Donald Trump's Washington DC intervention labelled as ‘unsettling and unprecedented' by mayor
Date: 2025-08-12T09:37:43.000Z
Title: Trump's order to deploy troops in DC is 'unsettling and unprecedented' - DC mayor
Content: Hello and welcome to the US politics live blog. I'm Tom Ambrose and I will be bringing you the latest news lines over the next few hours.
We start with news that Donald Trump has ordered the national guard to Washington DC and seized control of the city's police force, in a move described as 'unsettling and unprecedented' by DC's mayor.
The US president's move was swiftly condemned as a 'disgusting, dangerous and derogatory' assault on the political independence of a racially diverse city. The federal takeover is expected to be in effect for 30 days, the White House confirmed to the Guardian.
Speaking at a White House press conference on Monday, Trump said he was taking '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're going to take our capital back.'
He described Washington DC as 'one of the most dangerous cities anywhere in the world', claiming its murder rate is higher than Bogotá or Mexico City, even though violent crime is at a 30-year low.
The defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, who was among officials joining Trump on the podium, said 800 national guard troops would take to the streets of Washington over the coming week. 'They will be strong, they will be tough and they will stand with their law enforcement partners,' he said.
Later Muriel Bowser, the mayor of DC, who has pursued a non-confrontational relationship with Trump, described the intervention as 'unsettling and unprecedented' but declined to criticise the president directly.
'I've said before, and I'll repeat, that I believe that the president's view of DC is shaped by his Covid-era experience during his first term,' she told reporters.
'It is true that those were more challenging times related to some issues. It is also true that we experienced a crime spike post-Covid but we worked quickly to put laws in place and tactics that got violent offenders off our streets, and gave our police officers more tools.'
Read the full story here:
In other developments:
President Donald Trump has nominated conservative economist EJ Antoni to head the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the agency that is responsible for collecting and publishing the country's employment and inflation figures. The nomination comes after Trump fired the BLS commissioner, Erika McEntarfer, earlier this month following the release of a weak jobs report which he claimed had been 'rigged'.
Trump has once again delayed implementing sweeping tariffs on China, announcing another 90-day pause just hours before the last agreement between the world's two largest economies was due to expire. On Monday, Trump signed an executive order extending the deadline for higher tariffs on China until 10 November.
A federal judge in San Francisco on Monday began hearing evidence and arguments on whether the Trump administration violated federal law when it deployed national guard soldiers and US marines to Los Angeles after protests over immigration raids this summer. The Trump administration federalized California national guard members and sent them to the second-largest US city over the objections of the California governor, Gavin Newsom, and city leaders.
Trump previewed his Friday meeting with Vladimir Putin in Alaska, claiming he will know 'probably in the first two minutes' whether a peace deal can be made. Trump confirmed that while Volodymyr Zelenskyy wouldn't be a part of the summit, he would call him first as soon as he saw a 'fair deal' for a ceasefire emerge. He also didn't rule out the possibility of a future trading relationship with Russia.
A federal judge rejected on Monday a request from the justice department to unseal the grand jury transcripts relating to the criminal investigation of Ghislaine Maxwell – Jeffrey Epstein's former girlfriend, who is currently serving a 20-year sentence for sex trafficking. The judge wrote that the transcripts could not be released publicly – 'casually or promiscuously' – as Trump's government had pushed for because it would risk 'unraveling the foundations of secrecy upon which the grand jury is premised'.
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