Photo: Alex Wroblewski/Bloomberg/Getty Images

Donald Trump’s decision to seize control of the police department in Washington, D.C., and dispatch 800 National Guard troops to combat crime there is a reminder that all of this, really, did not have to happen. Trump didn’t have to get elected president twice. And, more crucially, the District of Columbia didn’t have to remain, all these centuries later, a prisoner of Congress and the White House. The dark reality of the present moment is that Trump, when it comes to the city of D.C. and its roughly 700,000 residents, many of them working class and poor, can effectively do whatever he wants.

Unlike any other major city in America, Washington is completely at his mercy.

Violent crime has been a challenge there, but it has been falling off in the last year; trends in Washington have mirrored the nation’s, which has seen a swift crime decline since the pandemic-era peaks. Trump is not interested in this story because he is a liar and delusional and he enjoys portraying Democrat-run cities as dystopian cesspools. Rank-and-file Republicans are only happy to egg him on. As the country, regionally, continues to polarize, with rural towns swinging rightward and big-city Republican politicians vanishing, this dynamic will only grow more pronounced. The gap between rural and urban America yawns ever wider. Big-city liberalism, for these Republicans, is the great political bogeyman.

Washington, with its blend of staunchly Democratic working-class Black voters and professional-class residents who lean left, is a ripe target for Trump and the Republican-controlled Congress. D.C. has no representation in Congress, and all power it currently possesses to govern itself derives directly from federal lawmakers. Trump, as president, can federalize the Metropolitan Police Department in 48-hour increments. Typically, the MPD is under the control of the mayor, but under the Richard Nixon–era Home Rule Act, the president is able to supersede the city for discrete periods of time. Devised to quell enormous urban riots, the Home Rule Act is now the next rung up in Trump’s escalatory ladder. There are, of course, no riots in Washington, but Trump won’t let reality get in the way of yet another disturbing, anti-democratic maneuver. Trump could eventually ask Congress to repeal the Home Rule Act completely, which would permit him to impose his will fully on the city — no guardrails, and no time limits, on his seizure of the local police. He’d very much enjoy that.

To strike down the Home Rule Act, Republicans would need a filibuster-proof Senate majority. They aren’t close, and there aren’t any Democratic senators who would bail them out. But the present reality, for the city of Washington, is disturbing enough. FBI, U.S. Park Police, and Secret Service, all under Trump’s control, can already menace locals. He controls D.C.’s National Guard. Mayor Muriel Bowser can either negotiate with Trump or meekly comply. She lacks the leverage of a mayor of New York, Los Angeles, or any other leading city because of D.C.’s unique designation as a federal district.

Democrats, over the years, have had plenty of incentive to change the reality of Washington — to grant it statehood or at least independence from Congress. But that hasn’t happened. For federal lawmakers who fly into and out of D.C., the city itself has always been a low priority. Barack Obama, in 2009 and 2010, enjoyed full control of the federal government and either a filibusterproof majority in the Senate or something very close to it. There were votes, in theory, to create new safeguards for D.C. or even move toward granting the city statehood, where it would, by population, outrank Vermont and Wyoming. Momentum for statehood kicked up again in the late 2010s when more progressives arrived in Congress, but Joe Biden, with Democrats narrowly controlling the Senate, never gave any serious attention to changing the status quo. Republicans, of course, are fully against statehood because the new senators joining Congress would very likely be Democrats.

For now, Trump can giddily intimidate the D.C. locals, since he both enjoys a good show of force and is desperate to distract Americans, including his own supporters, over his broken promise to release the Epstein files. If Republicans are braying about crime in D.C., they are less focused on Trump’s longtime association with a billionaire sex offender. Trump has said Attorney General Pam Bondi will oversee the federal takeover of the Metropolitan Police Department and declared he was prepared to send the military into Washington “if needed.” It’s unclear how long this takeover would remain in place. Since there’s no true emergency, there’s no telling how long Trump can drag this all out. Metrics for success are unknown. Trump has withdrawn most of the National Guard troops he deployed to Los Angeles to respond to protests against ICE, so it’s possible that Trump, as he did with L.A., will eventually lose interest in D.C. Residents there can only hope so.

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