By taking over DC, Trump may have outflanked the Democrats — again

First, it was Los Angeles. Now, it is Washington, D.C. Next, it could be the rest of the country — and maybe even the world.

On Aug. 11, President Donald Trump announced plans to invoke Section 740 of the Home Rule Act to seize control of the Washington’s Metropolitan Police Department and to deploy 800 troops from the D.C. National Guard to combat what he called “crime, bloodshed, bedlam and squalor.” (On Saturday, we learned these are to be supplemented by at least 750 more National Guard personnel from the Republican-led states of West Virginia, Ohio, and South Carolina.) After U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi attempted to install Drug Enforcement Administration chief Terrance A. Cook as “emergency police commissioner,” D.C. Attorney General Brian Schwalb sued the administration — and a federal judge ruled the order could not be implemented.

In reality, violent crime in Washington is at a 30-year low.

Trump’s takeover of law enforcement in Washington for reasons of “law and order” is but one more step toward a permanent state of national emergency where the Constitution, voting and elections, and civil rights could be greatly curtailed, if not suspended altogether. On Monday, he seemingly joked about the prospect of curtailing U.S. elections during his Oval Office meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. 

After Zelenskyy pledged to hold elections in Ukraine — which were postponed last year due to the country’s ongoing war with Russia — Trump couldn’t resist chiming in. “During the war you can’t have elections? So let me just see — three-and-a-half-years from me, if we happy to be in a war with somebody, no more elections,” he said. “That’s good.”

The president has signaled that Washington and Los Angeles could be just the beginning of the Trump administration’s plans to occupy other Democrat-led cities — many of which have large Black and brown populations.

Radley Belko, writing at The Intercept, connected Trump’s actions in D.C. and L.A. to his administration’s deportations of people to the notorious CECOT prison in El Salvador and the Justice Department’s politicization, and “nearly every other authoritarian overreach of the last six months.” 

“He is testing the limits of his power,” Belko observed, “and, by extension, of our democracy. He’s feeling out what the Supreme Court, Congress, and the public will let him get away with. And so far, he’s been able to do what he pleases.”

Trump’s attacks on the nation’s capital are tied to a long history in Republican politics, Belko wrote. “But the threat today is uniquely authoritarian and dangerous. The Nixon and Bush administrations were pushing policies that were wrongheaded, counterproductive, and in a few cases unconstitutional. But they weren’t attacks on democracy…This most certainly is.”

Belko noted in his essay that “Trump has long dreamed of presiding over a police state.” The president, he said, has long been blatant about his admiration for foreign autocrats, and in his second term, he seems to have surrounded himself with people who are willing to help him make his ambition a reality. “It’s time to believe them,” Belko warned. 

Trump’s actions come at a time when his authoritarian campaign against American democracy is becoming increasingly unpopular among the public. In theory, Democrats could harness such public outrage to slow the president’s momentum. Unfortunately for them — and for the future of the country — Democrats face a daunting challenge, as Trump’s “law and order” policies may prove to be much more popular than many would like to believe.

As New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman recently told CNN:

I think you see that in terms of [D.C.] Mayor [Muriel] Bowser, how she has reacted…There is a crime problem everywhere, in multiple cities. Big cities have traditionally had crime problems. There are a lot of people who feel unsafe in big cities. And so if the mayor pushes back on the president, she sounds like she’s not addressing concerns of constituents.

Crime remains one of Trump’s strongest polling issues. Citing a new Ipsos poll, CNN’s Harry Enten elaborated: “Americans view Trump far more favorably now on crime than they did a year ago, and while this polling doesn’t take into account what’s exactly happening in D.C. right now, it does take into account what happened in Los Angeles, what’s happened earlier this year, and Americans, for the most part, actually view Trump favorably. Crime is one of Trump’s best issues. It’s one of the reasons why he wants to talk about crime, because it favors him.”

For at least 60 years — from Richard Nixon’s “law and order” response to the mass protests and uprisings of the 1960s to Lee Atwater’s infamous Southern Strategy of the 1980s — Republicans have branded Democrats and liberals as being soft on crime.

That accusation defies the facts. In truth, it was President Bill Clinton and the New Democrats who accelerated the country’s system of mass incarceration. This included guaranteed minimum sentences and other draconian policies as part of the War on Drugs and larger crime panic that began in the late 1980s and continued through the 1990s.

Democrats and others who oppose Trump’s attempted authoritarian takeover of D.C. must work hard to penetrate the bubble of what author and civil rights lawyer Alec Karakatsanis describes as “copaganda” — “a system that villainizes the poor, neglects stories about white-collar crime and prioritizes punishment over public safety” — and how it dominates the American public’s imagination and perception about crime. 

They have an uphill battle. Trump and the MAGA movement’s “tough on crime” brand is enabled by how the average American (mis)understands statistics, relative risk and danger.

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It is a longstanding finding in psychology that individuals tend to amplify feelings of threat and danger, and downplay those of safety and security. In the context of crime and social disorganization, the U.S. currently has much less violent crime per capita than it did during the 1990s and 1980s. Yet the American public consistently overestimates the level of crime, believing it to be at historic highs that constitute an epidemic. 

The average person also has recency and immediacy biases. This means that events which happen locally in a person’s community, neighborhood or social circle — or to them personally — are given higher salience and impact than events that happen on a much larger society-wide scale. 

In this way, the personal is truly political, as direct experience is more important than statistical abstraction. The Democrats’ obsession with statistics and how “crime is at historic lows” cannot be easily reconciled by a public that feels (and experiences) the opposite. As Slate’s Matt Watkins explains, “Once again, Democrats fell into the trap they have been stumbling into for years. They met a visceral, emotional play with an abstract, data-heavy rebuttal.”

Trump’s “law and order” narrative and takeover of the D.C. police department is also an example of his mastery of pain points, political sadism and understanding of what the many Americans who feel ignored by Democrats and the country’s political elites are actually feeling.

When a person goes to the store and finds almost everything locked up behind plastic because of shoplifting, they may feel antagonized and triggered. An honest person is made to feel like a sucker and a fool. Donald Trump has a simple — and for many Americans, an emotionally appealing — answer for how to deal with shoplifters and other criminals.

Democrats must realize that the average person does not live their lives through statistics. Instead, they live their lives, both in major cities and other parts of the country, in fear of crime and hooliganism.

Trump has crafted an image of himself as a tireless strongman, a human dynamo fighting for his people, always in motion to “Make America Great Again.” His “crime” crackdown in D.C. fits firmly within this spectacle and fantasy.

Throughout the Age of Trump, I’ve overheard many conversations on the street, on the bus or in some other public place where people say things like “Trump may be crazy” or “I think he is too extreme.” And then they add: “But at least he is doing something about the problem.” I have heard this from Black, brown and white people; from members of the working class and poor and middle class; and from young people and older people. Even with Trump’s return to power in 2025, these voices have not gone away. If anything, they may have grown louder.

If Democrats and the party’s messengers continue along their current impotent path, Trump and his MAGA Republicans will likely not need skullduggery and trickery to win power in the future. Enough Americans will vote for him and the MAGA movement yet again — and by doing so, they will willingly surrender their democracy and freedom for “law and order,” “national strength” and “unity.”