On June 9, I stated the obvious about Donald Trump’s decision to put troops on the streets of Los Angeles, ostensibly in response to briefly violent protests against the administration’s immigration enforcement actions.
“The federalizing and dispatching of the National Guard was about optics,” I wrote. “It’s a show of force intended every bit as much, and perhaps even more so, for Americans who aren’t protest participants as for those who are.” Just hours later, Trump sent in the Marines.
Nearly everyone saw in the Los Angeles drama a prelude to a broader militarization of America’s streets. That began to play out on Monday, when Trump took control of the D.C. police force and called the National Guard to the nation’s capital, which he characterized as akin to a bad day in Mogadishu. D.C. in 2025 is a place where “caravans” of “bloodthirsty criminals,” “roving mobs of wild youth” and “drugged-out maniacs” scour the city for victims, Trump said, at a press conference.
While that might be more or less accurate as a description of 2 AM in America’s worst neighborhoods, it’s nothing short of ludicrous as a way of describing heavily-trafficked areas of the capital in broad daylight. I was just there a week and a half ago to watch tennis. And I’m fine. As pretty much every major US media outlet was quick to point out, official statistics show a dramatic reduction in violent crime, including a 32% drop in homicides last year versus 2023, a 40% decline in robberies and a halving of carjackings.
As the figure above shows, the same favorable trends continued this year, according to the city.
I’m sympathetic — really I am, I’m not being sarcastic — to a “me or your lyin’ eyes” approach when it comes to violent crime in urban settings, but between Trump’s enormous credibility deficit and his well-documented inclination to militarize America’s streets, it’s difficult to give him the benefit of the doubt.
Fortunately for Trump, he doesn’t need it. The benefit of the doubt. Because he’s doing whatever he wants whenever he wants to do it, and so far in his second term, no one’s been able to stop him. D.C. Attorney General Brian Schwalb’s about to become another one of those people — people who prove themselves unable to impede Trump on his quest to transform the US presidency into the office of an autocrat, I mean.
Schwalb on Monday lambasted Trump’s decision as an “unprecedented and unlawful” overreach while promising to “do what’s necessary to protect the rights and safety of District residents.” Of course, that’s the exact same thing Trump’s promising: To “do what’s necessary to protect the rights and safety of District residents.”
Pete Hegseth’s along for the ride, where that means prepared to deploy active-duty US troops “if needed,” as Trump put it. Hegseth’s former Fox colleague-turned US attorney for D.C., Jeanine Pirro, was there too. She blamed “young punks” for Trump’s imaginary crime wave. “They think they can get together in gangs and crews and beat the [hell] out of you,” she raged. “That changes today.”
This is one of those cases where simply stating the facts is a surreal joke by itself. Imagine going back to, say, 2015 and telling someone that in just 10 years, President Donald Trump and two Fox hosts, one of whom’s the Defense Secretary, the other the top US attorney for the nation’s capital, would be holding a joint press conference announcing a federal takeover of the police complimented by a quasi-military deployment, all aimed at dissuading “roving mobs of wild youth,” drug addicts and sundry “punks” from sacking the city.
Trump carried on. And on. And on. The press conference lasted more than an hour. “If our capital is dirty, our whole country is dirty,” he sneered.
Prelude to midterms. And cue the lack of outrage – we’ve become numb to this.
Whatever is in the Epstein files about Trump, it’s really really bad. He’s literally wasting millions of tax payer dollars to try to distract us from that, every damn day.
His sleight of hand seems to be working, no new Epstein stories for a couple of days…..
He’s got a lot of help. When is the last time you saw a story about the still ongoing LA protests?
With Trump in office, you can’t say he’s wrong about DC being dirty, and that dirt extending to the rest of the country. I feel dirty too, like it’s my fault for not saying/doing enough to help keep him out of office somehow. But mine is a different sort of dirty than (1) what he’s talking about (fake crime) and (2) what we’re talking about (real crimes against democracy).
Not quite sure what Big Balls was up to at 3am. Only 19 so can’t legally drink in DC bars. Certainly has no big city awareness that being out at 3am was exceedingly poor judgement. Now we will have national guard units intimidating everyone here.
So our Reichstag moment is here because a teenager nicknamed “Big Balls” got mugged? Humiliating!
I’m afraid to go to Washington D.C., but I wasn’t afraid yesterday or any day before that.
I guess having a good man on the inside might help here. A guy who can get you things. Then you can tunnel out and head to Zihuatanejo…
Hope is a beautiful thing, Red.
I think they should start with the worst criminals before they go after the kids. For starters how about they render anyone with more than 30 felonies to El Salvador. Brake out the National Guard in Alaska this weekend and you grab a bad felon and a globally wanted war criminal for crimes against humanity. That way you clean up the planet instead of just a few streets in DC.
I call this sort of strategy “striping the parking lot.” I’ve attended board meetings at a number of largish companies with real problems that need serious attention, only to watch the board go off track and start worrying about how the executive parking lot is configured, as in who gets the space next to the door. They often mess around with that topic for a couple hours because they can bring it to a vote. They run out of time, table the big stuff and recess. Small stuff can usually be resolved. It’s the real stuff that gets ignored.