thebulwark.com
Trump Isn’t Liberating D.C. He’s Subduing It.
New consumer price numbers out this morning! Overall, inflation held steady at 2.7 percent year over year last month, the Labor Department reported. But core inflation was elevated, coming in at 3.1 percent as tariff-related price hikes started to kick in. With Trump’s handpicked goon likely coming in to head the Bureau of Labor Statistics, this could be the last reliable inflation report we get for a while—so, you know, try to savor the flavor. Happy Tuesday. Soldiers drive a Stryker infantry carrier vehicle in the 250th birthday parade on June 14, 2025 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Andrew Leyden/Getty Images) I’m Sure It’s Fine by William Kristol It’s a familiar headline for Americans of my generation: “Authoritarian Government Uses Pretext to Take Control of Police Force in Nation’s Capital.” The dateline could be Belgrade or Bangkok, Caracas or Cairo. We’d read the stories, shake our heads, and reflect on the fragility of democracy in the Third World. We might have taken a moment to think: “It can’t happen here.” But the truth is that the possibility of it happening here seemed so remote that the thought barely came to mind in the first place. We did, of course, know that it had happened in counties more like us in the first half of the last century, in European capitals like Rome and Berlin and Madrid, and Prague and Budapest and Warsaw. But that was a long time ago. That couldn’t happen here. It couldn’t happen now. And then, yesterday, the president of the United States announced the following: Under the authorities vested in me as the president of the United States, I’m officially invoking Section 740 of the District of Columbia Home Rule Act, and placing the DC Metropolitan Police Department under direct federal control. . . . In addition, I’m deploying the National Guard to help reestablish law, order, and public safety in Washington DC, and they’re going to be allowed to do their job properly. The president claimed an emergency existed in the District of Columbia even though crime is down a lot over the last two years—and especially over the last two decades. He announced it even though other cities in the United States have higher rates of violent crime. A failed carjacking incident at 3:00 a.m. one night a week ago—an incident that, it must be noted, was stopped by the D.C. police and that resulted in the arrest of two of the perpetrators—was the pretext for the president’s actions. It also must be noted that it’s unclear what the legitimate “federal purpose” of the president’s action is, which is what the statute requires. Still, a federal takeover of the local police has happened in the capital of the United States. This is a new era. It needs a new model of journalism and a new kind of political community. That’s what we’re building here. Join us. There are those who may comfort themselves by arguing that Washington, D.C. has, for historical reasons, a peculiar legal status. That this couldn’t happen elsewhere in the United States. Except, a version of it has already happened in Los Angeles. And the president emphasized yesterday that Washington may be a precursor for more to come: You look at Chicago, how bad it is. You look at Los Angeles, how bad it is. We have other cities that are very bad. New York has a problem. And then you have, of course, Baltimore and Oakland. We’re not going to let it happen. We’re not going to lose our cities over this. And this will go further. We’re starting very strongly with DC. So perhaps D.C. isn’t such a unique case. Indeed, the Washington Post reported this morning that “the Trump administration is evaluating plans that would establish a ‘Domestic Civil Disturbance Quick Reaction Force’ composed of hundreds of National Guard troops tasked with rapidly deploying into American cities facing protests or other unrest.” The paper cited internal Pentagon documents. So, in other words, the use of federal troops at the discretion of the president to quell “domestic civil disturbance,” as he defines it, would be normalized. And the fact that all the cities mentioned by the president yesterday are run by Democratic mayors, in states with Democratic governors—one shouldn’t read too much into that, right? A Trump administration takeover of law enforcement in Democratic cities with an eye to using that control for political objectives—that couldn’t happen here. It’s true that the president did say at the White House yesterday, in a partisan moment, that, “Democrats are weak on crime, totally weak on crime” and “do not want safety.” But that surely doesn’t mean much. Those cabinet officers standing there