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The Guardian
29 minutes ago
- The Guardian
Seth Meyers on Donald Trump's DC police takeover: ‘This is all just theater'
With several late-night hosts on holiday, Seth Meyers took a closer look at the Trump administration's deployment of the national guard in Washington DC as a playbook for other cities. 'Donald Trump is always laser-focused on the important stuff – no, not inflation, not healthcare, not jobs,' said Seth Meyers on Wednesday evening. 'He's focused on giving himself an award.' On Wednesday, Trump gave a typically rambling speech at the John F Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the formerly prestigious performance hall that he took over early in his term, purging the board and replacing it with loyalists. Presenting the center's annual honorees, the president said: 'I always wanted one, I was never able to get one … I would've taken it, if they would've called me. I waited, and waited, and waited, and then said, 'To hell with it, I'll become chairman and I'll give myself an honor.' Next year we'll honor Trump, OK?' 'I like how everyone laughs at him, and then he says, 'No, it's true, actually,'' the Late Night host responded. 'Second, he's definitely not joking about giving himself an award. This is the guy who made a fake Time magazine cover for himself to hang on his wall. 'I have no trouble believing that he'd give himself a made-up award called the 'Kennedy Center Lifetime Achievement Nobel Prize EGOT Award for Most Everything',' Meyers added. Trump also announced that he would host the annual Kennedy Center Honors, and claimed he had to be talked into it by his team because he has better things to do as president. 'Well, I think you deserve the award for best original screenplay, because that's definitely a fake conversation that did not happen,' Meyers laughed. Meyers then turned to the other major political story this week: Trump taking over the Washington DC Metropolitan police and deploying the national guard to combat a made-up crime wave in the city. Meyers noted that Republicans see this action as a playbook for other cities, despite the fact that, in truth, violent crime rates are down in most major cities. The states with the highest crime rates, such as Louisiana and Mississippi, are largely controlled by Republicans. 'The right has created this myth about crime in big cities that isn't true,' Meyers said. 'It's a playbook that Republicans have used for decades, and Trump repeated it in 2024. 'In a clear sign that this is all just theater, Trump is threatening to only send the national guard to cities controlled by Democrats,' calling the DC action a 'beacon for New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and other places all over the country'. 'The myth of urban crime is central to the right's worldview,' Meyers noted. 'For years, they basically made it their whole thing to be afraid of cities.' He pointed to the example of the US transportation secretary, Sean Duffy, on Fox News, complaining about crime rates on the New York City subway and also taking a shot at its cleanliness. Meyers got defensive. 'Only New Yorkers are allowed to shit on the New York City subway. I mean that figuratively and sadly sometimes literally,' he said. 'Trump doesn't want to fix problems in big cities, because he loves problems in big cities,' he concluded. 'He loves problems anywhere that can distract from his problems. And he definitely has problems – his polling numbers are not great, his Maga base is questioning his ties to Jeffrey Epstein and voters are starting to suspect that the Trump administration might be,' to quote Trump himself, 'a crime pot.'
The Independent
an hour ago
- The Independent
Trump ally accuses Zelensky of ‘sabotage' before key Putin meeting
Marjorie Taylor Greene criticised Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky for drone strikes on Russia, hours before a crucial summit between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin in Alaska. Greene claimed Zelensky was attempting to sabotage peace efforts between Trump and Putin, stating he 'doesn't want peace'. Her comments followed reports that Ukrainian drones had struck two Russian cities, injuring at least 16 people. Greene has consistently opposed the provision of US weapons and aid to Ukraine, advocating an 'America First' foreign policy. The Republican lawmaker also previously spread false information regarding protests against Zelensky in Kyiv.
