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Photo: Alex Kent/The Washington Post/Getty Images

It’s possible Donald Trump’s abrupt decision to “federalize” law enforcement in Washington, D.C., was just a one-off power grab, reflecting the federal government’s unique control of the capital city and Trump’s own obsession with Washington as a symbol of the American greatness he claims to be restoring. In other words, maybe he took over D.C. because he could.

But the exotic and rather fascistic appearance of National Guard units on the streets of Washington absent a riot or some other historically relevant pretext makes you wonder if the 47th president has something far worse in store. Here are some possibilities that have Trump’s opponents concerned.

Cover for mass deportation

According to the White House’s own numbers, as reported by WUSA9, the immediate priority of the newly federalized law-enforcement presence in D.C. has been going after undocumented immigrants:

In the first week of President Donald Trump’s federal takeover of D.C.’s Metropolitan Police Department, 383 people were arrested, according to the White House …

Numbers from the White House show immigration arrests are driving the surge. Officers made nearly three times as many arrests for immigration violations as firearm possession. Two arrests were related to homicides.

This is less a matter of federal law enforcement usurping local responsibilities than of the Feds commandeering D.C. police to support ICE.

You could definitely envision this administration pursuing federalization as a strategy for compelling local cooperation with the mass deportation program in blue cities elsewhere, which may be why Trump has already suggested emulating the D.C. example in places like New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Baltimore, and Oakland.

More generally, the idea may be to use fighting an imaginary crime emergency as cover for controversial mass deportation efforts that are already planned. Once the presence of heavily armed and uniformed (or masked) federal troops becomes a familiar sight in U.S. cities, the specific outrages committed by ICE may draw less hostile attention and more local cooperation.

Setting the stage for a national law-enforcement takeover

A second rather obvious possibility (again, based in part on Trump’s own threats) is that the D.C. law-enforcement takeover is a trial balloon, enabled by Washington’s unique status as sort of a domestic colony, for plans the administration has to “fight crime” in other major cities. It has been widely reported that one of Trump’s major regrets about his first term is that he didn’t respond to the protests that followed George Floyd’s murder with the kind of militarized federal crackdown that Tom Cotton notoriously demanded. Perhaps he is jonesing for a do-over. After all, violent crime is dropping in other cities but is still perceived as a major problem in many of them. Why wait for a riot when regular old street crime will do as an excuse to “call in the troops”?

Militarizing red-state hostility to blue cities

Trump hasn’t simply taken control of local law enforcement in D.C.; he’s also used his power as de facto governor of the District to call out the D.C. National Guard. But he’s taken another step, with ominous political implications in our deeply polarized country, by inviting red-state governors to send their own Guard units to D.C. So far, Republican governors in Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, Tennessee, and West Virginia have answered the call. Presumably, these governors are storing up political capital with Trump in a performative offer of military might to back up his message, much as many of them did earlier in sending Guard units to the Mexican border at Texas’s request during the Biden administration.

The scary thing is that sending state-controlled military units into blue cities will become a familiar part of red-state conservative politics going forward. If Trump indeed begins federalizing law enforcement in other blue cities, he might call on Republican governors everywhere to chip in Guard resources, making it more obviously an example of quite literal partisan and ideological warfare. Or worse yet, red-state politicians might become tempted to use the Guard to conduct crackdowns on the blue cities within their own jurisdictions, in essence militarizing their own political conflicts. Performative use of the National Guard could become a habit that is hard to shake.

Exploiting Democratic differences over crime policy

It’s important to remember that Trump’s inflation of D.C. crime into a national emergency didn’t come out of nowhere. He made the idea of a largely imaginary crime wave central to the 2024 campaign that put him in a position to lord it over Washington. In some respects, his law-and-order stylings were simply an adjunct to his more general message about “open borders” and the Democrat conspiracy to herd violent migrants into the country to steal elections through illegal voting. But like other conservative demagogues before him, Trump understood that the crime issue divides and sometimes paralyzes Democrats as well. And that’s been made manifest in the divided reaction of Democrats to the D.C. takeover, as liberal pundit Paul Waldman sarcastically demonstrated:

If President Trump installed a guillotine where the White House Rose Garden used to be and started kidnapping and then beheading one Democratic member of Congress every day at noon, in a matter of days there would be an article in The Atlantic titled “Beheading Opposition Politicians is Wrong, But Democrats Need to Rethink Their Opposition to the Death Penalty.” […]

That was essentially where the thoughts of a great many centrists turned after watching the federal government’s assault on the city of Washington DC. They began by accepting the laughable premise that the squads of masked goons setting up checkpoints and walking around the National Mall and other tourist-heavy areas of the nation’s capital are there to address “crime,” then pivoted to their default argument about any controversial issue, which is that the Democratic Party has become too liberal and must move to the center by adopting a warmed-over version of whatever Republicans are offering.

Waldman isn’t wrong that some Democrats went into an immediate defensive crouch the moment “crime” was mentioned. But there’s a good reason for that: Democrats haven’t had much of a common agenda for dealing with crime in a long time (other than dismissing it as a serious problem), which has allowed Republicans to associate them with fringier positions like “defunding the police” and prosecutorial policies that are easy to parody as “soft on crime.” You have to go back to the days of Bill Clinton’s “100,000 cops” proposal and the brief period of interest in “community policing” among Democrats to find much of a consensus on what to say to voters who still fear crime, even if it’s not at historically high levels. A supreme opportunist like Trump with no inhibitions about inflaming racial tensions or violating constitutional norms will, of course, probe that sore point in Democratic politics with a sledgehammer.

Trump’s D.C. Takeover May Be a Prelude to Something Far Worse

Trump’s D.C. Takeover May Be a Prelude to Something Far Worse