beside the president yesterday—Attorney General Pam Bondi, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth—are officials sworn to uphold the Constitution, confirmed by the United States Senate. They and their colleagues in senior positions in the federal government wouldn’t go along with a widespread deployment of law enforcement and the military at home for political and partisan purposes, right? That couldn’t happen here. The president did say that under the new order of things in Washington, the police will be “allowed to do whatever the hell they want” to secure the streets. But that’s just performative pro-police rhetoric, right? It may sound like the actual legitimization of police brutality. But that couldn’t happen here. After all, the leaders of our major institutions would speak out, forcefully and in unison, against it. Here in the United States of America, our leaders would not avert their gaze. They would not keep their heads down. They would not simply go about their business. They would not shirk their civic duty. Here in the United States, distinguished liberals would not tie themselves in knots with hand-wringing. Here in the United States, proud conservatives would not put party over principle. The heirs of Franklin Roosevelt and of Ronald Reagan would join hands and come together in defense of liberty. Surely we Americans would rise to the occasion. This is not Belgrade or Bangkok, Caracas or Cairo. This is not the 1920s or the 1930s. Surely it couldn’t happen now. It couldn’t happen here. Share Running a Tight Zoo by Andrew Egger Donald Trump went to a lot of crazy places in his press conference announcing he was seizing control of the D.C. police yesterday. But perhaps his most revealing line—other than the loving descriptions of coming police brutality toward delinquent youth—was about who the change was actually for . “People come from Iowa, they come from Indiana, they come and then they get mugged,” Trump said. “Not going to happen. Keep coming, because by the time you get your trip set, it’s going to be safe again.” Trump’s implementation of federal rule is ultimately aimed at the twin goals of maximizing his own power and maintaining the experience of patriotic red-state tourists. He’s not pitching his crime crackdown to the city’s actual residents, who, whatever the city’s problems, might reasonably object to living their lives under the eye of the U.S. military now “flowing into the streets of Washington,” as Pete Hegseth said yesterday. Instead, he’s pitching it to the heartland, whose entire picture of D.C. as it currently exists is his image of a hellscape worse than Baghdad. People already have lovely trips to the capital all the time. Now, however, Trump will tell them he deserves personal credit, because my God, you should have seen what it was like before . Trump’s obvious nonconcern about the civil rights abuses likely to follow a group of cops who are told they can “do whatever the hell they want” makes plenty of sense in this context too. To Trump, D.C. isn’t a city; it’s a zoo. And he’s setting up his zoo for the comfort of the patrons, who want the attractions in cages at a safe distance. The “Iowa and Indiana” comment pricked up my ears for another reason. 1 In 2023, I attended a Trump rally near Des Moines—or what was supposed to be a Trump rally. (It got rained out.) Chatting with people milling around, I met a pair of women who had shown up for a specific reason: Their husbands were in jail for crimes committed on January 6th, and they believed Trump, if elected, would pardon them. He was and he did. When the good Republican folks from Iowa and Indiana are the ones clashing with D.C. police, Trump doesn’t concern himself with a safe, walkable city. He knows where his loyalties lie, and it’s not with the cops. He and his allies want to pretend they’re sticking up for public order. But this whole thing is really just shirts and skins. Share AROUND THE BULWARK Trump’s Immigration Policy Is Built on a Massive Political Miscalculation… He doesn’t understand why Americans care about illegal immigration in the first place, argues LINDA CHAVEZ . The Real Reason for the Alaska Summit… It’s surely not because Trump cares about the suffering of the Ukrainian people, observes NICHOLAS GROSSMAN . Big Balls Mugging Triggers DC Crackdown! Was the reason for Trump’s D.C. crackdown the mugging of one of Elon’s DOGE boys? Or was this a plan to mess with Democrat-run cities all along? CAM KASKY and TIM MILLER break it down on FYPod. An Uncomfortably Revealing Laura Loomer Deposition… Insights into her insults and clues about her career come from a sealed deposition. In False Flag, WILL SOMMER is not