Muriel Bowser, the mayor of Washington, D.C., was born just a year before the city’s residents were given the right to elect their mayor. In the five decades since, Washington has wrestled with challenges common to many U.S. cities, like violent crime. It has also faced challenges that, given its peculiar status under federal law, it shares with no other American city.
But even in Washington’s unique history, there was no episode quite like the one that Ms. Bowser, in her third term as mayor, had to confront on Monday afternoon.
“We know that access to our democracy is tenuous,” the mayor said to reporters just hours after the city’s most prominent resident, President Trump, announced that the federal government was going to take over the local police department and deploy the National Guard to the streets of Washington. “While this action today is unsettling and unprecedented,” the mayor said, “I can’t say that, given some of the rhetoric of the past, that we’re totally surprised.”
Indeed, Mr. Trump has not been shy about his feelings toward the nation’s capital, calling it a “filthy and crime-ridden embarrassment” and “a rat-infested, graffiti-infested shithole.”
For a city that federal law leaves vulnerable to the prerogatives of the White House, the raw rhetoric was a warning. Under the Home Rule Act of 1973, which gave residents the power to elect a mayor and a city council, Washington has a degree of self-governance, but it is limited.
Key roles in the city’s criminal justice system are in federal hands, with the president nominating judges and the U.S. attorney, who serves as the city’s chief prosecutor in most criminal cases. Laws passed by the District of Columbia Council are subject to congressional approval, and budgets are at the mercy of congressional whim. Elsewhere, a state’s governor typically deploys the National Guard. In Washington, however, forces can be deployed on city streets without the local government’s say-so.
And with the declaration of an emergency, a president can come in and, temporarily at least, take over the local police.
Until Monday morning, no president had.
“He’s doing this because he can,” said Charles Allen, a member of the Council who represents the Capitol Hill neighborhood. “He has the ability to place the military on our streets. He has the ability to take over our police.”
In many American cities, the rate of violent crime rose sharply during the coronavirus pandemic and fell in the years afterward, now returning to pre-Covid levels. Washington’s crime spike lasted longer than that of many cities, but over the past 18 months violent crime there has fallen considerably. The murder rate has declined to 2019 levels, and in January, before Mr. Trump took office, the U.S. Justice Department announced that violent crime had fallen to a 30-year low.
This was not the city that the president described on Monday, one of “crime, bloodshed, bedlam and squalor” that was in need of “liberation.”
In her comments on Monday afternoon, Ms. Bowser said that though she believed the president had a mistaken view of the crime situation, she was still committed to bringing down crime in her city.
Given Washington’s vulnerability to federal intervention, Ms. Bowser has been calculated in her dealings with Mr. Trump, emphasizing in speeches that she shares his goals for the city and making strategic concessions on matters likely to rile him up.
In March, she ordered the removal of the Black Lives Matter mural that was painted on a city street five years earlier as a pointed message to Mr. Trump, who was in his first term as president. Afterward, Ms. Bowser was candid about how she saw her mission in his second term. Washington residents, she said, “want us to be smart and strategic and get to the other side.”
“And that’s my job: I’m going to navigate us to the other side,” she added.
Some insisted that this approach was the only way that Washington would make it through a perilous era, with a president who has been an unsparing critic of the city and a Congress eager to follow his lead. But some on the Council have not taken a pragmatic approach, said Chuck Thies, a veteran political consultant, who said the city was now paying dearly for that.
“They should have read the room,” he said, arguing that certain members of the Council had been shortsighted in their refusal to “throw Trump a bone” on criminal justice. Some matters, like the lengths of sentences for juvenile offenders, were mentioned by administration officials in the news conference on Monday morning.
Still, universities, law firms and big-city mayors can attest that there really is no guarantee of good graces when it comes to Mr. Trump. For many in Washington, all guarantees now seemed shaky.
For example: The likelihood of a full congressional repeal of the Home Rule Act, stripping the city of what limited self-government it now enjoys, seems low given the slim Republican majority in the U.S. Senate. But some fear that the odds of a repeal are perhaps no longer as low as they were before Monday’s announcement.
“This may be the harbinger of a complete takeover,” said Mary Cheh, a law professor who served on the Council for 16 years. “We’re in jeopardy here.”
There have been other encroachments on the city’s autonomy during 52 years of home rule. Before this week, the most significant was a financial control board, established by Congress in 1995 to steer the city out of a fiscal crisis. Marion Barry, the four-term mayor, had earned a loyal following as the defender of the city from outside forces, only to see its authority curtailed in response to his administration’s mismanagement of city finances.
But while the presidentially appointed members of the control board had broad authority over municipal governance for six years, with the power to approve contracts and make personnel decisions, the fiscal emergency that spurred the board’s creation was clear.
The emergency behind the president’s declaration is harder to see, which is what troubles George Derek Musgrove, an author of “Chocolate City: A History of Race and Democracy in the Nation’s Capital.”
“There is crime in the city, but it’s not a crisis,” said Mr. Musgrove, a professor of history at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. The real message that Mr. Trump seems to be sending, he said, is that Democratic leaders are simply incapable of running their cities. “Clearly, he wants to make the argument that these people simply can’t do the job,” he said.
Jeffrey Willis, 66, a retiree who has lived in Washington for four decades, has no illusions about the challenges his city faces. In recent years, large crowds of rowdy young people have gathered in his neighborhood in the early morning hours, a time of day, he said, when there’s “going to be nothing but trouble.”
He said that the city’s police force was making progress, and that young people needed a sense of opportunity. What was not needed, he insisted, was what the president was planning.
“It’s insulting to me as a voter,” Mr. Willis said. “It’s patronizing. And I just think it’s frightening for the country.”
Clyde McGrady, Sonia A. Rao and Darren Sands contributed reporting.
Campbell Robertson reports for The Times on Delaware, the District of Columbia, Kentucky, Maryland, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and West Virginia.
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