Hey, Is It BAD When Trump Says He's Going To Invade All Our Cities (And Has Already Started)?
Yes, Epstein files bad. Military occupation worse.
Donald Trump has never liked the city where he has a part-time home while not golfing. In 2023, he told the CPAC convention that he thought it was high time the federal government took over the District of Columbia, because whenever he visited, “It looked like somebody just took their garbage and just threw it all over the highways, the Beltway. It’s so disgraceful, so disgusting,” and what kind of image did that project to foreign heads of state? It was almost as bad as having the oldest 747 on the tarmac for summit meetings!
The Neverending Crisis
During last year’s Republican National Convention, he called DC a “horrible killing field,” and the party platform included a plank promising to “reassert greater Federal Control over Washington, DC to restore Law and Order in our Capital City,” although not necessarily if mobs of Trump supporters needed to invade Congress again to overturn any elections.
Once in office again, Trump immediately got to planning for military takeovers of American cities, including renewed talk about how he needed to take control of DC, and to hell with the District’s elected leaders, even though Mayor Muriel Bowser cooperated with Trump’s demands to remove homeless encampments along some high-profile roads and to tear up the entire street where the bright yellow words “BLACK LIVES MATTER” were painted near the White House. He still griped that while “I get along great with the mayor, but they’re not doing the job. Too much crime. Too much graffiti. […] Too many tents on the lawns of these magnificent lawns, and there’s tents.” National crisis stuff.
So when former DOGE staffer “Big Balls” got beaten up by two 15-year-old attempted carjackers a week ago — the carjackers were stopped in the act, and arrested, by the actual police — Trump figured he had all the pretext he needed to take over control of the DC Metro police, send in 800 members of the National Guard, and also deploy hundreds of other federal law enforcement officers who would normally be handling serious crimes. He hinted he would also send in active duty troops, if he wants to, and that he’s considering federal takeovers of “other cities also,” specifically targeting LA, Oakland, Chicago, Baltimore, and New York. Gosh, what do those cities have in common?
All those federal officers were welcomed as liberators, as grateful DC residents showed their appreciation by throwing submarine sandwiches at them, a traditional greeting in the District. (OK, it was one guy and one FBI officer dressed like he was taking over Fallujah.) But at least at Trump’s news conference announcing the occupation yesterday, we were treated to the irony of Attorney General Pam Bondi announcing “Crime in DC is ending today” as two accused rapists stood on either side of her (that would be Great Leader and Defense Secretary Shitfaced).
Yes, this is also where we remind you yet again that violent crime is down substantially in the District compared to right after the pandemic. Even carjackings, which are down 50 percent from last year.
Prepare For Occupation
While Trump is happy for any opportunity to talk about anything right now other than the Epstein files and his resulting terrible poll numbers, let’s not call what he’s doing in DC a “distraction.” Taking over cities, especially cities with Democratic leaders, and especially especially cities with Black elected leaders, has always been a key feature of Trump’s autocratic agenda. That was obvious from the pointless military deployments in Los Angeles, where the entire city was somehow packed into several Waymo robotaxis and burned to the ground.
At most, the national crisis of Big Balls getting his ass kicked provided an excuse to go ahead with the occupation that has been in the works since Trump was denied the chance to do it in 2020. We can blame the timing on the Epstein mess, but Troops in the Streets is far more serious than a “distraction,” as election attorney Marc Elias explained yesterday.
Elias argued that Trump isn’t responding to any real crisis, but wants to create the false impression that crime and riots and threats in US cities are out of control because he wants to get Americans “accustomed to the idea that there would be US military, National Guard, federal law enforcement, […] masked agents throwing people in the back of vans.”
He added that it’s not going to end with DC, but will spread to other cities, and possibly suburbs, until Trump “feels like he has complete authority over all law enforcement in this country.” Can’t very well have a police state if local police might not go along, so sweep them aside, starting with the one place in the country where the law allows a president to federalize the local police in an “emergency.” Normalize that “crisis” and federal troops in the cities for the next year and a half, and you have a recipe for federal deployments in big cities leading up to the 2026 midterms.
That’s key to the whole goddamn fascist takeover, not a distraction.
Fascism On Tap
To help that agenda along, the administration has concocted a plan for a standing force of Stormtroopers that can be sent quickly to any city Trump thinks needs to be put in its place, the Washington Post reports today (gift link). The proposed “Domestic Civil Disturbance Quick Reaction Force” would consist of hundreds of National Guard troops that could be deployed within an hour to crack down on imaginary riots and out-of-control crime wherever Trump says they’re needed, since we’re in a perpetual state of crisis now.
