Trump Seizes Power Over D.C. Using Rarely Invoked Rule

President Trump on Monday announced plans to send the National Guard into Washington, D.C., and invoke Section 740 of the D.C. Home Rule Act of 1973, giving him temporary control over the nation’s capital.

“I’m announcing a historic action to rescue our nation’s capital from crime, bloodshed, Bedlam and squalor and worse,” Trump told a packed room of reporters. “This is Liberation Day in D.C., and we’re gonna take our capital back. We’re taking it back. 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, you know what that is, and placing the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department under direct federal control, and you’ll be meeting the people that will be directly involved with that.”

This is an unprecedented  decision that may very well lead to even more extreme overreaches of police and executive power on behalf of the Trump administration. As a federal district and not a state, the Home Rule Act gives D.C. the right to elect a mayor, legislate and enforce local police, and approve the city’s budget. Trump’s decision Monday puts the local Metropolitan Police Department under federal control. Rule 740, initially designed to be used in case of an all out violent uprising, allows Trump himself to control the MPD for two days at a time. 

Meanwhile, Trump announced, 800 National Guard troops will also be sent to patrol the district.

This press conference was the culmination of days of statements from the president in which he expressed the kind of far-right takes on crime in D.C. that people tend to develop after watching hours of Fox News every night. From clearing out homeless encampments to trying 14-year-olds as adults, Trump has begun to initiate his authoritarian vision  on the grounds that crime is at an emergency level. 

“You don’t want to get mugged and raped and shot and killed. And you all know people and friends of yours that that happened.... You want to be able to leave your apartment or your house where you live and feel safe and go into a store to buy a newspaper or buy something, and you don’t have that now,” Trump said. “The murder rate in Washington today is higher than that of Bogota, Colombia, Mexico City, some of the places that you hear about as being the worst places on earth. Much higher.” (In reality, violence crime in D.C. has been declining since 2023.) 

Trump also expressed deep, dogwhistle-laden disdain for the city’s Black and Latino youth, who he and his cast of press conference characters all threatened to clamp down on by increasing the level of force police can use and eliminating cashless bail. 

“We have slums here. We’re getting rid of them. I know it’s not politically correct. You’ll say, ‘Oh, so terrible.’ No, we get rid of the slums where they live. Caravans of mass youth rampage through city streets at all times of the day. They’re on ATVs, motorbikes. They travel pretty well,” Trump said. “They fight back, until you knock the hell out of them. Because it’s the only language they understand.”

D.C. residents should expect an increased police presence in popular areas like Dupont Circle and Malcolm X Park, as well as in triangle parks. Homeless people, immigrants, and young people of color, whom the administration sees as “young punks,” may likely face increased harassment.  

“This is just a list of some of the people … that were removed from the D.C. streets this weekend. They were rough, rough and tough. But we’re rougher and tougher,” Trump said, holding up a piece of paper with some unclear pictures on it. “Look at this. People here … they’re not going to be your local school teacher. This guy has killed people numerous times. They’re not going to be an asset. They will never be an asset to society. I don’t care.”

This story has been updated.

The president wants to federalize law enforcement in the nation’s capital—but his favorite mainstream media channel isn’t on board.

Fox News contributor Ted Williams, a criminal and civil trial attorney and former member of the Washington Metropolitan Police Department, issued an acute fact check for Donald Trump Sunday. Williams informed the network that he found Trump’s plan “troubling” because “crime is not out of control in the District of Columbia.”

“Yes there is crime, and there will always be crime,” Williams said, identifying minors as some of the major perpetrators of robberies over the last several years. “In any major metropolitan city you’re going to have, unfortunately, juveniles committing crimes.”

Trump has turned his attention toward Washington’s crime since 19-year-old DOGE staffer Edward Coristine, better known as “Big Balls,” was attacked a week ago by a couple of 15-year-olds who stole his iPhone. On Sunday, Trump said he would force the homeless out of the city “IMMEDIATELY” and that his administration would imprison criminals “very fast.”

“I would like to ask Mr. Trump,” Williams said. “Where were you last month when a three-year-old child, Honesty Cheadle, was shot and killed as the result of crime in the District of Columbia?”

