Trump sends troops into Washington DC: distraction tactic or part of wider policy?

Irish Times

2 days ago

It's one of the unique quirks of living in
Washington, DC
: the presidential motorcade sweeping through the city, with attendant street shutdowns and security sweeps and by-passers rubbernecking for a glimpse. But the occupant of The Beast, as the presidential state car is nicknamed, can look out on the world too. The short bursts to and from the White House are the only real opportunity that any president has to observe the city in which they reside. And this weekend,
Donald Trump
decided he had seen enough. On the short drive back through the city from his Virginia golf club, Trump saw a homeless encampment, a littered underpass and someone sleeping rough near the Capitol. Within hours, he had announced Monday's press conference, which he titled as being on 'Crime and Beautification' of the city.
'We are here for
a serious purpose
,' he told a crowded media attendance in the James Brady press room on Monday morning.
'I'm announcing a historic action to rescue our nation's capital from crime, bloodshed, bedlam and squalor and worse. This is liberation day in DC and we are gonna take our capital back. We are taking it back.'
The announcement that the actions of the DC police will be placed under federal control and that National Guard will be deployed in the city for 30 days, under section 640 of the District of Columbia Home Rule Act, was, he told the room, for their benefit also.
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'Many of you tend to be on the liberal side but you don't want to get mugged and shot and raped and killed,' he said, before declaring the murder rate in Washington is 'higher than Bogotá, Colombia or Mexico City, some of the places you hear about as the worst places on Earth.'
The announcement was a sudden, no-warning escalation of Trump's long-held portrait of Washington as a fallen, urban nightmare for its citizens. At the outset of his election campaign last year, he described the capital as 'a rat-infested shithole' during a snowy Sunday-morning stumps speech in Iowa. Now, as first resident of Washington, he was in more benign mood and leant into the idea of his reclamation project of an extension of his recently-announced intention to enhance the White House with a ballroom. Even as Trump continued to speak through a press conference that soon diverged into a rambling forecast of Friday's meeting with Vladimir Putin in Alaska, statistics refuting the president's claim about Washington's crime and safety began to appear in the majority of news networks.
The majority noted that violent crime had fallen from the alarmingly high rates of 2023. In 2024, the violent crime rate in Washington was 1,005 per 100,000 residents - which unquestionably represents a significant threat in a city of just 700,000 people. It was twice as high as the figure for New York City, but less than half that of Memphis, which has a similar population. DC authorities argue that the 2025 statistics are indicative of a spectacular turnaround, on track to achieve a 30-year low – an achievement the president may well attribute to this week's intervention if it continues until the end of the year.
But with his usual facility for blurring dates and data to produce an argument that suited his broader purpose, Trump noted that the 2023 murder rate in Washington was the highest in 25 years. He also described crimes of which he had direct knowledge: the shocking carjacking and murder of a former Trump administration official Mike Gill, which happened in the early evening in the heart of downtown early in 2024 and, just weeks ago, the attack on Edward Coristine, a former DogeE staffer who was set upon and viciously beaten by a group of youths after he intervened in an attempted carjacking.
'Our capital city has been overtaken by violent gangs and bloodthirsty criminals, roving mobs of wild youth, drugged-out maniacs and homeless people, and we're not going to let it happen any more,' Trump vowed as he stood at the podium flanked by his defence secretary, Pete Hegseth, and attorney general Pam Bondi, who will now become the first holder of that office to take charge of the metropolitan police force.
The response from Democratic opposition was predictably scathing, with former house speaker Nancy Pelosi issuing a statement that Trump 'delayed deploying the National Guard on January 6th when our Capitol was under violent attack and lives were at stake'.
'Now he's activating the DC Guard to distract from his incompetent mishandling of tariffs, healthcare and immigration – to name just a few blunders,' her statement continued.
But the
Democrats
failed to make January 6th a deterrent to voters in last year's election. And the broader operatic message behind Monday's performance will be well received among the
Republican
supporters, as will his vow that while police officers were for years restricted from responding when agitators spat in their faces, under his executive orders they 'will be allowed to do whatever the hell they want'.
It was presented as a companion piece to the Trump administration's border policy: a zero-tolerance emergency programme to cleanse Washington DC of a decades-old malaise and restore it to being a capital city of which Americans can be proud.
'You have countries where every Saturday the people go out and they wash the sidewalks in front of their doors,' Trump said at one stage.
'We are not quite at that level yet. I think it's so beautiful to hear that. You know my father always used to tell me – I had a wonderful father, very smart. He used to say: 'son, if you walk into a restaurant and you see the front door is dirty, don't go in. Because if the front door is dirty, the kitchen is dirty also.' Same thing with the capital. If the capital is dirty, our whole country is dirty – and they don't respect us.'
Nobody was certain of how the sudden infusion of 800 national guard members and FBI to the city's regular policing force will 'look', or whether it will be limited to a four-week exercise in image and high-profile arrests. The mayor of Washington DC, Muriel Bowser, said at a hastily called press conference of her own that she believes that president Trump's view of the city was shaped by his experience of the city during the pandemic. Invited to state whether she worried that the 30-day emergency measures could turn out to be a 'disaster,' she replied: 'I'm gonna work every day to make sure it's not a complete disaster, put it that way.'
The broader question on Monday centred around why president Trump had ordered this drastic intervention now. Sceptics interpreted the gesture as another high-profile distraction tactic to divert attention from the Epstein imbroglio. Monday's announcement by Trump coincided with a brutal ruling by Paul Engelmayer, the judge who rejected the department of justice request to unseal the grand jury transcripts relating to the Epstein case. In a 31 page-opinion he stated that granting it would 'casually or promiscuously' erode future confidence of citizens called to testify before panels. Crushingly, Engelmayer argued that the entire thesis forwarded by the department, most vocally by attorney general Bondi, that the transcripts could provide additional information that the public deserves to know 'is demonstrably false'.
The arrival of Putin in Alaska – if he shows up - for his summit with Trump should keep the Epstein story at bay for the remainder of the week.
Meanwhile, the military is coming to Washington for the last few weeks of the summer. It remains to be seen whether it's a symbolic gesture. But just two months ago, Trump ordered the California National Guard on to the streets of Los Angeles in the wake of anti-deportation protests. And on Monday, in referencing Chicago, Baltimore and Oakland, he hinted that this could be the beginning of a new pattern. 'This will go farther,' he promised. 'We are starting strongly with DC.'