The plan calls for 600 troops to be on standby at all times so they can deploy in as little as one hour, the documents say. They would be split into two groups of 300 and stationed at military bases in Alabama and Arizona, with purview of regions east and west of the Mississippi River, respectively.
Those quick reaction forces could of course then be supplemented by more troops as Trump sees necessary. At this stage, the leaked plan is marked “pre-decisional,” and the documents note that the earliest the force could be created and funded by Congress would be Fiscal Year 2027 — at least if it goes “through the Pentagon’s traditional budgetary process,” although since the administration has rejected the quaint old notion that Congress has the power of the purse, Trump might decide to fund it by moving around a few hundred million dollars from unnecessary stuff like … wait, why do we have both a Navy and a Coast Guard? Don’t both have boats?
The Post notes that the plan “relies on a section of U.S. Code that allows the commander in chief to circumvent limitations on the military’s use within the United States,” which we assume is really getting a workout these days. The Guard actually did a little rehearsal for something similar in the runup to the 2020 election, “putting 600 troops on alert in Arizona and Alabama as the country braced for possible political violence,” or at least a good pretext. As it turns out, all the violence was unleashed by Trump himself on January 6, 2021, although the Post doesn’t say whether the pre-election force, consisting mostly of Military Police, not regular troops, had been disbanded by that point.
Technically, Guard troops from one state can’t be mobilized in another state without permission from the second state’s governor, but as we’ve already seen, Trump isn’t too picky about minor things like laws, or about whether sending troops to US cities as a show of force might reduce their readiness for real duties like disaster response or preparing to fight wildfires.
Democrats, Come Out To Play-ay!
Democratic mayors and governors of the places Trump wants to take over next were quick to condemn Trump’s power grab in DC, and that’s good! California Gov. Gavin Newsom twote Monday that Trump was “just getting warmed up in Los Angeles,” and that he’s going to “gaslight his way into militarizing any city he wants in America. This is what dictators do.”
Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott issued a statement saying Trump should “turn off the right-wing propaganda and look at the facts” when he talks about public safety, not that Trump is likely to do anything of the sort. Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson noted that Chicago and other cities singled out by Trump have already brought down crime rates, and that Trump had actually cut violence-prevention funding for cities.
Silly mayors, trying to use facts against a fascist! Maybe Congress will take some kind of action to rein Trump in? Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Maryland) issued a statement condemning the DC takeover and calling it a “textbook authoritarian maneuver,” and said he would introduce a resolution to “reverse this plainly ridiculous state of local emergency and restore full home rule powers,” which will at least be on the official record.
But Democratic leaders in Congress haven’t yet committed to taking the kinds of absolute obstructionist tactics in either house that Republicans routinely used during the Biden administration, and there’s no indication that they plan to do anything more than hope voters will punish Trump in the midterms and 2028, even as Trump moves to rig those elections.
Why aren’t articles of impeachment being filed against Trump every damn week, since that’s about how frequently he commits a high crime here, an impeachable usurpation there? And when Democrats do have power, why do they keep kneecapping themselves, as they did following the financial crisis in 2008 or Trump’s first incompetent authoritarian flailings just five years ago?
As Brian Beutler argues, one big damn reason that Democratic electeds are so frequently unpopular with Democratic voters is that they have fought so hard to be timid in the name of not upsetting “centrists,” who then turned around and complained that the Left was the problem:
Democrats were unable to codify the protections of Roe v. Wade after the Republican Supreme Court eliminated the right to abortion, but it wasn’t because an insufficient number of Democrats supported the protections of Roe. It was because the party built its margins by recruiting Senate candidates like Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema. Because it encourages fearful frontline members to put their interests ahead of the interests of the majority of Americans. It’s hard to “get stuff done” for people in a timely way if your party codes an unwillingness to fight into its DNA.
Yes, Merrick Garland was far too slow to prosecute Trump, giving him all the time he needed to regain power and escape justice. But the very day after the insurrection, Beutler reminds us,
How many remember that then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi shut down a rank-and-file effort to impeach Trump in the wee hours of January 7, 2021, when a discombobulated Senate might have actually convicted him? That she chose to adjourn the House instead?
No, Dems can’t remove Trump while they’re in the minority. But they could be fighting every last step of the way to keep him from taking over cities and rigging elections, by gumming up the works in Congress at every possible opportunity, not just the big votes.
Just fight, for fuckssake. Chuck Schumer, your imaginary friends really fucking hate it when our cities are being invaded.
OPEN THREAD.
[WaPo [gift link] / WaPo (another gift link) / Off Message / Time]
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Open Thread Chat. Aug. 12. Teeny Tiny Tuesday. https://substack.com/chat/1783367/post/ae32039a-b5b3-40fb-9609-e7f5cb429d1a