Trump's military takeover of Washington DC is a sheer demonstration of power
That there is no emergency is irrelevant: Trump has declared one in order to exercise powers that are only available to him in a state of exception, which is, of course, what the whole country increasingly finds itself to be experiencing as the president expands the powers of his office from those of a constitutional executive into something more like the power of authoritarian control.
The move follows the Trump administration's deployment of both the National Guard and the Marines to Los Angeles earlier this year; in a press conference announcing the move on Monday, Trump suggested that he also intends to deploy the military to cities such as Baltimore, Oakland and New York. 'This will go further,' he said. 'We're starting very strongly with DC' The deployment reflects Trump's continued determination to further erode the longstanding American taboo against deploying military personnel for domestic law enforcement.
It hardly matters what the pretext for such moves are. In LA, Trump claimed that protests against his administration's kidnapping of immigrants was causing unsustainable disorder in the city; it wasn't. In DC, Trump is likewise claiming that crime is out of control; it is not. (Crime has in fact dropped precipitously in Washington over the past decade, with violent crimes declining by more than half since 2013; there has been an especially steep decline in the crime rate since 2023.)
In a bit of dark comedy, attorney general Pam Bondi appeared at the press conference and stood at a podium to declare that crime in DC would soon come to an end, all while flanked by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and President Trump, two men accused – and, in Trump's case, convicted – of numerous crimes themselves.
But no one is really supposed to believe that the deployment of troops to America's most liberal, most racially diverse, and most culturally thriving cities is an actual response to an actual crisis. Rather, the thinness of the pretext is itself a demonstration of power. The Trump administration, and national Republicans more broadly, have increasingly been willing to argue that Democratic rule is illegitimate even where Democratic politicians are duly elected; the nationalization of law enforcement in DC follows from this premise, seizing authority that rightly belongs to the Democratic local officials and distributing it to the Republican national figures who will brook no disagreement and tolerate no imposition of policies with which they disagree.
Such a move may not, in the end, lead to widespread violence: aside from the lack of much actual crime for them to respond to, the capital is unbearably hot in the summertime, and one imagines sleepy-looking National Guard troops wandering aimlessly around the National Mall in the August swamp heat, wilted and sweaty in their tactical gear. But the imposition should, in a country with sufficient civic virtue, spawn mass protests all the same.
The troops, after all, are not there to solve a real problem; there is no actual crisis for Trump to exploit. They are there, instead, because the president wants to send a message: that cities and states that are not sufficiently deferential to him in law will have his will imposed on them by force. The result is the same politics of shakedown and threat that Trump has wielded so successfully against universities and major businesses: he will impose suffering on anyone who does not defer to his will.
One strange facet of the Trump era is the continually receding horizon of terms like 'dictatorship' and 'authoritarianism.' Is it an 'authoritarian' move for Trump to seize control of the DC police force if a statute technically grants him the legal authority to do so? Is it a 'dictatorship' if the mechanisms used to extend presidential control into things like private university admissions policies partakes of the nominal consent of administrators?
Is it really a collapsed democracy if the soldiers marching down the streets of the capitol haven't actually wound up shooting anyone yet? These are the kinds of questions that sound ridiculous and naïve when you say them out loud; they sound like the kind of excuse-making one engages in when the effort to maintain denial has become desperate. They are also, often, debates involving the sort of semantic questions that are a bad sign when they come up at all: if the answer was good, no one would be asking the question.
But the militarization of DC also illustrates a core feature of fascist regimes, which is their collapse of rhetoric and reality. Symbolism, language, images: these are core to Trump's political project, which is as much mythic as it is material. Trump's claims about crime and disorder are plain lies. But the ability to make your lies have the force of fact is a terrifying power. No one can doubt that Trump has seized it.
Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist
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