Playbook: Mr. Trump comes for Washington

Politico

13 hours ago

Presented by
With help from Eli Okun, Bethany Irvine and Ali Bianco
On today's Playbook Podcast, Adam Wren and Mike DeBonis discuss President Donald Trump's looming announcement of his plans for D.C., and what he does (and doesn't) have the power to do.
Happy Monday. I'm Adam Wren, here as another work week begins. Send me your tips, thoughts, etc.
In today's Playbook …
— Trump's big announcement about crime and homelessness in Washington D.C. is set for 10 a.m. We have everything you need to know.
— Planning continues for Friday's big Alaska summit between Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
— What the Teamsters' latest donations to the GOP tell us about the political realignment.
DRIVING THE DAY
TRUMP'S D.C. DECISION: For a few more uneasy hours, Washington waits. At 10 a.m., President Donald Trump will unveil his bid to exert control over the District of Columbia — part of ending 'Crime, Murder, and Death in our Nation's Capital,' he announced yesterday.
Exactly what that push entails has parts of the city on edge.
'I'm going to make our Capital safer and more beautiful than it ever was before,' the president posted on Sunday. 'The Homeless have to move out, IMMEDIATELY. We will give you places to stay, but FAR from the Capital. The Criminals, you don't have to move out. We're going to put you in jail where you belong. It's all going to happen very fast, just like the Border. … Be prepared! There will be no 'MR. NICE GUY.' We want our Capital BACK.'
What the White House says: 'Everyone who lives in our nation's capital, (including the press who read this newsletter every morning) knows homelessness and crime are plaguing this city,' White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt tells Playbook. 'You can thank President Trump for finally taking action to clean it up. Under President Trump's leadership, DC will be safe and beautiful again for its residents, lawmakers, and visitors from around the world.'
The view from D.C.: Mayor Muriel Bowser told MSNBC Sunday she suspects Trump's 'announcement is that he is surging federal law enforcement, which he's talked about.'
'We're going to keep talking to the president, working with his people on the issues that are high priority for him,' Bowser said. 'Now, if the priority is to show force in an American city, we know he can do that here. But it won't be because there's a spike in crime.'
HOW FAR COULD TRUMP GO?: Basically, there's an escalating scale of options at the president's disposal, as POLITICO's Mike DeBonis, himself a former D.C. government reporter, tells us.
On the low end of the scale: The president has control of federal law enforcement agencies, including the FBI, U.S. Park Police and Secret Service, and is within his rights to mobilize them to police the city.
He's already doing that. Over the weekend, there was a noticeable increase in federal law enforcement patrolling the streets of Washington — or at least the downtown-adjacent parts of the city's northwest quadrant most trafficked by the professional class. The 'FBI has begun dispatching agents in overnight shifts,' per WaPo's Perry Stein and colleagues. Joining them are officers from the DEA, ICE and other federal agencies.
One step up on the scale: The National Guard. The D.C. National Guard is under the president's control, and Trump could call them up if he chooses — and, indeed, he's considering doing that.
'The U.S. military is preparing for the activation of hundreds of National Guard troops to Washington, D.C.,' Reuters' Idrees Ali reported last night. Administration sources who spoke with Playbook didn't dispute that report, but stressed that Trump had yet to make a final decision about deploying the National Guard.
If Trump does activate the National Guard, it would be in keeping with his recent actions in Los Angeles and his talk on the 2024 campaign trail. '[I]n cities where there has been a complete breakdown of law and order, where the fundamental rights of our citizens are being intolerably violated, I will not hesitate to send in federal assets including the National Guard until safety is restored,' Trump vowed during the campaign.
Further up the scale: The 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 retains the power to supersede city hall for discrete periods of time.
This has never happened before. When the law was written, they envisioned it being used in the event of a 1960s-style urban riot. 'They were afraid of a scenario where D.C. would be on fire and the mayor would not be able to control it,' DeBonis tells us on this morning's Playbook Podcast. 'That's an option [Trump] has, and it would probably be one of the more serious things. It would be the first time that this particular provision of the Home Rule Act has been invoked.'
Highest up the scale: Asking Congress to modify or repeal the Home Rule Act. At the moment, this seems unlikely to happen; it would need a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, and the support isn't there.
