Pete Hegseth Ignores Key Detail About Trump’s Fascist D.C. Takeover

The secretary of defense won’t confirm the time limits on Donald Trump’s capital takeover.

The president activated 800 National Guard members to Washington Monday. He also federalized the Metropolitan Police Department to rid the country’s capital of homeless people and to handle a nonexistent uptick in crime. To do so, Trump declared a “public safety emergency,” emphasizing Washington’s supposedly startling rise in crime while citing inflammatory statistics from 2023 instead of 2025.

Trump’s order, however, has an expiration date: The president has 30 days before his occupation of the Metropolitan Police requires congressional approval by way of a new law.

His time constraints on leveraging the D.C. National Guard are a bit more complicated: Trump’s repeated use of the National Guard brushes up against the Posse Comitatus Act, a federal law dating back to 1878 that forbids the government from using the military for law enforcement purposes. The trial challenging the legality of his decision to deploy the National Guard in June against Los Angeles protesters kicked off Monday in a California courtroom.

But it’s not clear if the Trump administration has any intention of respecting the law. In an interview with Fox News Monday evening, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth refused to acknowledge the time constraint when pressed about the legal requirement.

“How long will that be?” interrupted Fox News’s Laura Ingraham as the Pentagon chief rattled off the White House’s intention to bring even more federal forces to Washington’s doorstep.

“Who knows!” Hegseth exclaimed.

“Well it costs money, right?” Ingraham continued. “The question is, are you there for a year? Are you there for six months? And when the troops pull out, what happens then?”

“I would call this conditions-based,” Hegseth said. “I would say it’s a situation where we’re here to support law enforcement. And the more we can free them up to do their job, the more effective they can be, the more we can work—I mean, this isn’t my realm, but the justice system to make sure people who are arrested are actually locked up. That’s why the president is talking about cashless bail and sanctuary cities. If you’re illegal here in D.C., that’s going to be a problem.”

“Weeks, months, what will it take, that’s the president’s call,” Hegseth lied.

Violent crime has been on the decline in Washington since 2023, funneling into a nationwide crime drop the following year that saw homicide rates plummet across the country, reported The Washington Post. In 2024, crime in the capital was down 35 percent, according to data from the Metropolitan Police Department.

President Trump and the Pentagon are considering creating a full-time “Domestic Civil Disturbance Quick Reaction Force” that could be called on to quash civil unrest and protest at a moment’s notice, according to internal documents reviewed by The Washington Post.

The force would be made up of about 600 National Guards troops, half of which would be based on military bases in Alabama and Arizona, ready at all times to fly into any given city or state to lay down Trump’s law. They’d have military-style weapons and riot gear, would dispatch from their bases in waves of 100 soldiers, and would cycle out after 90 days to “limit burnout.”

The Pentagon documents did list concerns regarding the reduced availability of the National Guard, the program’s cost, logistics, “Public and Political Impact,” and other negative external impacts this program could cause.

Trump is allowed to call upon the National Guard like this under two federal codes, Title 10 and Title 32. While Title 10 gives the president jurisdiction to order the National Guard to aid local police without making any arrests or leading any investigations, Trump would primarily employ Title 32 for this force. That would authorize him to use the Guard’s federally funded status to expand its powers in states with “unrest,” allowing it to make arrests and act more aggressively in general. Trump also invoked Title 32 during the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020.

If approved, and if it follows the traditional budgetary process, this program would begin in 2027, costing hundreds of millions. But it’s not clear whether Trump would try to speed up that process.

This reporting comes just a day after Trump announced his plans to seize control of Washington, D.C.’s police force in an invocation of Section 740 of the D.C. Home Rule Act of 1973. He threatened increased police force and presence to “clean up” homeless people and “slums,” and also announced the deployment of 800 National Guardsmen into the city.

Trump is weaponizing the military on his own whims, shaping the National Guard into a private, militant police force that answers to him and him only. And it seems like no one can do anything about it. He already sent more than 5,000 Guardsmen and active-duty Marines to California in June to shut down protests against his immigration crackdown.

“You don’t want to normalize routine military participation in law enforcement,” Brennan Center for Justice lawyer Joseph Nunn told the Post. “You don’t want to normalize routine domestic deployment.”