“Don’t use this as a pretext to actually eradicate home rule,” he continued. “And that seemed to be what Mr. Trump is interested in.”

Trump also posted an ominous warning to Washington’s denizens early Monday, claiming that the city would be “liberated” the same day.

“Crime, Savagery, Filth, and Scum will DISAPPEAR,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “I will, MAKE OUR CAPITAL GREAT AGAIN! The days of ruthlessly killing, or hurting, innocent people, are OVER! I quickly fixed the Border (ZERO ILLEGALS in last 3 months!), D.C. is next!!! Thank you for your attention to this matter. President DJT.”

Last month, President Trump announced a bid to unseal grand jury transcripts from the criminal trials of notorious sex criminal Jeffrey Epstein and his convicted associate Ghislaine Maxwell—apparently to quell outrage over his administration’s perceived lack of transparency on Epstein.

On Monday, a federal judge in Manhattan denied Trump’s request to unseal such records related to Maxwell. Unsparingly, U.S. District Judge Paul Engelmayer described the administration’s attempt as a ruse, noting that unsealing the materials would reveal nothing new to the public.

The administration’s argument that the material “would bring to light meaningful new information about Epstein’s and Maxwell’s crimes,” Engelmayer wrote, “is demonstrably false.”

Someone “deeply interested and concerned about the Epstein matter” who “reviewed these materials expecting, based on the Government’s representations, to learn new information about Epstein’s and Maxwell’s crimes and the investigation into them, would come away feeling disappointed and misled,” he continued. “There is no ‘there’ there.”

Thus, Trump’s bid is “a far cry from every reported case” in which the court has previously been petitioned to unseal such records due to “special circumstances.”

Engelmawyer noted that he actually did consider unsealing the documents, but only because doing so “would expose as disingenuous” the administration’s explanations for seeking to do so. If the records were unsealed, he wrote, “A member of the public, appreciating that the Maxwell grand jury materials do not contribute anything to public knowledge, might conclude that the Government’s motion for their unsealing was aimed not at ‘transparency’ but at diversion—aimed not at full disclosure but at the illusion of such.”

Moreover, Engelmayer said the administration’s motion was “weakened” by a number of “irregularities.” Curiously, it was filed by Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche alone. Made “under circumstances suggestive of haste rather than reflective deliberation,” it was also brief—all of three-and-a-half pages, with “no purporting materials”—and filed without notifying victims of Epstein and Maxwell in advance.

This is the latest hiccup for Trump as the Epstein fiasco continues to plague his administration. Last month, a federal judge in Florida denied a request to unseal Epstein grand jury materials, in an opinion that observed the government itself had, in its petition, explicitly acknowledged that its argument was insufficient. A request before another Manhattan federal judge to unseal Epstein grand jury transcripts is still pending.

This story has been updated.

Disregarding the Constitution’s export clause, the Trump administration has struck an unprecedented arrangement to take a 15 percent cut of Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices’ chip sales to China.

Under the deal, first reported on Sunday, the companies will pay the U.S. government for sales of chips used for artificial intelligence—Nvidia’s H20 and AMD’s MI308 chips—in China in order to obtain export licenses to the country, despite national security restrictions.

According to the Financial Times, the arrangement is unprecedented, as “no US company has ever agreed to pay a portion of their revenues to obtain export licences.” Several media reports have called it “unusual.”

“Unconstitutional” would evidently work just as well. As Peter Harrell, a former Biden administration official and current fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, as well as many other observers, noted, the move disregards the U.S. Constitution’s prohibition on export taxes. The export clause states: “No Tax or Duty shall be laid on Articles exported from any State.”

The administration can be expected to characterize the arrangement as something other than a tax. It may ultimately be up to the courts, if the move faces legal challenges, to tell this like it is.

Constitutional concerns aside, this development represents the latest in an ongoing saga of Trump flip-flopping on chips, as the administration previously reportedly planned to ban the export of Nvidia’s H20 chips to China, before having a change of heart in April after the company’s CEO paid $1 million to dine with the president at Mar-a-Lago.

