex power but to treat the District of Columbia as the president’s personal fiefdom.
Trump’s move is based on out-of-date statistics. It places two officials without municipal policing experience in positions of power over federalization and the MPD, and seems unlikely to significantly affect crime rates. What the White House hopes it might achieve, Politico reports, is “a quick, visually friendly PR win.” Trump needs that after more than a month of trying and failing to change the subject from his onetime friend Jeffrey Epstein.
But what this PR stunt could also do is create precedent for Trump to send armed forces out into American streets whenever he declares a spurious state of emergency. Some of Trump’s supporters don’t seem to mind that fact: “Trump has the opportunity to do a Bukele-style crackdown on DC crime,” Christopher Rufo, the influential conservative personality, posted on X, referring to Nayib Bukele, the Trump ally who is president of El Salvador. “Question is whether he has the will, and whether the public the stomach. Big test: Can he reduce crime faster than the Left advances a counternarrative about ‘authoritarianism’? If yes, he wins. Speed matters.”
Rufo seems to view everything in terms of a political battle to be won via narratives; the term authoritarianism appears to mean nothing to him, and maybe it never meant anything to others on the right who assailed Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and Democratic governors. It does have a real meaning, though, and Bukele is its poster boy. Despite the constitution having banned it, he ran for a second term in office; his party then changed the constitution to allow “indefinite” reelection. Lawmakers in his party also brazenly removed supreme-court justices, and his government has forced journalists into exile and locked up tens of thousands of people without due process. This is apparently the America that Chris Rufo wants.
To justify the crackdown, Trump has cited an alleged carjacking attempt that police records say injured the former DOGE employee Edward “Big Balls” Coristine. But MPD has already arrested two Maryland 15-year-olds for unarmed carjacking. That’s good news. Carjacking is a serious crime and should be punished. But Trump has used the incident to claim that violent crime is skyrocketing in Washington. This is, put simply, nonsense. During a press conference today, Trump cited murder statistics from 2023, and said that carjackings had “more than tripled” over the past five years. He didn’t use more recent numbers because they show that these crimes are down significantly in Washington. Murder dropped 32 percent from 2023 to 2024, robberies 39 percent, and armed carjackings 53 percent. This is in line with a broad national reduction in crime. MPD’s preliminary data indicate that violent crime is down another 26 percent so far this year compared with the same timeframe in 2024, though as the crime-statistics analyst Jeff Asher writes, this drop is probably overstated.
Trump’s descriptions of Washington as a lawless hellscape bear little resemblance to what most residents experience. Not only is D.C. not "one of the most dangerous cities anywhere in the World,” as Trump claims, but his prescription seems unlikely to help. He said he is appointing Attorney General Pam Bondi and Terry Cole, the head of the Drug Enforcement Administration, to help lead the federalization effort and MPD, but neither has any experience with municipal policing. They have not said what they will do differently. If the administration deploys its forces to high-profile areas such as the National Mall, they won’t have much impact on violent crime, because that’s not where it happens; if they go to less central areas with higher crime rates, they won’t get the PR boost they seek, because tourists and news cameras aren’t there.
Throughout his two presidencies, Trump has treated the military as a prop for making statements about which issues he cares about—and which he doesn’t. He deployed the D.C. National Guard during protests after the murder of George Floyd in summer 2020. Earlier this summer, he federalized the California National Guard and sent Marines to Los Angeles to assist with immigration enforcement, but they were sent home when it became clear that they had nothing to do there. Yet according to testimony before the January 6 panel, Trump did not deploy the D.C. National Guard when an armed mob was sacking the U.S. Capitol in 2021 to try to help Trump hold on to power.
Good policing is important because citizens deserve the right to live in safety. Recent drops in crime in Washington are good news because the district’s residents should be able to feel safe. But Trump’s militarization of the city, his seizure of local police, and his lies about crime in Washington do the opposite: They are a way to make people feel unsafe, and either quiet residents’ dissent or make them support new presidential power grabs. Many of Trump’s defenders are angry when he’s called an authoritarian, but not when he acts as one.
Related:
Trump’s farcical D.C. crackdown
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