Trump is doing exactly that with this “reaction force,” manufacturing emergencies and inflating crime numbers, all with the end goal of having a branch of the military at his immediate beck and call.

“There is a well-established procedure that exists to request additional assistance during times of need,” Carter Elliot, spokesman for Maryland Governor Wes Moore, told the Post. “And the Trump administration is blatantly and dangerously ignoring that precedent.”

Trump came into office promising to “end inflation.” Three months in, he declared he’d “already solved” it. And yet the new consumer price index report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics suggests, as many expected, that inflation is worsening due to his wild tariff policy.

The agency—fresh off Trump’s ouster of its commissioner on preposterous allegations of political bias (for poor July jobs numbers)—reported Tuesday that inflation rose 0.2 percent in July on a month-over-month basis, and 2.7 percent year-over-year.

The “core” measure of underlying inflation (excluding volatile food and energy prices) shows inflation rose 0.3 since last month and 3.1 percent since last year.

The numbers are roughly in line with last month’s increases, as well as with forecasts for this month’s numbers. But it shows the country isn’t getting any closer to the Fed’s target 2 percent inflation.

Just 11 days earlier, the president fired BLS Commissioner Erika McEntarfer for a jobs report that reflected poorly on the president. On Monday, he announced her successor: E.J. Antoni, an economist at the Heritage Foundation and a contributor to the conservative think tank’s notorious Project 2025. Antoni has long criticized BLS methodology.

On Truth Social, Trump indicated that his new pick will produce statistics that reflect favorably on his administration, the truth notwithstanding. “Our Economy is booming,” he wrote, “and E.J. will ensure that the Numbers released are HONEST and ACCURATE.”

Trump’s team is sure to try painting the data released Tuesday (which, a BLS spokesperson told NBC prior to its release, was unaffected by McEntarfer’s removal) in a positive light, despite it indicating that his tariffs are burdening American consumers.

But going forward, not only Trump’s spin, but the numbers themselves will warrant scrutiny. The agency’s prospective head, after all, is a MAGA loyalist on the record as saying “tariffs, by definition, cannot be inflationary.”

This story has been updated.

Anyone can submit tips to help the Texas GOP catch state Democratic lawmakers.

The Republican Party has turned to the Department of Public Safety to help it rein in liberal state representatives who fled Texas to avoid a vote intended to redistrict the Lone Star State.

Texas House Speaker Duston Burrows revealed Monday that Republicans had tasked DPS to create a tip line—(866) 786-5972, incidentally the same number as the Texas Department of Criminal Justice’s Fusion Center—hoping that average citizens would help them hunt the wayward lawmakers.

“Many have submitted tips about the whereabouts of absent members,” Burrows said Monday. “For example, over the weekend, we received word of a rally in Fort Worth where a couple of absent members were allegedly making an appearance. We took this as actionable intelligence, and DPS was dispatched immediately.

“Although in this instance, members did not end up being physically present at the event, we will keep following every credible lead until these members return,” he added.

Texas Republicans have dutifully responded to Donald Trump’s demand that the party create five new right-wing seats ahead of the midterm elections. State conservatives unveiled their new House maps last week, proposing to practically eviscerate historically Democratic districts.

State Democrats absconded the state in order to avoid the vote. The party began fundraising late last month to offset the $500-a-day fines they’ll incur as a result. (Texas House rules prevent lawmakers from using their campaign funds to cover the fines, which were imposed in 2023 after an unsuccessful attempt to stop a Republican-led overhaul of the state’s election laws.)

Burrows promised that the absent Democrats would be the ones footing the DPS’s bill as the agency works to capture them.

“We are keeping receipts for every gallon of gas, every mile traveled, and every hour of overtime associated with the pursuit of these missing members,” Burrows said. “Under Rule 5, Section 3 of the House Rules, those breaking quorum will be held financially responsible for the cost they’ve created, not the taxpayers.”

Over the last several days, the Texas House has sued 33 Democrats in Illinois and six in California, with more on the way.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s Monday remarks about the deployment of troops on the streets of Washington, D.C., may have already harmed the Trump administration in its legal battle over the deployment of troops on the streets of Los Angeles.

