During the 2024 election, Donald Trump promised to be a dictator on “day one.” Seven months after his return to power, he is earnestly expanding that promise.
On Monday, in remarks filled with falsehoods and misleading statements, the president announced a federal takeover of Washington, D.C.’s Metropolitan Police Department to root out “crime, bloodshed, bedlam and squalor.” He ordered the D.C. National Guard to assist in guarding federal property and, as seen recently in Los Angeles, likely making arrests. According to reports, this will begin with 800 soldiers. Trump also warned he would deploy active-duty military personnel if he deemed it necessary. These orders followed a report in Sunday’s Washington Post that the FBI had dispatched agents to roam the streets at night, ostensibly to assist local law enforcement. The president has indicated he could take similar actions in other cities, including Chicago and New York.
“This is Liberation Day in D.C. and we’re gonna take our capital back,” Trump said. “We’re declaring a public safety emergency in the District of Columbia.”
In reality, crime in the nation’s capital is at historic lows. Contrary to Trump’s claims, the city is not a hellscape. In a statement posted on X, D.C. Attorney General Brian Schwalb declared the president’s actions “unprecedented, unnecessary, and unlawful.”
“There is no crime emergency in the District of Columbia,” he wrote. “Violent crime in DC reached historic 30-year lows last year, and is down another 26% so far this year. We are considering all of our options and will do what is necessary to protect the rights and safety of District residents.”
Despite the assurances and best efforts of Schwalb and D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser, their hands may be tied. According to the Home Rule Act of 1973, which granted the city partial self-governance, Trump’s takeover of the D.C. police department is limited to 48 hours unless he notifies certain congressional committees. If he wants to control the police for more than 30 days, he will need to get approval from Congress to continue. MAGA Republicans will, of course, do his bidding.
As the Atlantic’s David Graham and others have observed, Trump’s concerns about “law and order” are self-interested and wholly circumstantial. Trump, Graham wrote, “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.”
The president’s hypocrisy with these two circumstances is explicit. He is more than willing to tolerate willful acts of destruction and violence from his own supporters. And he is ready to manufacture statistics and public emergencies that do not exist in reality to control a majority Democratic — and a majority Black — city he has never liked…
The president’s hypocrisy with these two circumstances is explicit. He is more than willing to tolerate willful acts of destruction and violence from his own supporters. And he is ready to manufacture statistics and public emergencies that do not exist in reality to control a majority Democratic — and a majority Black — city he has never liked, in all likelihood because it has rejected him by overwhelming margins larger than any state in the country in three subsequent presidential elections.
As Trump spoke on Monday, multiple media outlets, including CNN, MSNBC and the Associated Press, fact-checked his lies and other distortions of fact about “out of control crime” in Washington in real time.
But fact checks are no deterrent for Trump. Like other authoritarians and demagogues, he does not care about empirical reality. His attempt to take over the Metropolitan Police Department and to deploy the National Guard in that city is a page straight from the authoritarian playbook.
Autocrats and demagogues use false claims of crime and disorder as pretexts to declare a permanent state of emergency and to suspend the rule of law, along with civil rights and liberties. In a recent interview with Salon, democracy expert Katherine Stewart dubbed the tactic “one of the most frequently telegraphed stunts in the authoritarian canon.”
Marc Elias, a voting rights lawyer and founder of Democracy Docket, warned progressive podcaster Brian Tyler Cohen on Monday that Trump’s actions in D.C. are likely a prelude of what’s to come. “It’s going to spread from city to city, and then to the suburbs, and then to rural areas, until Trump feels like he has complete authority over local law enforcement,” he said. “All of this is in furtherance of his efforts to undermine democracy, undermine the rule of law, to squelch and intimidate people who are willing to stand up and speak out, to intimidate and have large institutions, the legacy media, the universities and the institutions all bow down…Free and fair elections are the crown jewel, the cornerstone of what he wants to undermine.”
Nearly three weeks ago, Trump signed an executive order directing the federal government to prioritize putting homeless people, the mentally ill and drug addicts in institutions and camps instead of providing housing assistance and drug treatment. This underreported act was significant: The homeless, the poor and others who are the human proof of how a government and its leaders have failed the people are a form of narcissistic injury to an authoritarian who presents himself as being all-powerful and perfect.
Trump reinforced Monday’s announcement with posts across social media platforms announcing D.C.’s supposed liberation. “Crime, Savagery, Filth, and Scum will DISAPPEAR,” he claimed. “I will, MAKE OUR CAPITAL GREAT AGAIN!”
Just as facts that defy the regime’s newspeak must be erased (“we are at war with Oceania!”), these “inconvenient” and “disposable” people must be removed or erased because they are an affront to the Great Leader, the Party and the myth of national greatness. This category of besieged and suspect personhood inevitably expands to include political “enemies.”
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Authoritarians take over the power centers of a country in order to cement their control. Following Project 2025, Agenda 47, the Red Caesar scenario, and other plans, Trump and his forces have rapidly consolidated their near-total control over every branch of government, the national security state (including the military), the bureaucracy, the courts, the law, and civil rights and liberties. Taking the capital isn’t just a power grab — it’s symbolic violence against the nation itself.