But could that change? It would require getting several Democrats on board, which seems outside the realm of possibility — especially if Trump decides to make a political priority of it. There's growing interest from a niche group in the Senate led by Mike Lee (R-Utah) to repeal the act. And it has support from prominent GOP attorney and MAGA legal enforcer Mike Davis, who has Trump's ear and is often the tip of the spear on controversial issues that intersect with the justice system.
'The Constitution is clear: Congress, not local Democrats, must control our nation's capital,' Davis tells Playbook. 'The D.C. Home Rule Act of 1973 is unconstitutional — and it has turned D.C. into a third-world Marxist hellhole. Congress and the courts must end this half-century disaster.'
Davis is encouraging Trump to press forward. 'The President must follow his constitutional duty and work around unconstitutional legal obstacles in his way,' he says.
BUT LET'S TAKE A DEEP BREATH: Based on our conversations with people in Trump world, at this moment, this entire ordeal seems less like the machinations of a major power struggle than something Trump sees as a quick, visually friendly PR win.
'What it really is is the president has been driving around D.C. and has seen the filth and has seen the squalor himself, and he wants to make it more beautiful and more safe,' a White House official told Playbook last night.
It's about the visuals: The Guardian notes that Trump's Truth Social post yesterday in which he said homeless people have to move out 'IMMEDIATELY' was illustrated by four photos of homeless people or tents — all of which were apparently 'taken from the president's motorcade along the route from the White House to his golf course.' The visual, as ever, matters to him.
And then, consider the political reality of something like overturning home rule. 'Most Republicans understand 'you broke it, you bought it' when it comes to D.C.,' DeBonis tells us. 'If there was a congressional takeover, you are now responsible for cops, schools, picking up trash, etc. Any problems there now redound to you. You don't get to complain about liberal Democrats. It's on you.' Which brings us to …
THE POLITICAL MOMENT: It's worth noting that 'law and order' has long been a dominant plank in Trump's overarching political project, dating back more than a decade. And it's inextricable from how he thinks about cities — which, as our colleague Michael Kruse chronicled years ago, is firmly rooted in his experiences of 1970s and '80s New York City.
In that way, it's not especially surprising that the issue has reemerged.
But its timing seems somewhat politically useful, Democrats argue, coming so soon after a bleak jobs report and the ongoing fallout over the Jeffrey Epstein files.
'This is not related at all to the jobs report,' a White House official granted anonymity tells Playbook.
Even so, campaigning as 'tough on crime' has long been terra firma for Republicans, particularly ahead of midterm elections (see 2018 and the 'migrant caravans,' or 2022 and the number of grim ads that flooded the airwaves on the topic).
It isn't just Trump. In the last week or so, Republicans around the country have raised crime as an issue. 'The soft-on-crime policies that the liberal left has been championing for far too long don't just hurt people, people die,' Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin said in an appearance last week on Sean Hannity's Fox News show. And after a viral video of an assault in Cincinnati, Ohio, GOP gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy held a town hall on the event, phoning into Fox at the end.
This is still an issue on which Democrats find themselves on the back heel. A strain of the party has begun to wrestle with its record of governance in big blue cities. The center-left group Third Way conceded in a memo earlier this year that Democrats needed to 'own failures of Democratic governance in large cities and commit to improving local government.'
Still, Dems argue this is another Trump distraction. Nationally, crime is trending down in every category, according to the FBI. And in Washington, the violent crime rate has dropped drastically since 2023.
'While Trump is making communities less safe and working to undermine cities at every opportunity, Democratic mayors have stepped up to deliver real progress and historic reductions in crime,' a spokesperson for the Democratic Mayors Association told Playbook. 'Trump may want to take credit, but he is the problem, not the solution. Mayors need a federal partner who works with them, not against them.'
The DCCC pushed back, too.
'Firstly, the party that celebrates pardons for those who attacked Capitol Police on January 6 should never, ever be lecturing anyone about law and order,' DCCC spokesperson Viet Shelton told Playbook. 'Secondly, no amount of desperate misdirection will hide the reality that the American people are swiftly souring on House Republicans' failed agenda of broken promises and rising prices, and will reject them in the midterms.'
A White House official said the president has long been focused on law and order. 'This is why Democrats continue to be so unpopular among everyday Americans — they think the President of the United States cracking down on crime in our nation's capital is a bad thing,' the White House official told Playbook.
And to be fair, as David Urban, a former 2016 Trump campaign adviser, told Playbook, litigating crime while talking about other issues isn't an either/or: 'BOTH the economy, as well as safety and security, will always be issues in American elections,' he told us.