Monday marked the beginning of a three-day trial in which California is making the case that Hegseth and the Trump administration violated the Posse Comitatus Act—an 1878 federal law forbidding the use of the military for civilian law enforcement purposes—during its crackdown on L.A. protests against its immigration agenda.

During a Monday press conference on Trump’s federal takeover of D.C., Hegseth announced that the National Guard will be “flowing into the streets of Washington in the coming week” and that “there are other units we are prepared to bring in—other National Guard units, other specialized units.

“They will be strong, they will be tough, and they will stand with their law enforcement partners,” Hegseth said. And “this is nothing new for DOD,” he added. “In Los Angeles, we did the same thing, working with the California National Guard, working with ICE officers.”

The comments apparently caught the ears of those hoping to prove that Hegseth unlawfully deployed troops in Los Angeles.

According to journalist Adam Klasfeld of the legal affairs publication All Rise, California’s attorney on Monday moved to enter Hegseth’s announcement of National Guard deployment—and, specifically, his comments about the troops “stand[ing] with their law enforcement partners” and having done “the same thing” in L.A.—into evidence.

Hegseth’s comments were ultimately admitted by the judge, Klasfeld reports, despite the Trump administration objecting on the grounds that they were not already on the exhibit list. The judge reportedly observed that the remarks could not have been included on the exhibit list previously, considering they just happened.

This is apparently the sort of mishap that occurs when one doesn’t wait for their potential military occupation of one city to play out in court before moving on to the next.

Washington, D.C., Mayor Muriel Bowser does not think President Trump’s hostile takeover of the D.C. Police Department is a “disaster.”

The mayor held a press conference on Monday after Trump announced he’d be invoking Section 740 of the D.C. Home Rule Act of 1973, kicking off an aggressive crackdown that gives him temporary control over the nation’s capital. He has also activated the National Guard.

“When you testified to Congress after the 2020 racial justice protests, when there was concern that Trump might take control over MPD at that time, that that would be a ‘complete disaster’ and that you were worried that you were gonna lose control of the city,’” a reporter asked Bowser, “can you reflect on this moment today? Do you feel that you’re at risk of losing control of the city? Are you worried this is going to be a complete disaster?”

Bowser offered a mild, diplomatic answer, which she had done many times up to that point in the press conference.

“I’m gonna work every day to make sure it’s not a complete disaster, let me put it that way,” Bowser replied, refusing to directly condemn the decision.

“And I think that with [Metropolitan Police] Chief Smith’s leadership and her expertise in both the federal space and the local space, we are gonna do our level best … to maintain the trust that D.C. residents have in us,” she continued. “What could be a disaster is if we lose communities who won’t call the police. That could be a disaster. What would be a disaster is if communities won’t talk to the police if a crime has been committed, and could help solve that crime. That could be a disaster. It could be a disaster if people who aren’t committing crimes are antagonized into committing crimes. That would be a disaster. So we’re gonna work every day to … get this emergency put to an end, I’ll call it the so-called emergency. And continue to do our work. And at the same time, make sure … we don’t want [the National Guard’s] time to be wasted.”

Bowser also told reporters that she had only expected Trump to announce his calling in of the National Guard, not to invoke Section 740 to take over the Metropolitan Police Department. However, she downplayed the level of control that Trump would levy over the MPD, stating that officers would continue to answer to Smith, even as Trump and Attorney General Pam Bondi just very aggressively stated the opposite earlier that same morning.

“MPD reports to the chief of police, and they are subject to D.C. local laws as well as federal laws,” Bowser replied, when asked if MPD would comply with a different set of federal rules during the takeover. She also noted that she would defer to President Trump in regard to what constitutes an “emergency” situation.

“I’ll end by saying this … we know the tools that are available to the district if we have or are experiencing a surge in crime. And I put them in place before, including curfews. I’ve asked the Council to pass the emergency legislation, I’ve asked the Congress for additional funds. We’ve done all of those things. So there’s nobody here, and certainly nobody who works for me, who wants to tolerate any level of crime.”

