Monica Potts writes:

The military parade in June was just practice, it turns out. For more than a week, the nation has watched federal officers and even camouflaged troops patrolling the streets of Washington, D.C., causing increasing amounts of violence and mayhem. Videos of agents pulling a delivery driver off his moped and stopping to lecture a Black man smoking a cigarette on his own stoop have gone viral, while Republican governors from West Virginia, Ohio, South Carolina, Mississippi, and Louisiana will likely add to the chaos and potential danger by deploying their National Guardsmen to the city. Some of them could be armed.

President Donald Trump on Monday made the ludicrous claim that these actions have made the district safer. In response, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser touted the Metropolitan Police Department’s own efforts to reduce crime and said the district just needs more police officers. “The numbers on the ground in the District don’t support a thousand people from other states coming to Washington, D.C. You know that,” she said on Monday. Other Democrats, like Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy, have pointed out that many of the states sending troops have cities with higher crime rates, a claim supported by the data.

Bowser and Murphy are right, and Trump is wrong. But no one should be hand-wringing about crime right now—I’m looking at you, The Atlantic—because Trump isn’t actually worried about crime. He’s not trying to make the district safer for its residents, and he’s certainly not weighing the data and evidence when he calls on governors to send guardsmen. Parading troops through an American city is a brazen authoritarian power grab, a test run at martial law in a city with an already heavy federal presence. So we’re well past the point of rebutting Trump’s lies about crime, or trying to gain the upper hand on the issue. What the residents of D.C., and everyone around the country who is alarmed by the rise of MAGA fascism, wants is for Trump’s show of force to be met with an equal show of force. And the Democrats are utterly failing in that regard.

Facts have never stopped Trump, and they won’t now. “D.C. gave Fake Crime numbers in order to create a false illusion of safety,” he lied on his propaganda platform, Truth Social. “Until 4 days ago, Washington, D.C., was the most unsafe ‘city’ in the United States, and perhaps the World. Now, in just a short period of time, it is perhaps the safest, and getting better every single hour! People are flocking to D.C. again, and soon, the beautification will begin!” To support this, he posted a video on Truth Social with his voiceover saying, “We will take over our horribly run Washington, D.C., and clean up, rebuild, and renovate our capital.” And yet, the video montage shows our capital city already looking quite beautiful and peaceful; mute Trump’s voice, and you’d be forgiven for thinking it was tourism promo.

What does it mean to “take over” the District? Most of the cities Trump has criticized are governed by democratically elected Black mayors, and so the claims that they are crime-ridden are more of a racist bullhorn than a dog whistle. D.C., where the plurality of the population (44 percent) is Black and more than 90 percent of residents vote Democratic, does not want meddling from the Republican president it didn’t elect and the Congress it has no representation in. It wants to preserve home rule and be granted statehood someday.

The takeover is political, and it is partly a “performative” “stunt”—to quote Maryland Governor Wes Moore and Murphy, respectively—in the sense that it’s elaborate political theater designed to distract from Trump’s tanking approval rating and the Epstein scandal. But it’s also more than that: an authoritarian show of force that is genuinely terrifying and terrorizing innocent people. [Continue reading…]