On Sunday, Vice President JD Vance and the Trump administration tried and failed to shift the accountability for the Epstein files onto Democrats, only reinvigorating calls for their release. 

“I laugh at the Democrats who are now all of a sudden so interested in the Epstein files. For four years, Joe Biden and the Democrats did nothing about this story,” Vance told Fox News’s Maria Bartiromo. “We know that Jeffrey Epstein had a lot of connections with left-wing politicians and left-wing billionaires, and now President Trump has demanded full transparency from this, and yet somehow the Democrats are attacking him, and not the Biden administration, which did nothing for four years.” 

Vance’s line of argument is willfully obtuse. Epstein killed himself in prison while Trump was president. He had plenty of time to start a “transparent” investigation, and arguably had even more reason to do so then, given the circumstances of Epstein’s death.   

And Trump has been anything but transparent on this. Attorney General Pam Bondi essentially lied to the entire country about the “Epstein list,” initially claiming she had it on her desk and then later stating no such list existed. Trump himself has called the entire process “bullshit,” questioned his biggest supporters for still caring about it, and has had Republicans pussyfoot around the issue in Congress. This is simply not how a transparent inquiry into this–or any issue of this gravity—should look.  

Another thing Vance fails to understand is that to normal Americans outside of the MAGA/Qanon spectrum, the Epstein case is still about the victims he abused, not about playing politics or revealing some liberal cabal. Epstein has been connected to prominent leftists like Fidel Castro and Noam Chomsky, as well as liberals like former President Bill Clinton, and conservatives like Donald Trump. What does it matter?  It isn’t some gotcha if the point here is justice, which it obviously isn’t for Trump and Vance. 

“Fine. Release all the files. With victims and survivors’ names and PII redacted,” conservative Bulwark editor Bill Kriston wrote on X. “But no redactions of clients, enablers, and see-no-evil associates.” 

Pod Save America’s Jon Favreau also chimed in. 

“Donald Trump’s name is in the Epstein files and @JDVance has been plotting with the AG and FBI Director to cover it up. Release the names! Democrats, Republicans, billionaires, or not,” he wrote. “What are you afraid of, @JDVance?”

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is once again openly touting the far-right, Christian nationalist views of his favorite pastor, Doug Wilson.

“All of Christ for All of Life,” Hegseth wrote Friday in a post sharing an interview that Wilson did with CNN the day prior. In the video, Wilson proceeds to describe his theocratic, patriarchal vision for America, which has clearly had a significant influence on Hegseth.

“I’d like to see the town be a Christian town, I’d like to see the state be a Christian state, I’d like to see the nation be a Christian nation, and I’d like to see the world be a Christian world,” the Moscow, Idaho, pastor said. “Every society is theocratic. The only question is who’s ‘Theo’? In a secular democracy, it would be Demos, the people. In a Christian republic, it’d be Christ.”

Wilson also bans women from leadership roles in his church and believes that they should not have the right to vote, arguing they should only be mothers and homemakers.

“Women are the kind of people that people come out of,” he told CNN’s Pamela Brown in the clip shared by Hegseth.

“So you just think they’re meant to have babies, that’s it? They’re just a vessel?” Brown responded.

“No, it doesn’t take any talent to simply reproduce biologically. The wife and mother, who is the chief executive of the home, is entrusted with three, or four, or five eternal souls.”

“I’m here as a working journalist and I’m a mom of three—”

“Good for you.”

“Is that an issue for you?”

“No, it’s not automatically an issue.”

Wilson holds some of the extreme views on gender on the Christian right. In the past, he’s written that men have a sexual right to women and that unsubmissive women are at fault for any sexual violence committed against them. “The sexual act cannot be made into an egalitarian pleasuring party.… A man penetrates, conquers, colonizes, plants. A woman receives, surrenders, accepts.” He also posits that God created women “to make the sandwiches” and thinks that giving women the right to vote led to “a long, sustained war on the family.” This is the man the U.S. defense secretary is enthusiastically platforming.

