\n<\/p>\n
Washington, D.C., more than any other city in the country, presents President Donald Trump with the opportunity to meddle in the minutiae of municipal governance. Even in the capital, though, his powers are far from limitless. And the chasm between Trump\u2019s sweeping plan to \u201cclean up\u201d D.C. and his actual authority over the city sets up a stark choice for the president: He can either settle for a significantly diminished version of the kind of change he desires or attempt to push the bounds of the law.<\/p>\n
On Monday, Trump announced that he would federalize the city\u2019s police department, deploy the National Guard, and dispatch hundreds of federal officers to patrol the nation\u2019s capital, pledging to address its \u201ccrime, bloodshed, bedlam, and squalor.\u201d Trump set a high bar for himself during a press conference in which he promised to, among other things, get rid of D.C.\u2019s \u201chomeless encampments\u201d and \u201cslums,\u201d revoke the city\u2019s cash-bail system, end its so-called sanctuary-city policies, increase penalties for youth offenders, and even fill potholes with fresh asphalt. \u201cOur capital city has been overtaken by violent gangs and bloodthirsty criminals, roving mobs of wild youth, drugged-out maniacs, and homeless people,\u201d he said yesterday at the White House. \u201cAnd we\u2019re not going to let it happen anymore. We\u2019re not going to take it.\u201d But Trump is likely to find that even this seizure of broad emergency powers does not give him free rein to remake the city to his liking.<\/p>\n
The 1973 Home Rule Act, which allows a president to take over Washington\u2019s police force during an emergency, also sets a limit on how long this kind of federalization can last. Under that law, Trump has a maximum of 30 days to maintain control over the Metropolitan Police Department\u2014hardly enough time to conduct a major revamping of policing tactics and enforcement priorities. (The 1973 law actually limits the White House\u2019s authority to 48 hours, allowing an extension to 30 days only after the president has notified Congress why such an accommodation is necessary.) Extending the federalization, which began yesterday, past a month would require an act of Congress. Democrats, whose votes Trump would likely need to pass such a law, have already blasted his actions as those of a would-be authoritarian.<\/p>\n
Washington\u2019s attorney general, Brian Schwalb, has denounced Trump\u2019s moves as \u201cunprecedented, unnecessary and unlawful,\u201d challenging the president\u2019s claim that D.C.\u2019s crime levels constitute an emergency. \u201cThere is no crime emergency in the District of Columbia,\u201d Schwalb wrote yesterday on X. \u201cWe are considering all of our options and will do what is necessary to protect the rights and safety of District residents.\u201d Like many other cities, D.C. experienced a spike in crime during and immediately after the COVID-19 lockdowns but has since seen numbers drop. Homicides are down 12 percent so far this year compared with the same period last year, following a 31 percent decline in 2024, according to MPD. Violent crime is down 26 percent as of Monday, MPD reports, after a 35 percent drop last year. As a result, crime levels in Washington are at a 30-year low.<\/p>\n
Still, Trump has looked past the broader statistics to zero in on specific acts of violence\u2014including a bloody assault on a federal staffer earlier this month that the president said led him to get more involved in local crime fighting.<\/p>\n
While the D.C. city council echoed Schwalb\u2019s criticism, calling Trump\u2019s actions \u201ca show of force without impact\u201d in a statement, Mayor Muriel Bowser was less combative during a press conference yesterday afternoon. She said Trump\u2019s moves were \u201cunsettling and unprecedented\u201d but \u201cnot surprising,\u201d given Trump\u2019s rhetoric in recent weeks. She said she would work with Trump\u2019s allies to review the city\u2019s crime laws and encourage the police force to collaborate with its federal partners to help end \u201cthe so-called emergency.\u201d<\/p>\n
Trump would need buy-in from Washington\u2019s police officers themselves to enforce the more aggressive form of policing he has requested. (Trump said yesterday that law enforcement should \u201cknock the hell out of\u201d suspected criminals, lock up more juveniles, and otherwise \u201cdo whatever the hell they want.\u201d) He received a nod from MPD\u2019s union, which has clashed with the city council over laws that aimed to reduce police misconduct and hold officers accountable for using excessive force. The union said yesterday that it welcomed the federalization and looked forward to working with the White House to tackle local crime.<\/p>\n
At the same time, the union asserted that any federal takeover should be temporary, and fissures have already emerged over staffing levels. The department said its force of about 3,200 officers, which has shrunk by about 600 over the past five years, is overstretched and needs more employees. Trump, who wants the department to make more arrests, disagrees, saying yesterday that the officers need only to have the right policies in place. \u201cI was told today, \u2018Sir, they want more police.\u2019 I heard a number\u20143,500 police,\u201d Trump said. \u201cThey said, \u2018We have 3,500. We need more.\u2019 You don\u2019t need more. That\u2019s so many. That\u2019s like an army.\u201d<\/p>\n