kidding , it is uncomfortably revealing. Who Deserves Credit for the Armenia–Azerbaijan Peace Deal? Conflicts end because of patience, persistence, and luck—not one man’s showmanship, writes GEN. MARK HERTLING . They Should be Ashamed of This Manifesto… Joining MONA CHAREN on her show is WALTER OLSON of the Cato Institute , as they discuss the Manhattan Statement on Higher Education, which would license Trump to ignore law, procedure, and precious liberties, and the anti-antis are all over it. Quick Hits THE ERRING STRAIGHT: That was some weird shit, as George W. Bush said of Donald Trump’s 2017 inauguration speech. This time, the weird shit came during a Monday press conference where Trump said he was “going to Russia on Friday” to meet with Vladimir Putin. The meeting is set to be in Alaska, not Russia, unless there is some deal we don’t know about. Worse, Trump is back to victim-blaming Ukraine and extolling Russian strength. He “ very severely disagree[s] ” with what Volodymyr Zelensky has done, because “this is a war that should have never happened.” He’s “a little bothered” by Zelensky saying he needs “constitutional approval” for land concessions: “He’s got approval to go into war and kill everybody, but he needs approval to do a land swap.” He thinks the Russians would have “ taken Kyiv in four hours ” if they’d taken the highway instead of going across muddy farmland. ( Um , no .) Also, Viktor Orbán says Russia can’t be beaten because all they do is win wars (the Crimean War, for instance ?). They beat Napoleon! (After he handed their ass to them in 1801, 1805, and 1807.) They must be drinking champagne in the Kremlin. —Cathy Young CHERYL SPEAKS: You might dive into the Wall Street Journal ’s excellent new profile of actress Cheryl Hines—wife of HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—expecting to see a longtime L.A. liberal grappling with her husband’s new place in the MAGA firmament. But what you get instead is a remarkable case study in the human mind’s ability to rationalize, compartmentalize, glide on by. All the hostility to her MAGA coziness is odd, she insists. Surprising, “really rather strange,” she says repeatedly. She “can’t understand” it. From the Journal , you also get the sense that burning down America’s public-health apparatus isn’t the first RFK Jr. behavior Hines has had to grin away. Vivid details abound: Kennedy once owned “an emu named Toby that pecked at Cheryl one too many times, got sent to an animal shelter and was eventually killed by a mountain lion.” Kennedy “once threw her Snickers bar out the car window after she’d told him she was trying to watch her diet.” In their Georgetown home, she keeps taking down a portrait of herself that she hates. She does it when Kennedy is out of town. The Journal notes: “When he got back last time, he hung it even higher.” The two payoff quotes come at the end. One is from Hines’s sister Rebecca: “It’s like, ‘Why are you picking on Cheryl?’ She hasn’t done anything except refuse to leave her husband.” The other is from Hines herself, talking about a time Kennedy Jr. and his daughter Kick were forced to run through a swarm of bees: “Sometimes you just have to run through the bees, and it’s better if you don’t scream.” MISTER MANAGER: Ten days after firing the commissioner of labor statistics over an embarrassingly weak job report—do not bring the emperor bad news while he’s crabby!—Donald Trump has selected a replacement. You will no doubt be shocked to learn that the lucky boy, EJ Antoni, is a straightforward MAGA hack: the in-house economist at the new-look Heritage Foundation, which has distinguished itself in recent years as the think tank most willing to tear itself down to the studs to remake itself in Trump’s personal image. Antoni’s nomination has unsurprisingly sparked a bout of anxiety among independent economists who fear Trump intends to monkey with the release of future jobs and inflation reports. After all, any politically unhelpful report is, to the president’s diseased mind, a priori fake and rigged. Whether the Bureau of Labor Statistics actually is susceptible to such political fudging remains to be seen: The actual number-crunching is non-partisan technical work, and any real attempts to put a thumb on the scale could result in a department revolt. Perhaps instead we will see a parade of shot messengers, each commissioner lasting as long as a streak of good economic news lasts, only to be replaced by a still more comically toadyish person. You never know: Laura Loomer might get that White House job jet. Share Cheap Shots 1 For the record, my whole family is from Iowa. I lived in Iowa for years. No shade on Iowa! Great state!
