The military parade in June was just practice, it turns out. For more than a week, the nation has watched federal officers and even camouflaged troops patrolling the streets of Washington, D.C., causing increasing amounts of violence and mayhem. Videos of agents pulling a delivery driver off his moped and stopping to lecture a Black man smoking a cigarette on his own stoop have gone viral, while Republican governors from West Virginia, Ohio, South Carolina, Mississippi, and Louisiana will likely add to the chaos and potential danger by deploying their National Guardsmen to the city. Some of them could be armed.
President Donald Trump on Monday made the ludicrous claim that these actions have made the district safer. In response, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser touted the Metropolitan Police Department’s own efforts to reduce crime and said the district just needs more police officers. “The numbers on the ground in the District don’t support a thousand people from other states coming to Washington, D.C. You know that,” she said on Monday. Other Democrats, like Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy, have pointed out that many of the states sending troops have cities with higher crime rates, a claim supported by the data.
Bowser and Murphy are right, and Trump is wrong. But no one should be hand-wringing about crime right now—I’m looking at you, The Atlantic—because Trump isn’t actually worried about crime. He’s not trying to make the district safer for its residents, and he’s certainly not weighing the data and evidence when he calls on governors to send guardsmen. Parading troops through an American city is a brazen authoritarian power grab, a test run at martial law in a city with an already heavy federal presence. So we’re well past the point of rebutting Trump’s lies about crime, or trying to gain the upper hand on the issue. What the residents of D.C., and everyone around the country who is alarmed by the rise of MAGA fascism, wants is for Trump’s show of force to be met with an equal show of force. And the Democrats are utterly failing in that regard.
Facts have never stopped Trump, and they won’t now. “D.C. gave Fake Crime numbers in order to create a false illusion of safety,” he lied on his propaganda platform, Truth Social. “Until 4 days ago, Washington, D.C., was the most unsafe ‘city’ in the United States, and perhaps the World. Now, in just a short period of time, it is perhaps the safest, and getting better every single hour! People are flocking to D.C. again, and soon, the beautification will begin!” To support this, he posted a video on Truth Social with his voiceover saying, “We will take over our horribly run Washington, D.C., and clean up, rebuild, and renovate our capital.” And yet, the video montage shows our capital city already looking quite beautiful and peaceful; mute Trump’s voice, and you’d be forgiven for thinking it was tourism promo.
What does it mean to “take over” the District? Most of the cities Trump has criticized are governed by democratically elected Black mayors, and so the claims that they are crime-ridden are more of a racist bullhorn than a dog whistle. D.C., where the plurality of the population (44 percent) is Black and more than 90 percent of residents vote Democratic, does not want meddling from the Republican president it didn’t elect and the Congress it has no representation in. It wants to preserve home rule and be granted statehood someday.
The takeover is political, and it is partly a “performative” “stunt”—to quote Maryland Governor Wes Moore and Murphy, respectively—in the sense that it’s elaborate political theater designed to distract from Trump’s tanking approval rating and the Epstein scandal. But it’s also more than that: an authoritarian show of force that is genuinely terrifying and terrorizing innocent people. Sending groups of federal officers roving empty streets on a weeknight in the tony Georgetown neighborhood or the U Street nightlife district almost guarantees someone will film it. Combat vehicles lined up in front of the city’s Union Station are a shocking sight that guarantees pictures and commentary. This coverage spreads across the country, conveying different messages to different Americans, depending on where they live, the color of their skin, whom they voted for last year, and so on.
If you’re a white MAGA voter in suburban or rural America, these videos probably confirm your priors: that our capital, and many other American cities, are crime-ridden hellholes run by feckless Black liberals. Conversely, if you’re afraid of being targeted by police because of your race or immigration status, you’re going to circumscribe your actions in response to seeing these videos, as well as videos of ICE actions from around the country. Even if you’re not accustomed to being treated with suspicion, you now know that a normal trip through your city might involve encountering federal officers or witnessing someone else being arrested and detained. Increasingly, Americans are primed to bear witness—to record masked agents who are snatching people off the streets—and some are even intervening. This is what it means to learn to live in an authoritarian police state, and people are using the only tools they have: cell phones and sandwiches. The longer ICE raids and military takeovers go on, the more they will inspire protests around the country, which may be the only excuse Trump is waiting for to claim that cities are full of disorder and then crack down even harder.
It’s hard to know whether the D.C. takeover is a trial run for occupying other cities, or simply an intimidation tactic to try to suppress voters in cities ahead of the 2026 midterm. It’s definitely part of Trump’s only true and unwavering project: consolidating power. Even as he’s posting on Truth Social about crime in D.C., he’s cheering efforts in Texas to redraw district maps to elect more Republicans to the House next year and launching an effort to get rid of mail-in ballots.
What have Democrats done in response? Few have risen to the challenge. Representative Sarah McBride, the first-year representative from Delaware, tweeted Monday that Trump is engaged in an “all-out assault not just on free and fair elections—but on American democracy itself,” and Texas Democrats have been fighting Governor Greg Abbott’s gerrymander, but where is everyone else? Who is willing to take a risk to channel the anger so many people in D.C. and around the country feel? I understand that Democrats in Congress are on recess in their home districts this month, and thus don’t have their usual platform on Capitol Hill, with its hundreds of reporters, to get their message out. But where are their comms teams? Where’s the sense of emergency?
I fear the answer lies where it usually does for Democrats: They’re scared of appearing not to care about crime. “We as Democrats should be careful not to cede the issue of public safety to Donald Trump and Republicans,” Representative Ritchie Torres told The New York Times the other day. “We should own the issue of public safety, because it matters to voters.” I suspect a lot of other prominent Democrats feel the same way but don’t want to say it because they know it will further enrage their restless base. What else explains the party’s deafening silence amid this crisis in our capital?
Democratic politicians are terrified of issues like crime and immigration because they’re terrible at understanding polls. Torres is right that “public safety” matters to voters: If you ask voters whether they care about public safety, most of them will say yes! They care about it in the same way that they care about the economy or health care. If you ask more specifically about violent crime, Americans will say they’re worried about it because they have been trained—first and foremost by their local news but also, well, the president of the United States—to be worried about it, the facts notwithstanding. They believe crime is a big problem in cities and elsewhere, not where they live, which often tells us much more about racial stereotypes in this country than actual feelings of safety.
Amid Trump’s federal takeover of D.C, some of the most prominent Democrats in America have accused him of a “political ploy” and “attempted distraction,” in the words of Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer. The president, Pete Buttigieg said, is trying “to solve his own political problems” and get his base “thinking and talking about something other than his refusal to open up the Epstein files, because he’s mixed up in them.” Trump activated the National Guard “to distract from his incompetent mishandling of tariffs, health care, education and immigration,” said Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi.
This feeble response is characteristic of Democrat leaders, who trot out this outdated attack line any time they want to shift the political conversation onto more favorable terrain—rather than actually attacking Trump on the matter at hand. What’s more, the actual distraction here is the entire discourse about crime in D.C., which Democrats have ceded entirely to Trump and the Republicans (and in some cases, like Torrres, even contributed to it). The federal agents and troops are not the distraction. They are the whole point—quite literally the spear in Trump’s increasingly fascist assault on American democracy. Some Americans are ready to stand in front of it. Very few of those Americans, it seems, are national Democrats.