As the commander in chief of D.C.\u2019s National Guard, Trump faces fewer limitations in deploying the actual Army onto Washington\u2019s streets. Unlike state National Guard members, who report to a governor, the D.C. National Guard is under the purview of the White House. Even so, D.C.\u2019s National Guard is relatively small. The Army said in a statement yesterday that it was mobilizing 800 soldiers, though only about 100 to 200 would be assisting local law enforcement at any given time.<\/p>\n
In practice, that means the troops will likely serve primarily as backup to D.C. police or other law-enforcement officials who might be arresting suspects or conducting direct law-enforcement activities, as California National Guard troops largely did after Trump sent 4,000 of them into Los Angeles earlier this summer. Trump\u2019s eagerness to deploy the guard members to a mostly quiet city sparked accusations of hypocrisy from Democrats, who questioned his delays in dispatching the guard during the deadly January 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. Other federal agents from branches including the FBI, U.S. Park Police, and the Drug Enforcement Agency have begun emerging on city streets but are supposed to limit their activities to enforcing federal laws.<\/p>\n
Yesterday, Trump pledged to overhaul several local D.C. policies\u2014cash bail, immigration enforcement, road construction. The Home Rule Act does not give him authority to do any of those things; instead, it offers broad powers to the locally elected D.C. city council and mayor to govern the city of 700,000.<\/p>\n
Once Trump realizes that he does not have the ability to enact his vision quickly, the president is likely to move on to other matters, Joseph Margulies, an attorney and government professor at Cornell University, predicted. \u201cIt\u2019s equivalent to the bloviating about buying Greenland or seizing the Panama Canal or making Canada the 51st state, where he\u2019s going to lose interest in an hour and a half,\u201d Margulies told me. \u201cAnd then, the National Guard will drift away, and the FBI will be reassigned to where they need to be, and the D.C. police will go back to doing what they do. It\u2019s just a pointless symbolic exercise.\u201d<\/p>\n
Others see darker possibilities. Trump\u2019s ultimate goal might be to normalize the idea of federal forces storming into Democratic cities, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, an expert on authoritarianism, told me. \u201cIt is no surprise that with the flimsiest of excuses\u2014a supposed crime surge that is contradicted flatly by the actual statistics\u2014they are moving to militarize the capital,\u201d she said. \u201cEach laboratory of repression\u2014first L.A., now this\u2014is supposed to habituate people to accept this executive overreach and with the aesthetics of cities being subjugated by troops.\u201d<\/p>\n
But unlike mass protests over racial justice or pro-immigrant activism in Los Angeles\u2014incidents that tend to grab the national spotlight at least for a time\u2014the issues of homelessness, youth crime, and municipal disorder are long-standing challenges that defy easy fixes. Trump has shown more interest in the flashier parts of managing the city\u2019s profile, appointing himself the chair of the Kennedy Center, creating the \u201cD.C. Safe and Beautiful Task Force\u201d to tackle crime and urban grime, and overseeing a military parade near the White House. During his press conference yesterday, he took time to tout the recent \u201cupgrades\u201d he has implemented at the White House itself, including renovated marble floors, an abundance of new gold trim, and plans for a massive ballroom.<\/p>\n
Citing his \u201cnatural instinct\u201d for \u201cfixing things up,\u201d Trump suggested that he would do the same for the nation\u2019s capital, betraying no awareness that his power is far more limited outside the gates of the White House complex. \u201cNot only are we stopping the crime; we\u2019re going to clean up the trash and the graffiti and the grime and the dirt and the broken marble panels and all of the things they\u2019ve done to hurt this city,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd we\u2019re going to restore the city back to the gleaming capital that everybody wants it to be. It\u2019s going to be something very special.\u201d<\/p>\n
Missy Ryan contributed to this report. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Washington, D.C., more than any other city in the country, presents President Donald Trump with the opportunity to meddle in the minutiae of municipal governance. Even in the capital, though, his powers are far from limitless. And the chasm between Trump\u2019s sweeping plan to \u201cclean up\u201d D.C. and his actual authority over the city sets<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":15415,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[8854,7536,70,2921,71],"class_list":{"0":"post-15414","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-social-issues","8":"tag-d-c","9":"tag-dreams","10":"tag-hit","11":"tag-reality","12":"tag-trumps"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15414","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=15414"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15414\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/15415"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=15414"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=15414"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=15414"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}