TRUMP AND THE WORLD
THE ALASKA SUMMIT: On Friday, Trump is due to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Alaska. European leaders have been rallying around Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and backing his demands for a ceasefire before negotiations start, per NYT's Constant Méheut. EU foreign ministers are set to meet today to discuss what's next, per Reuters.
Land grab: NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte on ABC yesterday said that along with security guarantees for Ukraine, ceding some territory to Russia would 'have to be on the table' — an idea that Zelenskyy has repeatedly rejected, per Bloomberg's Hadriana Lowenkron. And it's not just Rutte: Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) told NBC that there may need to be land swaps, even though he doesn't want to see Russia's actions rewarded.
The room where it happens: VP JD Vance left open the door to organizing a trilateral meeting with Zelenskyy and Putin, saying on Fox News that the White House is 'trying to figure out, frankly, scheduling and things like that, around when these three leaders could sit down and discuss an end to this conflict,' as WaPo's Marianne LeVine and colleagues write. The Kremlin has rejected the idea of inviting Ukraine this week, while Zelenskyy has argued that no peace deal can be reached without Ukraine present.
THE CRISIS IN GAZA: The Israeli military is preparing to quickly expand its operation and seize central Gaza as PM Benjamin Netanyahu yesterday vowed the IDF will 'finish the job' and 'defeat Hamas,' NYT's Isabel Kershner and Aaron Boxerman report from Jerusalem. The Israeli offensive focuses on Gaza's central refugee camps as well as Gaza City, WSJ's Anat Peled reports. … Netanyahu spoke with Trump about the new campaign, but it's not clear when it will begin — only that it will happen 'fairly quickly,' per Reuters' Nidal Al-Mughrabi and Maayan Lubell. The White House has not yet publicly weighed in on the plan.
The latest: An Israeli strike in Gaza last night killed four Al Jazeera journalists, including reporters Anas al-Sharif and Mohammed Qureiqa, per NYT's Ephrat Livni. The IDF accused al-Sharif of being the head of a Hamas 'terrorist cell,' which the Committee to Protect Journalists previously warned was a 'smear campaign.'
The human impact: 'Doctors detail the daily deluge of Gazans shot while seeking food,' by WaPo's Louisa Loveluck and Claire Parker
BEST OF THE REST
CHIP ON YOUR SHOULDER: Nvidia and AMD made a deal with the Trump administration to give the U.S. government 15 percent of their revenue from chip sales to China — a condition to the agreement to obtain export licenses that was approved last week, FT's Demetri Sevastopulo and Michael Acton scooped. 'The quid pro quo arrangement is unprecedented,' FT writes. 'According to export control experts, no U.S. company has ever agreed to pay a portion of their revenues to obtain export licences.'
Speaking of Big Tech: Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan is visiting the White House today to meet with Trump, per WSJ's Lauren Thomas, just days after Trump called for him to be sacked over his ties to China.
DAMNED LIES AND STATISTICS: The Trump administration is actively interviewing candidates to replace Erika McEntarfer atop the Bureau of Labor Statistics — among them E.J. Antoni, the lead economist at the Heritage Foundation and a longtime critic of the BLS jobs data collection system, WSJ's Brian Schwartz and Meridith McGraw scooped. The process is ongoing, but Antoni has the backing of some MAGA die-hards, including Steve Bannon.
SIGN OF THE TIMES: For the second year in a row, the Teamsters' political arm donated to Republicans after about two decades of only backing Democrats. The labor union's D.R.I.V.E political action committee — Democrat, Republican, Independent Voter Education — gave the National Republican Congressional Committee $5,000 in the second quarter.
In addition to giving to the NRCC, Teamsters doled out a combined $62,000 in contributions to GOP Reps. Rob Bresnahan and Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania; Pete Stauber and Tom Emmer of Minnesota; Nicole Malliotakis, Andrew Garbarino, Nick LaLota and Mike Lawler of New York; Jefferson Shreve of Indiana; Dave Taylor, Bob Latta, Michael Rulli and Dave Joyce of Ohio; Jeff Van Drew and Chris Smith of New Jersey; David Rouzer of North Carolina; Tom Barrett of Michigan; Blake Moore of Utah; Darin LaHood and Mike Bost of Illinois; Troy Nehls of Texas; and Vern Buchanan of Florida.
