Well, at least they’re not eating the cats and dogs.
To hear President Trump tell it, Washington, D.C., has become a barbarous hellhole — worse even than Springfield, Ohio, it would seem, where he accused Black immigrants, many from Somalia, of barbecuing pets last year during the campaign.
Back then, Trump was just a candidate. Now, he’s the commander in chief of the U.S. military with a clear desire to use troops of war on American streets, whether it’s for a fancy birthday parade, to enforce his immigration agenda in Los Angeles or to stop car thefts in the nation’s capital.
“It’s becoming a situation of complete and total lawlessness,” Trump said during a Monday news conference, announcing that he was calling up National Guard troops to help with domestic policing in D.C.
“We’ll get rid of the slums, too. We have slums here. We’ll get rid of them,” he said. “I know it’s not politically correct. You’ll say, ‘Oh, so terrible.’ No, we’re getting rid of the slums where they live.”
Where “they” live.
While the use of the military on American streets is alarming, it should be just as scary how blatantly this president is tying race not just to crime, but to violence so uncontrollable it requires military troops to stop it. Tying race to criminality is nothing new, of course. It’s a big part of American history and our justice system has unfortunately been steeped in it, from the Jim Crow era to the 1990s war on drugs, which targeted inner cities with the same rhetoric that Trump is recycling now.
The difference between that last attack on minorities — started by President Nixon and lasting through Presidents Reagan and George H.W. Bush, also under the guise of law and order — and our current circumstances is that in this instance, the notion of war isn’t just hyperbole. We are literally talking about soldiers in the streets, targeting Black and brown people. Whether they are car wash employees in California or teenagers on school break in D.C., actual crimes don’t seem to matter. Skin color is enough for law enforcement scrutiny, a sad and dangerous return to an era before civil rights.
“Certainly the language that President Trump is using with regard to D.C. has a message that’s racially based,” said Erwin Chemerinsky, the dean of the UC Berkeley School of Law.
Chemerinsky pointed out that just a few days ago, the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals called out the Trump administration for immigration raids that were unconstitutional because they were basically racial sweeps. But he is unabashed. His calls for violence against people of color are escalating. It increasingly appears that bringing troops to Los Angeles was a test case for a larger use of the military in civilian settings.
“This will go further,” Trump ominously said, making it clear he’d like to see soldiers policing across America.
“We have other cities also that are bad, very bad. You look at Chicago, how bad it is,” he went on. “We have other cities that are very bad. New York has a problem. And then you have, of course, Baltimore and Oakland. We don’t even mention that anymore, they’re so, they’re so far gone.”
In reality, crime is dropping across the United States, including in Washington. As the Washington Post pointed out, violent crime rates, including murders, have for the most part been on a downward trend since 2023. But all it takes is a few explosive examples to banish truth from conscientiousness. Trump pointed out some tragic and horrific examples — including the beating of Edward “Big Balls” Coristine, a former employee of the president’s Department of Government Efficiency who was attacked after attempting to defend a woman during a carjacking recently, not far from the White House.
These are crimes that should be punished, and certainly not tolerated. But the exploitation we are seeing from Trump is a dangerous precedent to justify military force for domestic law enforcement, which until now has been forbidden — or at least assumed forbidden — by the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878.
This week, just how strong that prohibition is will be debated in a San Francisco courtroom, during the three-day trial over the deployment of troops in Los Angeles. While it’s uncertain how that case will resolve, “Los Angeles could provide a bit of a road map for any jurisdiction seeking to push back against the Trump administration when there’s a potential threat of sending in federal troops,” Jessica Levinson, a constitutional legal scholar at Loyola Law School, told me.
Again, California coming out as the biggest foil to a Trump autocracy.
But while we wait in the hopes that the courts will catch up to Trump, we can’t be blind to what is happening on our streets. Race and crime are not linked by anything other than racism.
Allowing our military to terrorize Black and brown people under the guise of law and order is nothing more than a power grab based on the exploitation of our darkest natures.
It’s a tactic Trump has perfected, but one which will fundamentally change, and weaken, American justice if we do not stop it.
The post Chabria: Trump wants troops in D.C. But don’t expect him to stop there appeared first on Los Angeles Times.