And this isn’t the first time. Hegseth and Wilson go way back. The defense secretary has attended Wilson’s services, posted in support of his private Christian schools, praised Wilson for not masking during the pandemic, and went on Wilson’s Association of Classical Christian Schools–affiliated CrossPolitic podcast shortly after his nomination. Wilson is a mouthpiece of a militantly regressive wing of Christianity with a very specific agenda, and the man leading the U.S. military continues to be one of his strongest advocates. Only time will tell just how much influence Wilson will continue to levy over the next three years.

Donald Trump is replacing Billy Long as IRS commissioner, after just two months on the job.

Long was confirmed to the role in June, but his near future will no longer involve fronting the tax agency. Instead, he is expected to be nominated to an ambassador position, reported The New York Times.

There is no clear permanent replacement for Long yet, though Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent will double time as acting commissioner until one is in place, according to a senior administration official who spoke with the Times.

Long, a former congressman from Missouri, had been an unexpected choice for the revenue service, with no background in tax policy. As a lawmaker, he sponsored legislation to completely axe the IRS. Long was confirmed by the Senate in June by a 53-44 vote amid an agency-wide staffing purge, with all Democrats voting against his appointment.

He was the subject of an inquiry by Senate Democrats in December—when his name was first floated as an option to front the IRS—over his support for a “fraud-ridden” pandemic-era tax credit that cost Americans “hundreds of billions of dollars,” according to a memo from the Senate Finance Committee.

The 69-year-old was the fifth individual to run the IRS this year after the rapid-fire turnover of several interim chiefs, including Doug O’Donnell, Melanie Krause, Gary Shapley, and Michael Faulkender.

Despite its shrunken workforce, the IRS has been tasked by Trump to diversify its focus to advance the White House’s agenda, asking the tax agency to help it identify and deport immigrants as well as scrutinize universities.

Trump’s downsizing at the IRS has been a complete 180 for the agency, which saw funding boons and new hiring efforts under the Biden administration to expand revenue collection services and to investigate potential tax cheats.

This story has been updated.

Far-right commentator Candace Owens thinks President Trump and JD Vance should be rushing to defend her as French President Emmanuel Macron and his wife, Brigitte, sue her for defamation. Owens has been running a monthslong harassment campaign, or “transvestigation,” against Brigitte, claiming she was born a biological man.

The Macrons’ lawsuit, filed in Delaware, alleges that Owens has “used this false statement to promote her independent platform, gain notoriety, and make money.” This includes Owens’s Candace podcast and her eight-part YouTube series on Brigitte’s gender, Becoming Brigitte.

“After looking into this, I would stake my entire professional reputation on the fact that Brigitte Macron is in fact a man,” Owens posted on X in March 2024.

Now, as the lawsuit approaches, Owens is grasping at straws and begging for help, to no avail. She even went so far as to reveal that Trump called her on the phone to tell her to drop the transgender allegations.

“You have a literal European leader that is basically saying ‘eff you’ to the American Constitution, right? Emmanuel Macron and Brigitte are saying, ‘You know what, we don’t like that podcaster in America, and we are gonna launch a lawsuit that’s never been launched before, an unprecedented lawsuit, to impoverish her for speaking,’” Owens opined. “And both JD Vance and Trump have not issued a statement.

“In fact, where are the journalists even asking them to make a statement, OK?” she continued. “A state leader—a state leader is speaking about your constituent, and launching a lawsuit and saying they’re gonna impoverish them for executing a First Amendment right. Where are you? If you are Trump, the first thing you should have done, if you purport to care about America and our Constitution … you would come out and you would say ‘I don’t even know whether I believe that she’s a man or a woman, it doesn’t matter,’ right?”

“He could even say, like he said to me on the phone, that ‘I looked at her real close in the Eiffel Tower, and it looked like a woman to me.’ OK, you can say all those things, but you should say it’s unacceptable,” Owens continued. “That this leader would threaten the First Amendment in any way.… The job of the federal government is to defend us against foreign invaders, and I would pretty much say Emmanuel Macron right now is being a foreign invader. But no, they’re silent. They are silent.”