It comes as Teamsters General President Sean O'Brien has sought to reach out beyond the union's traditional audience. He recently hosted Ramaswamy on his podcast, and sat with The Free Press for an interview with Bari Weiss.
'Our members are working people whose interests cut across party lines,' Kara Deniz, a Teamsters spokesperson, told Playbook. 'And there's no value in living in a bubble … where you only talk to certain people to the exclusion of others.'
'Labor unions are finally recognizing the fact that their memberships are made up of workers from across the political spectrum,' said Bresnahan, who received $5,000 from the Teamsters and whose grandfather was a member of the IBEW.
Last year, the Teamsters donated $25,000 to the NRCC and gave $45,000 to the RNC in an effort to diversify their support as their rank-and-file members move rightward.
'Hard-working men and women across the country are rallying behind Republicans up and down the ballot because we fight for their jobs, their families, and their future,' NRCC spokesperson Mike Marinella told Playbook. 'Democrats have abandoned them for their deeply out of touch, radical policies. We're bringing these voters home, and they will be key in growing our House majority.'
REDISTRICTING ROUNDUP: Democrats are blasting Republicans' effort to enact a mid-decade change to multiple state congressional maps, with Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker telling NBC yesterday that Republicans 'know that they're going to lose in 2026 … so they're trying to steal seats.' But Democrats say their own push for mid-cycle redistricting is different, POLITICO's Gregory Svirnovskiy writes. Former AG Eric Holder said Democrats' efforts are 'responsive' and 'temporary.'
Republicans press on: Texas Gov. Greg Abbott vowed to see the redistricting effort through, saying 'as soon as this [session] is over, I'm gonna call another one, then another one, then another one, then another one,' WaPo's Mariana Alfaro and Hannah Knowles report. And Vance is pushing for 'very decisive action' to fight back against what he said were already gerrymandered blue states, per Axios.
TALK OF THE TOWN
George Morgan, a 65-year-old homeless man who lives in a tent camp by the Lincoln Memorial, told NPR's Brian Mann that he is disappointed by Trump's rhetoric about the homeless in D.C. 'As much as God has blessed America … truth be told we're in a shamble and in hot water in terms of taking care of our own.'
Michelle Obama and Ketanji Brown Jackson both made guest appearances at events on Martha's Vineyard last weekend.
EXTREME MAKEOVER: WHITE HOUSE EDITION — Trump's White House makeover continues. The official portraits of former presidents George W. Bush, George H.W. Bush and Barack Obama have been moved to an out-of-the-way stairwell — with Obama's portrait out of view for White House visitors, CNN's Betsy Klein and Kristen Holmes report.
FIRST IN PLAYBOOK — Max Eden and James Paul are joining the America First Policy Institute. Eden will be director of federal education policy and previously was a director at the Domestic Policy Council and an alum of Manhattan Institute and AEI. Paul will be director of state education policy and previously was executive director of the West Virginia Professional Charter School Board.
TRANSITIONS — Janis Bowdler and Felicia Escobar Carrillo are joining Equis Research as senior fellows. Bowdler will be a senior fellow on the economy and previously was the first counselor for racial equity at the Treasury Department. Escobar Carrillo will be a senior fellow on immigration and previously served as chief of staff at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and is a White House Domestic Policy Council alum.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY: Billy Long (7-0) … NYT's David Brooks and Lyndsey Layton … David Rubenstein … former Rep. Dan Kildee (D-Mich.) … Charles Blow … Matt Morgan of Barnes & Thornburg … POLITICO's Toby Eckert, Michael Roberts and Danielle Bello … Chris Berry of iHeartMedia … Scripps News' Liz Landers … Tara Ayres … Joanna Piacenza of Gravity Research … Precision's Brian Krebs … Alex Siciliano of the National Association of Broadcasters … Lauren Maddox of Holland & Knight … Jesse Barba of Cengage Group … Chris Lisi … Kedrin Simms Brachman … former USTR Charlene Barshefsky … DemList's Kimberly Scott … Albert Morales … Marissa Secreto … Colin Cunliff … former Sen. Tim Hutchinson (R-Ark.) … Thad Huguley … John Files … Greg Michaelidis … Ilana Drimmer … Mitra Kalita of URL Media … Sam Myers Jr. … National Journal's Emily Akhtarzandi … Rob O'Donnell … ABCA's Domingo Juan
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