Trump’s D.C. takeover: Not distraction. Dictatorship. | Will Bunch Newsletter

Violent repression of the free press is a slippery slope. On Sunday, just a few hours after I’d posted a column about police in Los Angeles assaulting journalists with batons and detaining some of them with zip ties at an immigration protest came news of Israel’s lethal bombing of a team of journalists from the most prominent Arab-run news network, Al Jazeera. The calculated murder of six working journalists — falsely labelled as “terrorists” by the Benjamin Netanyahu regime — is a despicable war crime, and the definitive proof that Israel under its current right-wing government has become a rogue state.

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The Trinidad neighborhood in northeast Washington, D.C. has seen a lot of things over the years, from baseball’s Washington Senators in the early 1900s to a major crime wave during the crack cocaine epidemic of the 1980s and ‘90s. But it’s never seen anything quite like what neighbors witnessed there Monday night.

After sundown, as captured on a video sent to the independent journalist Marisa Kabas, two federal officers — apparently from the FBI and Secret Service — walked slowly down the street with flashlights, occasionally shining them into parked cars.

This was Day One of President Donald Trump’s law-enforcement surge in the nation’s capital, and although the real cavalry — armed troops from the D.C. National Guard — won’t arrive until later this week, the stepped-up police presence on the streets was already palpable.

It actually started over the weekend, according to the Washington Post, with FBI agents seen patrolling the popular U Street corridor, the target of a recent youth curfew. The paper noted that officers in the uniform of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, were spotted on the city’s Key Bridge.

Even in a summer in which major news from a government waging a vast war on the institutions and principles of a once strong American democracy — with crackdowns on universities, the media, and vital scientific research — seems to hit several times a day, Trump’s militaristic move on the city where his supporters attempted a coup on Jan. 6, 2021 felt like the most dangerous escalation yet.

I watched the endless Monday morning news conference where Trump declared a so-called emergency to seize day-to-day control of the Washington police force for the next month, powered by agents from the alphabet soup of federal law enforcement and those 800 just-mobilized National Guard troops. It was maybe the most Orwellian moment of the 47th presidency, so far.

“Our capital city has been overtaken by violent gangs and bloodthirsty criminals, roving mobs of wild youth, drugged out maniacs, and homeless people, and we’re not going to let it happen any more,” Trump said in a totally fabricated description of the current situation in the city of just over 700,000 people. The Clockwork Orange-type dystopia described by Trump is completely at odds with the latest statistics showing violent crime in Washington at a 30-year-low.

“Let me be crystal clear: crime in DC is ending and ending today,” a sycophantic Attorney General Pam Bondi added from the podium, just one of a string of absurd statements and manufactured “facts.” Everything about the announcement and the upsurge in law enforcement — the fictional reality on a “freedom is slavery” 1984-ish level, the militaristic show of force, the targeting of a city with a sizable Black population — smacked of straight-up fascism. It should serve as a moment of clarity to anyone still in denial that Trump seeks a dictatorship.

Given the strong evidence that crime in DC is actually falling, pundits searched for what actually triggered the president’s actions. The over-the-top rhetoric began last week with a report that a much-publicized member of the White House’s DOGE cost-cutting team — 19-year-old Edward Coristine, nicknamed “Big Balls” — was the victim of a violent carjacking by teenagers in the district. But it’s also been suggested that Trump was personally revulsed by the sight of homeless encampments dotting the limousine route to his Virginia golf outings.

Those explanations didn’t stop pundits from declaring that Trump’s domestic military moves are one more attempted “distraction” from a cruel summer for the president, marked by his falling approval rating, high grocery prices, and the irrepressible scandal over Trump’s ties to the late wealthy sex-trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.

While some deflection from Epstein news might be a side effect, it’s silly to claim that a military occupation on a major American city heavily populated by Democrats is any kind of distraction. It’s arguably been the plan for a Trump presidency all along.

As noted in a report by the Brennan Center for Justice back in January, Project 2025 — the policy blueprint for a second Trump presidency drafted by a team led by the Heritage Foundation — “proposes expanding federal control over local law enforcement in places where the administration disagrees with local policies and practices.” Indeed, sending troops into Democratic strongholds like Chicago or Los Angeles — where the Trump regime did deploy a mix of Marines and National Guard troops in June after protests against ICE raids there — is an idea that Trump frequently talked up on the 2024 campaign trail.

Like much of the Trump presidency, there is a performative element here. For all the hoopla, the armed soldiers in Los Angeles just detained one person (a military veteran attempting to enter a protected federal building), and there are — for now, anyway — similar constraints on the National Guard troops bound for Washington. Many of Trump’s more dictatorial moves have so far been lightly held back by weakened democratic guardrails.

But D.C. has long also been the nation’s capital of political dissent — the site of rallies ranging from the 1963 pro-civil rights March on Washington to massive anti-war protests to the 2017 Women’s March — and clusters of armed troops on city street corners sends a chilling message to would-be demonstrators as the Trump presidency spirals downward.

On Monday, D.C. residents staged a boisterous protest of the police takeover outside the White House, and the demonstrations could increase. What’s more, the stepped up law-enforcement presence only raises the risk of violent confrontation, and any unrest that stems from such an incident will give the Trump regime its pretense to clamp down on other American cities with even more aggression.