This is a real “hit dog hollering” moment. Owens claimed for months that the first lady of France is a biological male, based a significant portion of her million-dollar podcast content on that baseless lie, and is now crying for the president to save her while the Macrons gear up to sue the hell out of her, and rightly so.

Piers Morgan somehow said it best: “You kind of know [the rumor about Brigitte] is not true, but you’ve ridden the wave of conspiracy theory about it because it’s been so lucrative,” he told Owens on his show on Wednesday. “That is why they’re suing you, because ultimately they know you’ve been amplifying this massively more than the journalists had in France.”

The Justice Department has opened an investigation into New York State Attorney General Letitia James, in an apparent act of Trumpian retribution.

Two grand jury subpoenas were issued to James’s office, requesting information pertaining to the Attorney General’s previous investigations into the Trump Organization and the National Rifle Association, reported CNN.

The subpoenas are related to Trump’s bank fraud case, which James won against Trump in 2024, forcing him to cough up $454 million for his family’s faulty business practices. 

Sources that spoke with the network also revealed that a grand jury investigation has been opened in Albany, examining whether James violated Trump’s constitutional rights in taking legal action against him.

James’s office vehemently rejected the accusations, underscoring its efforts to hold Trump accountable.

“Any weaponization of the justice system should disturb every American,” a spokesperson for the New York state attorney general told The New Republic. “We stand strongly behind our successful litigation against the Trump Organization and the National Rifle Association, and we will continue to stand up for New Yorkers’ rights.”

James’s attorney Abbe Lowell went a step further, telling CNN that the Trump administration’s investigation into James’s closed case “has to be the most blatant and desperate example of this administration’s carrying out the president’s political retribution campaign.”

“Weaponizing the Department of Justice to try to punish an elected official for doing her job is an attack on the rule of law and a dangerous escalation by this administration,” Lowell added. “If prosecutors carry out this improper tactic and are genuinely interested in the truth, we are ready and waiting with the facts and law.”

New York’s top cop has become one of the president’s chief legal adversaries since the civil fraud case. In April, the Trump administration launched an investigation into her personal finances, accusing the attorney general of lying on her bank statements in order to obtain better mortgage rates. At the time, Trump referred to James as a  “totally corrupt politician” and a “wacky crook,” and accused New York’s first Black woman in statewide office of being “racist.”

On Thursday, the Daily Mail reported that Steve Bannon, the brains behind the MAGA movement, was strongly considering a 2028 presidential run—news that would surely aggravate the current internal rift between Trump’s radical base and the more traditional neocons at the top of the GOP.

Sources also told the Mail that Bannon’s primary motivation for considering a run was his long-standing feud with Vice President JD Vance. “Love him … but Vance is not tough enough to run in 2028,” one source quoted Bannon as saying.

These rumors came just days after Trump soft-endorsed a Vance–Marco Rubio ticket in 2028.

“Well, I think most likely. In all fairness, he’s the vice president, and I think Marco is also somebody that maybe would get together with JD in some form,” he said. “I also think we have incredible people, some of the people on the stage right here. So it’s too early, obviously, to talk about it, but certainly he’s doing a great job. And he would be probably favored at this point.”

Bannon responded to the speculation surrounding his chances the next day in The National Pulse with just two troubling words: “Trump 2028.” That’s not exactly a denial—if Trump doesn’t run again, which he is constitutionally prohibited from doing, then Bannon might throw his factory-distressed Barbour jacket in the ring.

This isn’t the first time Bannon has alluded to or called outright for Trump to eschew a basic constitutional principle and seize power for another four years.

“My guy in 2028 is Donald J. Trump—a guy like this comes around once in a century, OK, and we got to get everything out of President Trump we can get,” Bannon told Politico back in March. “I went to fucking prison to back this president, and to back this movement in a low-security fucking prison,” Bannon said. “Here are the things I care about: I care about my country and this movement, and I care about President Trump.”

It’s clear that Bannon has issues with Vance, who initially opposed Trump and only got in line when it was overwhelmingly obvious that Trumpism was the future of the GOP. Still, Bannon has always wielded the most power behind the scenes—which means he’s likely looking for a puppet to control more than he is contemplating a star turn of his own.