The Guardian
an hour ago
- The Guardian
‘An intimidation tactic': Trump's show of force dismays Washington residents
Washington DC's only Home Depot was busy with contractors and customers on Thursday morning – but the Hispanic day laborers who usually gather and wait for work under the parking lot's sparse trees were nowhere to be found. Two days earlier, masked federal agents swarmed the area and made several arrests, which were photographed by bystanders and posted on social media. Juwan Brooks, a store employee who witnessed the raid, said the agents grabbed anyone who appeared Hispanic. 'They don't ask no questions,' Brooks said. People walking across the parking lot, getting out of their cars, or even sleeping in their vehicle – all were grabbed by the agents, leaving behind empty work trucks that were eventually towed away. 'It was cool when Trump was saying it, but to actually see it first hand? I didn't like it,' Brooks said. The day laborers 'are not bad people', and he wondered what happened to the children of the men that were taken away. Four days after Trump ordered federal agents and national guard on to the streets of Washington DC to fight a crime wave that city leaders say is not happening, residents of the capital are becoming used to the presence of groups of armed men in their neighborhoods, and the aggressive tactics they use. Beyond the apparent immigration arrests at Home Depot – which Brooks said was the second raid there he is aware of since Trump took office – federal agents have been spotted setting up roadblocks at busy intersections, and patrolling neighborhoods across the city. Trump, who exercised a never-before-used clause in the law governing the district to take over the Metropolitan police department (MPD) for 30 days, this week said he would seek Congress's approval to keep it under federal control for the 'long term'. It's unclear how much of a difference the deployment has yet made on public safety. Rates of violent crime dropped to 30-year lows last year, but it remains more prevalent in Washington DC than many cities with similar populations. Since Trump made the deployment official on Monday, the city recorded two homicides, bringing its count for the year up to 101. 'I just feel like it's too much federal overreach. I think it's unnecessary, and I think our MPD does a great job,' said Kevin Cataldo, a neighborhood commissioner whose district includes the block just north of downtown where the 100th homicide of the year took place on Monday, hours after Trump announced the federal takeover. The White House says 800 national guard troops will be on the ground in the city, along with hundreds of federal officers from the Drug Enforcement Administration, border patrol, FBI and other agencies. On Thursday afternoon, a half-dozen unarmed troops, who said they had been told not to talk to the press, could be found milling among the tourists visiting the Lincoln Memorial on the National Mall, an area not known for crime. 'What they are doing right now? It's just a show of force. I did that in Iraq,' said Kevin Davis, a 21-year army veteran visiting the capital from El Paso, Texas. 'When people see the uniform, they act differently.' More prevalent have been the federal agents who have appeared in neighborhoods across the overwhelmingly Democratic city. They began arriving over the weekend, and on Sunday night, a justice department employee was arrested for hurling a sandwich at a Customs and Border Protection official, and later charged with felony assault on a federal officer. Recent evenings have seen federal agents and police set up roadblocks and pull drivers over on major roads, as protesters gathered to condemn them. On Tuesday evening on 14th Street in Columbia Heights, a north-west Washington neighborhood that is home to the city's largest Hispanic population, police and federal agents, some with their faces covered, began stopping cars, said a local shop manager who declined to be named. Before long, dozens of people emerged to berate them. '[Residents] were trying to tell them to leave, you know, the people in the street and the neighbors,' he told the Guardian. 'They yelled back 'don't make the people scared, this is a free country', 'why make the community unsafe?',' the manager said. The scene repeated a little over a mile south on 14th Street on Wednesday evening, with police and federal agents pulling over cars, and locals heckling them and trying to warn approaching drivers away, according to videos posted on social media. Owen Simon, an undergraduate government student at Georgetown University, had heard that agents were spotted in the tony neighborhood around campus, and wondered what they were doing there. Muggings happened occasionally in the neighborhood, but Simon said he was less concerned about those than what the agents might do to foreign students – or students who appeared to be foreign. 'No one wants to walk around knowing that anyone could be scooped up out of the street at any moment,' he said. 'I don't think that this move by the Trump administration is a way to crack down on crime. I think it's about optics.' As he smoked a cigarette in the Home Deport parking lot, Brooks had a similar concern about Congress Heights, the south-east Washington neighborhood where he lives. Crime there is undoubtedly a concern, but it was teenagers who were behind it, not his working-class neighbors. 'You got other people catching strays off that, too,' he said. 'You got working people living in the neighborhood, going to the store, getting picked up because of 16-, 17-year-olds. 'I understand targeting the area, but you can't really blame the people in the area who are trying to do better,' he added. Over the weekend, he had seen eight cars full of federal agents driving through his neighborhood like they wanted to be seen, something he had never witnessed the city police do. 'What is this for?' he wondered. 'It's more of an intimidation tactic.' Joseph Gedeon contributed reporting