In doing so, Trump and his MAGA movement are expanding their efforts to remake society in their image. We’ve seen it in other areas and action as well, including the administration’s targeting of the educational system — with a specific focus on elite colleges and universities — the arts, museums, popular culture, interest groups and non-profits, religion, healthcare, banking and finance, the corporatocracy and, of course, the news media.
This is not by accident. Like other authoritarians, Trump believes he is the personal embodiment of the State. To that end, the United States government and its vast power exists to serve his will, his needs, his desires. In his worldview, Washington symbolically (and literally) belongs to Trump and his MAGA fake “populist” authoritarian movement — not the American people. Like all authoritarians, Trump sees himself as the State. His unprecedented birthday-military parade, and his paving over the Rose Garden and proposed addition of a $200 million gilded ballroom to the White House, are Trump’s ways of claiming ownership over not just the executive mansion but also of the country itself. He is creating a solipsistic world shaped entirely by his will.
Trump is America’s first White president. He is the leader of a White restoration project whose goal is to roll the gains of the civil rights movement and long Black Freedom Struggle back to the Gilded Age, if not before, to create a 21st century form of Jim Crow…
These actions are also rooted in another fact: Trump is America’s first White president. He is the leader of a White restoration project whose goal is to roll the gains of the civil rights movement and long Black Freedom Struggle back to the Gilded Age, if not before, to create a 21st century form of Jim Crow, where Black and brown people — along with women, LGBTQ people and other marginalized communities — will have no rights that conservative, straight, Christian evangelical white men are bound to respect.
With a majority Black population, Washington has been famously described as a “chocolate city.” It was also a Jim and Jane Crow city where Black Americans were treated as second-class citizens in their own country.
Conservatives and other members of the right-wing have long wanted to put D.C. under federal control because it is a symbolic provocation to how they view being “white” and “American” as synonymous with one another. During a 2021 interview with NPR about the role that race plays in opposition to D.C. statehood, historian Chris Myers Asch offered this context:
Race still does play a role, in large part because race and partisanship are so closely intertwined nationally, but especially in the District. And so modern politicians are not nearly as blunt and direct as those of the late 19th century. They don’t talk about the racial reasons in as quite clear language as they did back then.
But they use words like urban Democrats or even just Democrats – you know, district Democrats. And when they say that, they know what people will hear, and what people will hear is Black Democrats because particularly in Washington, race and party politics are so closely intertwined.
Now, Trump is also symbolically, if not literally, conquering Washington. His cries of “law and order” are a centuries-old white racist siren — and a justification for oppressing and taking away the rights and freedoms of Black Americans and other non-whites.
Central to the White Restoration project is the shaping of public memory and control over public space. To that point, the Trump administration recently announced that it will be restoring a Confederate monument to Arlington National Cemetery, which sits across the Potomac River from the capital.
“[T]he work of towering statues in town squares, presented without context, do not offer insight into history but freeze historical norms in place,” Natasha Lennard of The Intercept wrote. “This is precisely Trump’s revanchist aim…Today’s Republicans are doing the same: restoring Confederate statues to erase the traces of the vast 2020 rebellions and what they represented, and taking an ax to historical research and education that reflects the truth of America’s foundational and continued white supremacist violence, and the struggles against it.”
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Trump’s attempted takeover of D.C. brought me back to Cullen Murphy’s book “Are We Rome?” He writes:
Washington resembles Rome in many ways. The physical similarities are visible to anyone. The similarities of spirit are more salient…Washington, too, has been animated by a special outlook. Long ago, it was a notion of Republican virtue that Romans of an early era would immediately have recognized. Today it’s a strutting sense of self and mission the Roman of a later era would have recognized just as readily. Foreigners are well aware of this outlook, friends, and enemies alike. It’s a pungent quality — an internal characteristic that gives rise to outside counterforces. The comparison with Rome has always been on the minds of leaders in America’s capital. It was celebrated when Washington was no more than a street plan.
In moving descriptive prose, Murphy compares Washington’s famous monuments, memorials, landmarks and “[c]ollonaded government buildings” that “stretch for miles” to those of Rome. The Jefferson Memorial is a smaller version of the Pantheon. Union Station recalls the Baths of Diocletian. As an obelisk, the Washington Monument serves as a reminder of Rome’s victory over Egypt.
“I doubt I’m the only person who has trod, with lofty steps, sculpted gardens of the Capitol and been seized with a vision of how the city below might appear as a ruin…What calamity could bring the capital to this condition? Earthquake? Pestilence? Pride?”
In the book’s last chapter, Murphy asks, “Are we Rome? In important ways we just might be. In important ways we’re clearly making some of the same mistakes. But the antidote is everywhere. The antidote is being American.”
Watching the rise of Trumpism and American neofascism, I am repeatedly convinced that “being American” will not be the antidote that Murphy and other observers hope it will be.
As the old saying goes, “all roads lead to Rome.” In America today, with its rapidly collapsing democracy, all roads lead to Donald Trump and his MAGA movement.
