To hear President Trump tell it, you’d think that Washington was a lawless dystopia where few live free from fear. “Our capital city has been overtaken by violent gangs and bloodthirsty criminals, roving mobs of wild youth, drugged out maniacs and homeless people,” he said on Monday at the White House.
This is why he formally declared a public safety emergency in the city in a pair of executive orders that placed the Metropolitan Police Department under the federal government control and directed 800 National Guard members into the streets. Mr. Trump opted to rattle off a series of anecdotes about local victims of violent crime, instead of talking about the recent data that shows it’s at a 30-year low.
From there, Mr. Trump went even further, seemingly soft-launching the case for potential federal intervention in more Democrat-led cities — Chicago, Baltimore, Oakland — “if they don’t learn their lesson” to address crime. “We’re not going to lose our cities over this,” he said.
The president’s words and actions served as the latest examples of his long-running fixation to exercise control over blue parts of the country through rarely used executive powers. In June, he sent nearly 5,000 troops to Los Angeles — mostly National Guard but also, much more unusually, several hundred Marines — after protests broke out over his immigration policies, blurring the line between the U.S. military’s role and domestic law enforcement.
National Guard units are typically called into service by a governor during natural disasters or emergencies. Mr. Trump has chosen instead to “federalize” the units against the wishes of state and local leaders for “emergencies” that few outside his administration can see, particularly as national ones.
In Los Angeles, for instance, Mr. Trump sent troops to help quell protests against ICE around federal facilities. But the troops weren’t involved in crowd control. They couldn’t arrest anyone. They were largely resigned to standing guard in or around two buildings where little was happening. There were instances of vandalism and looting, but the mass civil unrest didn’t materialize.
Mr. Trump took similar action during his first term in 2020, when federal agents were widely deployed amid the violence and protests after George Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis. Operation Legend was a law enforcement initiative established to address what Mr. Trump called “a shocking explosion of shootings, killings, murders and heinous crimes of violence.” The F.B.I. later said 6,000 arrests were conducted nationwide at the local, state and federal levels, but there is open debate about whether the six-month effort delivered any lasting or meaningful impact on the communities involved.
Mr. Trump is again sending federal agents into a city. The Times reported that about 120 F.B.I. agents will be reassigned. But by activating the National Guard as well, he directs forces that cannot act independently in a domestic law enforcement role because of a century-and-a-half-old law that generally prohibits them from doing so. It’s unclear what Guard members will be directed to do in Washington. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said they will be led by Army Secretary Dan Driscoll.
The Metropolitan Police Department will be overseen by the administrator of the Drug Enforcement Administration, Terry Cole. Mr. Trump had the power to name him as interim federal commissioner under the Home Rule Act of 1973, which allows the president to take control of the city’s police for 48 hours if he “determines that special conditions of an emergency nature exist.”
The police will have authority to do “whatever the hell they want,” Mr. Trump said, and indicated that the federal takeover is likely to go beyond the initial 48 hours to the 30 days provided for in the law, pending notice to Congress. “I’ll be making the appropriate notifications to Congress and to the mayor,” Mr. Trump said.
Eight months into the president’s second term, the National Guard has been deployed twice — once for protests and once for local crime concerns. The president has more authority in Washington than in most places, but leaders in cities all over the country will be paying attention to what happens there.
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W.J. Hennigan writes about national security, foreign policy and conflict for the Opinion section.
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