The real reason Trump's DC takeover is scary

Vox

3 days ago

is a senior correspondent at Vox, where he covers ideology and challenges to democracy, both at home and abroad. His book on democracy,, was published 0n July 16. You can purchase it here.
Depending on who you listen to, President Donald Trump's decision to seize control over law enforcement in Washington, DC, is either an authoritarian menace or a farce.
The authoritarian menace case is straightforward: Trump is (again) asserting the power to deploy the National Guard to a major US city, while adding the new wrinkle of federalizing the local police force based on a wholly made-up emergency. He is, political scientist Barbara Walter warns, 'building the machinery of repression before it's needed,' getting the tools to violently shut down big protests 'in place before the next election.'
The farce case focuses less on these broad fears and more on the actual way it has played out. Instead of nabbing DC residents who oppose the president, federal agents appear to be aimlessly strolling the streets in safe touristy areas like Georgetown or the National Mall. During a pointless Sunday night deployment to the U Street corridor, a popular nightlife area, they faced down the terrifying threat of a drunk man throwing a sandwich.
'This ostensible show of strength is more like an admission of weakness,' The Atlantic's Quinta Jurecic writes. 'It is the behavior of a bully: very bad for the people it touches, but not a likely prelude to full authoritarian takeover.'
So who's right? In a sense, both of them. Trump's show of force in DC is both cartoonish and ominous, farcical and dangerous.
It serves to normalize abuses of power that could very well be expanded — in fact, that Trump himself is openly promising to try it out in other cities. However, both the DC deployment and Trump's prior National Guard misadventure in Los Angeles show that it's actually quite hard to create effective tools of domestic repression. Executing on his threats requires a level of legal and tactical acumen that it's not obvious the Trump administration possesses.
Or, put differently: The power they're claiming is scary in the abstract, but the way they're currently wielding it is too incompetent to do meaningful damage to democracy. The key question going forward — not just for DC, but the nation — is whether they get better with practice.
The DC crackdown has been impotent so far
Carl Schmitt, a reactionary German legal theorist who would later become a Nazi jurist, famously claimed that emergency powers create an insuperable problem for the liberal-democratic ideal of the rule of law. In theory, the law can limit how and when a person in government can wield emergency powers. But in practice, it all comes down to who has the power to give those words meaning.
Who says what an emergency is, and when it ends? That person, and not the legal text or its underlying intent, is what determines what the law means — and thus has the real power.
Schmitt expressed this idea in a famous dictum: 'Sovereign is he who decides on the exception.' And while Trump has surely never heard of Schmitt, let alone read him, this is basically the way his administration has operated. On issues ranging from trade to federalizing DC law enforcement, Trump has decided that ordinary problems — job losses from trade, crime — are emergencies that justify him invoking powers designed for times of war, natural disaster, or rebellion. And so far, he's mostly gotten away with it.
His federalization of DC will test the limits of Trump's Schmittian approach. By law, Trump's emergency power only allows him to federalize control over city police — the Metropolitan Police Department, or MPD — for 30 days. And federal agents, be they National Guard or the DEA or Homeland Security, have circumscribed legal responsibilities and personnel limitations that prevent them from fully replacing MPD as ultimate authority in the capital city.
This is the first thing to watch in DC: Will Trump go full Schmitt, and simply declare that these constraints on his power are moot? And if so, who — if anyone — will try and stop him?
It's important to emphasize that we don't know the answers to these questions. While Trump has claimed the power to maintain federal control over MPD beyond the 30-day limit, Trump is constantly claiming all sorts of things that aren't true. It is entirely possible that, next month, MPD reverts to local control with basically no long-term ill effects.
But even if Trump does defy a court order to release the MPD back to DC, or otherwise maintain some kind of long-term federal presence on the streets of DC, there's a question of what exactly he is accomplishing.
Here, we have to separate damage to democracy from other concrete harms. Trump's crackdown may already be producing unjust arrests of many unhoused people in DC. That is bad and worthy of condemnation.
Such arrests do not, however, help Trump consolidate the kind of controls a would-be dictator wants from law enforcement: the ability to suppress critical speech and opposition political activity through force of arms. The mere fact that federal troops are on the street, or that MPD is technically under federal control, does not mean that they're arresting Democrats or raiding the Washington Post or opening fire on protesters.
Of course, the fact that something isn't yet happening doesn't mean it won't. But the current deployments, for all their fascist aesthetics, are quite far from that — in fact, they appear to be doing a lot of impotent, haphazard traffic stops. In the U Street area, home to mixed populations of longtime residents and more recent gentrifiers, locals have confronted the cops and jeered at them — with no reports of serious retaliatory injury. Trump is doing something that has an authoritarian intent and appearance that galvanizes resistance, without any kind of plan for turning it into an effective repressive tool.
One could tell a similar story about the National Guard deployment to LA. Back then, Trump sent in the troops with a big show, claiming they were necessary to get (overhyped) riots under control. In reality, they showed up and went on a few drug and immigration raids, and then almost all of them quietly slinked off without scaring the LA population into political submission. Courts are currently hearing arguments on the deployment's legality.
Ad hoc authoritarianism
None of this is to say that Trump's deployments are harmless. As Walter points out, he is creating legal and political precedents that could — at least in theory — be used toward repressive ends if they so desire. If Trump does something to mess with the fairness of the midterm elections, and large cities erupt with protest, he's already somewhat normalized a militarized response.
From a health-of-democracy standpoint, then, what's worrying about recent events in DC is not the developments on the ground. It's the precedent they set — the powers that Trump is claiming that could be all too easily abused. The question is whether such abuse will occur.
So far, there is very little evidence that the Trump administration has anything like a systematic plan for suborning American democracy. He isn't doing what someone like Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán did in 2010 — come in with a blueprint for destroying the political opposition and executing on it as efficiently as possible.
Rather, he's simply asserting powers whenever it's convenient to do what he wants to do at the moment. Can't get Congress to raise tariffs? Use emergency powers to impose them. Want to impose an unconstitutional export tax on Nvidia? Just make an extortionate 'deal' with its CEO. Want to stop seeing images of protesters with Mexican flags in LA? Send in the National Guard.
To be clear: This ad hoc authoritarianism is still dangerous. It's just comparatively less effective than its deliberate cousin. Trump hasn't silenced the Democratic opposition or the American press or shuttered civil rights groups. He's taken steps in all of those directions, but they fit the ad hoc pattern: each troubling, but not (yet!) systematic or successful enough to fundamentally compromise the fairness of elections or Americans' rights to dissent and free speech.
Where we're at, in short, is a place where the building blocks for constructing an authoritarian state are all in a row. The question is whether Trump has the will and the vision to put them together in a way that could durably compromise the viability of American democracy.
This context helps us understand why the DC deployment is both absurd and dangerous.
It is absurd in the sense that it does nothing, on its own, to advance an authoritarian agenda — and, if anything, compromises it by creating images of uniformed thugs on American streets that galvanize his opponents. It is dangerous in that it could normalize abuses of power that, down the line, could be wielded as part of an actually serious campaign of repression.
And at this point, I don't know which scenario is more likely: that Trump's ad hoc efforts to seize control founder and ultimately amount to little, or that he follows his Schmittian logic to its dictatorial terminus.