Troops flood the nation's capital

Trump is trying to create more political theater

Thanks for reading America Explained! Paid subscriptions are what keeps this newsletter a going concern, so please upgrade if you’re able to spare a few dollars or euros or whatever (I’m not picky!) a month to support independent journalism.

It all started with the carjacking of Big Balls.

Just over a week ago, former DOGE staffer Edward Coristine - aka “Big Balls” - was injured in an apparent attempted robbery in Washington, D.C. Donald Trump, who has been looking for a way to distract from the Epstein scandal, knew an opportunity when he saw it.

Trump soon moved to federalize - that is, take control of - law enforcement in Washington, D.C. This is possible because of the strange constitutional status of the nation’s capital.

Washington, D.C. is not a state. It is a federal district which is directly ruled by Congress. At the same time, residents of Washington, D.C. are not actually represented in Congress - so they are subject to a power which they have no voice in controlling. You might even call it taxation without representation.

The Founders designed things this way for a few reasons. The first was that they believed that the federal government needed to have ultimate control over law and order in the nation’s capital.

They learned this lesson in the Pennsylvania Mutiny of 1783, when a group of soldiers protested to demand their wages outside Congress and the state government of Pennsylvania refused to disperse them because it sympathized with the soldiers. Putting Congress in charge of security around the federal government seemed a smart move to prevent that from happening again.

The second reason the Founders made Washington, D.C. subject to an authority it did not control was that they wanted to stop the residents of the capital from becoming too powerful. If the capital became a huge, prosperous city like London, then they worried that it would exercise undue influence over the rest of the country. Cutting it off from representation in Congress (and, until the twentieth century, voting for president) would prevent that from happening.

That’s also why they built Washington, D.C. in a noxious swamp - they hoped that not many people would want to live there.

Fast forward to today, and this situation makes little sense. There are close to a million people living in D.C., but only a little over 10% of them work for the federal government. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of government workers live just over the border in Virginia and Maryland and commute into the city, and they vote for Congress just like everyone else. The republic seems not to have collapsed.

Nevertheless, ultimate federal control over D.C. remains the rule - and Trump is now using that authority to take over the city. He has taken control of the local police and dispatched FBI agents and National Guard soldiers to, he says, fight crime.

The thing is that, although crime in D.C. is no laughing matter, there is no urgent crisis right now. Violent crime is at a 30 year low in the district and the trend is in the right direction. If Trump seriously wanted to help drive it even lower, he might try offering to cooperate with the local officials who know their city best - not staging a federal takeover.

It’s important to understand that what is going on here is not an earnest attempt to fight crime in D.C., but a new episode of political theater.

Big cities, and D.C. in particular, have long served as a convenient Other for Republican politicians. If you watch Fox News, then you hear that every single large city in America is a crime-infested hellhole littered with homeless encampments and overrun by brown and black gang members.

The fact that cities are mostly run by Democrats makes this a convenient picture for the right to paint. In truth, they have the causality wrong - it’s true that most large cities in America elect Democratic mayors, but it’s not true that cities run by Democrats are any more crime-ridden than their Republican counterparts. There’s just more crime in cities than there is in some rural part of Kansas.

Nevertheless, the idea that Democrats are chronically mismanaging cities and allowing them to become urban hellholes has become Trump’s chief justification for abusing his powers over domestic law enforcement. It’s the same argument that his regime made when it launched an immigration crackdown on Los Angeles and promised to “liberate” the city from its leadership.

Trump thinks this game allows him to pose as the savior, protecting Americans when their own feckless city leaders won’t do it themselves. And the politics is indeed a bit tricky for figures like Washington, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser. “More resources to stop murders in our communities” is, at its heart, a good thing which is difficult to oppose. But the way that Trump goes about it - with a degree of confrontation that makes it clear he’s more interested in headlines than results - reveals that the game he’s really playing is political, not about public safety.

And i’s a dangerous game to be playing. Perhaps the federal deployment to D.C. will peter out of the news quickly as the National Guard troops end up doing paperwork at headquarters and D.C. police go about their business pretty much as normal. Or maybe the intervention will spark resistance, or lead to a violent incident between a poorly-trained guardsman and a local. Maybe things will escalate badly - that’s always a possibility when you use the military as political props.

What’s scariest of all is that because Trump’s goal is attention-grabbing theatre, he has an interest in making that escalation happen.

Thanks for reading America Explained! Paid subscriptions are what keeps this newsletter a going concern, so please upgrade if you’re able to spare a few dollars or euros or whatever (I’m not picky!) a month to support independent journalism.