Tuesday morning, just as I was finishing work on this newsletter, the Washington Post reported that the Trump regime is weighing a plan for an Alabama-based “Domestic Civil Disturbance Quick Reaction Force” comprised of hundreds of National Guard troops that would respond quickly to protests — a constitutionally guaranteed right.

With each new erosion of democracy and freedom, a president whose supporters begged for “a red Caesar” to crush liberals is testing the limits, to see what public opinion, the media reaction, and ultimately the courts and Congress will allow. This unwarranted military occupation of the American capital is the greatest test yet, which is why we need to be clear-eyed about what this is.

Not a distraction. Dictatorship.

Question: Are there any Dem politicians you feel are capable of leading the party in a way that can truly counteract what the GOP is doing? — from @pjeanne97@bsky.social via Bluesky

Answer: This strikes me as a two-part question. I believe there are some Democrats or allies who are offering leadership right now by traveling around the country and firing up the liberal base. These include Sens. Bernie Sanders (who packed auditoriums in Trump-red West Virginia last weekend) and Chris Murphy, as well as Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Maxwell Frost, Jasmine Crockett, and Jamie Raskin. For assorted reasons, most — with the arguable exception of AOC — aren’t seen as presidential contenders in 2028. I’ve heard suggestions that there could be a Democratic “Trump,” a formidable candidate who’s not currently an elected official. Maybe, but I’m hard-pressed to think whom that might be.

A lot of you weighed in about last week’s question concerning the universities — including Columbia, Penn, and my alma mater, Brown — bowing down and cutting deals with the Trump regime. Respondents (including a lot of boomers like me who attended college in the 1970s or thereabouts) were highly negative about these capitulations, and urged fighting back with other deep-pocketed supporters of higher ed replacing any lost federal dollars. Patricia Eisenberg wrote that Trump, the bully, will be back for more. She said: “How can a university tell generations of young people to live by the principles they honor, and then shock those kids by failing to do it themselves?” Added Wendy Moluf: “Universities should hold academic rigor and freedom of thought as their highest value.”

📮 This week’s question: Slated for Friday is the controversial Trump-Vladimir Putin summit in Alaska seeking a possible end to Russia’s war against Ukraine. Should Trump’s priority be getting any deal he can, in the interest of ending this deadly European conflict? Or should Trump insist on protecting Ukrainian sovereignty, even if that prolongs the war? Please email me your answer and put the exact phrase “Putin summit” in the subject line.

As we’ve learned more about last week’s Atlanta shooter, who fired a high-powered rifle at the high-rise offices of the federal Centers for Disease Control and murdered a police officer, I was struck by the similarities between this incident and the recent mass shooting at a Midtown Manhattan office that killed four, including a cop. The most eerie was that both slain officers — David Rose of DeKalb County, Georgia, and Didarul Islam of the NYPD — left behind two children and a pregnant wife.

The more significant overlap was that both the Georgia gunman, 30-year-old Patrick Joseph White, from an Atlanta suburb, and the New York killer Shane Tamura, 27, who drove to Manhattan from his home in Las Vegas, were deeply troubled young men who came to believe that large institutions were to blame for their mounting personal problems. That, and the fact that despite their apparent mental-health woes both were able to obtain high-powered rifles in the world’s most gun-crazed nations.

Tamura, a former high school football player, came to believe he was suffering from chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, from concussions while playing the sport. Even though he never came close to playing the pro game, one of his two suicide notes found after he was killed in the rampage blamed the National Football League — the target of multiple lawsuits — for covering up what it knew about the risks of CTE. The Park Avenue building where the gunman killed Islam and three others houses the NFL headquarters.

White, like Tamura, died either by police fire or suicide at the end of his shooting spree. According to his father and others, the young man became obsessed with online conspiracy theories about the COVID-19 vaccines, and came to believe that the shot had made him ill. Authorities have speculated that’s why he showed up at the CDC complex with five guns and fired multiple rounds at the building, since the federal agency had assisted in developing and encouraging COVID shots.

There’s one big difference between these two stories. There’s no proof of significant illness caused by the millions of COVID shots since the vaccines were introduced in early 2021, while the evidence from court cases and investigative reporting indicates that the NFL did downplay the sport’s concussion risk, even if it’s not clear how that affected the gunman.

But both shooters were adrift young men at a time of increasing worries about their cohort, its social isolation, and the failure of many to find good jobs or meaningful relationships. Both seem to have gone online to “do their own research” about the CDC and the NFL, in an age of twisted information. Both had no problem buying the guns that made their personal obsessions deadly for innocent people. In an age of massive distrust of large institutions, whether that’s the federal government or a pro sports league, the most heartbreaking thing about the Atlanta and New York shootings is that — until we start to get a handle on all of these problems — they likely won’t be the last.

Nothing quite brings back the pain of Election Night 2024 than re-reading columns I wrote in the more optimistic early months of the Joe Biden presidency, when there was still hope that the 2020 contest had been a positive turning point for America. On this date four years ago, I opined about how Biden’s first-year efforts to win back the white working-class vote were falling short from Day One. I wrote: “So far, the experiment is showing that the white middle class is shrugging off economic aid, when it comes from the political tribe they so thoroughly distrust.” Noting that in 2021 I answered my headline’s question with a “no,” read the rest: “Are Biden and the Democrats making a giant political goof by helping out the white working class?”

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