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The Farce of Trump’s ‘Law and Order’ Crackdown in America’s Capital

Imagine living in a city where violent crime has been sinking toward a thirty-year low, where church bells drown out sirens, where joggers glide past historic brownstones, unarmed and content, their only concern being which café to visit after their run. Imagine living in a city where smiling couples stroll with joints in hand, swapping jokes under rainbow flags near their beloved LGBTQ-friendly bar, waving to friends seated on the patio. Imagine living in a city where weekend farmers’ markets brim with local produce, not fear, and street musicians fill open-air benches with jazz, not sirens. Just imagine this city where the murder rate plummeted by nearly half between 2023 and 2024, a city that, for once, felt like it was finally awakening to its own promise, and suddenly soldiers in fatigues roll down your street. You look up from your coffee shop and see the president call your home “lawless”, compare it to Baghdad, and invoke an emergency law designed for riots and insurrections. Bags of groceries turn into camouflaged checkpoints, neighbours who once argued over parking spaces whisper about martial law. You have spent years warning friends not to elect angry narcissists, and they assured you that you were being dramatic. Now the Stars and Stripes is stitched onto combat fatigues patrolling the nation’s capital. How is that for dramatic? It sounds like a sinister scene from some B-movie made in Hollywood, but no, that is the orange wrecking ball calling for “law and order”.

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Donald Trump’s unprecedented invocation of Section 740 of the DC Home Rule Act to seize control of Washington’s police and deploy the National Guard is being sold as a heroic crackdown on violent crime. The White House says the city is a war zone, Trump calls it “lawless” even as his own officials admit violent crime has been falling and federal data put it at a three-decade low. Yet under this fabricated emergency, the streets are swarming with roughly 800 National Guard troops and another 850 federal officers. On the first night of the “surge”, they made just 23 arrests, for crimes ranging from homicide to fare evasion, and seized six illegal handguns. If that is the definition of a crisis requiring martial law, America’s bar for invasion now sits somewhere between a panhandler’s cup and a pothole on Pennsylvania Avenue. Mayor Muriel Bowser tried diplomacy at first but quickly called the deployment what it is, an “authoritarian push”, and urged residents to defend the city’s autonomy and elect a Democratic Congress as a backstop. She grasps what many choose to ignore: a public-safety pretext is being used to normalise a federal occupation, complete with checkpoints, surveillance sweeps of homeless encampments, and a president comparing his own capital to a Middle Eastern war zone as though he does not hear the irony.

The president’s quest for new enemies started with Edward Coristine, a nineteen-year-old staffer for the government-efficiency institutional cosplay known as DOGE. One of its most recognisable faces and most unforgettable nicknames, “Big Balls”, was assaulted around three o’clock one Sunday morning near Dupont Circle by a group of youths. Police quickly arrested a fifteen-year-old boy and girl and charged them with attempted carjacking; they recovered a stolen iPhone worth a thousand dollars. But rather than take the win on two swift arrests, Trump turned this single street mugging into a national morality tale, blasted out photos of a bloodied, shirtless Big Balls on Truth Social, and demanded that the law be changed so juveniles could be prosecuted as adults. Elon Musk chimed in that Big Balls, who had left Doge in June and now works for the Social Security Administration, had bravely intervened to save a woman from a gang and had been “severely beaten to the point of concussion”. The irony of a man whose screen name trumpets his supposed toughness being roughed up by minors would be funny if it were not being exploited to justify martial law. Coristine’s misfortune became yet another prop in Trump’s narrative that DC is a lawless hellhole, one that conveniently omits that violent crime is at historic lows.

To understand why the president can even attempt this stunt, you have to revisit the racist, paternalistic roots of the nation’s capital. Washington, DC, was created as a federal district under congressional control, and its residents were disenfranchised for most of the city’s history. Even after the 23rd Amendment allowed them to vote for president, they had no elected mayor until 1974, and Congress still retains the power to override local laws. DC has long been majority Black, and opponents of statehood have leaned on the patronising notion that Black residents cannot govern themselves. It is no accident that a city nicknamed “Chocolate City” has never been granted full representation in Congress. Against that backdrop, Trump’s rhetoric about a “lawless” capital plays to old racist tropes. Writer Dave Zirin captured the surreal farce of the moment: he turned up alone at a pots-and-pans protest because he had the wrong address and realised it was no more absurd than proclaiming a crime epidemic in a city where crime has plummeted, or hearing self-described tough guys admit they will not buckle their seatbelts because they are afraid of being carjacked. The mythology of marauding youths, caravans of juvenile thugs, gangs of “local thugs”, is the coin of fear-mongering politics. This takeover is not about fighting crime. It is about a president’s desire to militarily occupy cities governed by Democrats, put a final stake through the heart of democratic norms, and, most critically, do it all on fictitious terms. DC was already one of the most policed cities in America. Only its Metropolitan Police Department was under local control. Now, with National Guard troops on the streets and the chain of command hijacked, civil-rights leaders warn that Washingtonians are living under martial law, waving banners that read “No Occupation Without Representation”.

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For years, observers across the globe have implored their friends in the United States not to hand power to men whose egos are as fragile as their violent impulses. We warned that electing a leader who openly admired dictators, who joked about roughing up protesters, who insisted he alone could fix things, would end badly. We warned that the cult of personality around Trump was less politics than one man’s delusions. From halfway around the world, we watch footage of National Guard trucks rumbling past the cherry blossoms and see a White House press secretary praising a crackdown while lying to the American people with a smile and for a paycheck. We hear senators on the news complain they cannot buckle their seatbelts in fear of carjackers and are told the solution is to hand more power to the man who incites mobs, who pardoned insurrectionists, and who thought Epstein was a terrific guy. This takeover is not about keeping anyone safe. It is about conditioning Americans to accept occupation as a legitimate political tool, and conditioning the rest of the world to accept it as a precedent. If a president can federalise the police in Washington because he feels like it, he can do it anywhere. What begins as a law and order stunt ends as a blueprint for suspending elections, cancelling dissent, and rewriting laws by fiat. Today it is Washington, tomorrow it could be any liberal city that displeases the America First angry president. This is not just a domestic concern. Democrats with a small d, feminists, DEI supporters, and liberals around the world are watching with alarm. When a man who called Charlottesville’s white supremacists “very fine people” sends troops to a city where crime is falling, it is not for your protection, it is for his power. Decades of warnings sound less hysterical when the sirens start. If you think voting for an angry narcissist cannot end in authoritarianism, welcome to Baghdad on the Potomac. We thought Germany had given the best blueprint of how not to run a country, and the rest of us have been banging our pots and pans from afar for years.

Will they listen NOW???