What could have been a strong, pointed statement in the face of an authoritarian overreach was more of a timid announcement of cooperation on Bowser’s part. And while Bowser’s continued calls for D.C. statehood were all well and good, they did little to address the immediate concern that the nation’s capital—very much not experiencing a crime epidemic—will be overrun with aggressive police who only answer to Trump.

On Monday, Representative Doug LaMalfa of California became the latest Republican to face furious constituents, at an in-person town hall in Chico.

Many Republicans haven’t held such events for months—GOP leaders advised lawmakers to avoid them earlier this year—so the handful who’ve decided to break the advised embargo in recent weeks have endured fierce confrontations with their constituents.

But LaMalfa hasn’t appeared in Chico for an in-person town hall for much longer than that: Before Monday, it had reportedly been eight years since his previous one in town, as Chico City Councilmember Katie Hawley noted early in the event. At that point, LaMalfa had already been berated by the audience, including with shouts of “No fascism in America!” and “You need to be impeached!”

Hawley remarked, “If Chico City Council was a public event only once every eight years, I think we would have a room exactly like this.” She continued, “The less frequently you show up and have town halls like this, I believe that the harder it will be to facilitate the conversations.”

Throughout the event, LaMalfa faced raucous jeers, as well as tough questions and criticisms.

One resident, who identified himself as the son of Holocaust survivors, said, “People being kidnapped without arrest warrants, without trial, without recourse, by the president of the United States’s ICE armies is clear evidence of how a fascist, authoritarian government works. We are not headed toward an authoritarian fascist government; we are already there.”

Another resident called Trump’s spending plan (the so-called “one, big beautiful bill”) the “big bullshit bill” and was chastised by LaMalfa for their language. “Fuck you!” replied several in attendance.

Multiple people voiced concerns about SNAP and Medicaid cuts under the plan—with one pointing out that people in the area depend on those services to “help keep them alive.” Another common cause of concern was Israel’s war on Gaza, on which LaMalfa maintained a staunch, pro-Israel stance.

Trump’s efforts to defund PBS and NPR also elicited outrage from the attendees. LaMalfa responded to one such comment with, “Well, the people have many, many choices to receive media,” only to be met with resounding boos.

Another resident expressed concern about Trump’s tariffs. “Article 1, Section 8 talks about the power of Congress to regulate foreign trade,” he said. “It doesn’t say anything about the president unilaterally creating tariffs.”

Several in attendance also registered their worries about public education under Trump. LaMalfa, for his part, suggested that the more pressing issue regarding public schools is that they need “to be focused on what the children really need”—the so-called three R’s: reading, writing, and arithmetic—instead of on “ancillary things” like “climate change” and “LGB.”

A particularly interesting question came toward the tail end of the event, when a resident asked if LaMalfa supports the ongoing GOP attempt to gerrymander Texas in order to tilt Congress in his party’s favor. The move has led California Democrats to propose retaliatory redistricting that could possibly sound the death knell for LaMalfa’s political career.

“Texas shouldn’t be doing that,” LaMalfa said. “California shouldn’t be doing this. This is going to start a grass fire all across the country. Every single state will try to change it based on a political outcome.”

Same-sex marriage could soon be back on the Supreme Court docket.

Kim Davis, the Kentucky county clerk who was jailed in 2015 for refusing to issue same-sex marriage licenses, is appealing her case. Davis is appealing a $100,000 jury verdict for emotional damages plus $260,000 for attorneys’ fees, reported ABC News Monday.

In a petition filed last month, Davis claimed that her First Amendment rights protecting her religious freedom effectively immunized her from repercussions for denying the licenses.

“The mistake must be corrected,” Davis’s attorney Mathew Staver argued in the petition, further condemning Justice Anthony Kennedy’s majority opinion in Obergefell v. Hodges as “legal fiction.”

“This court should revisit and reverse Obergefell for the same reasons articulated in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Center,” reads one titled portion, under which Staver claims that “Obergefell was wrong when it was decided and it is wrong today because it was grounded entirely on the legal fiction of substantive due process.”

Staver’s argument alluded to Justice Clarence Thomas’s concurring opinion in Dobbs, which overturned the nationwide right to abortion established in Roe v. Wade. In his 2022 opinion, Thomas argued that the court “should reconsider” its substantive due process precedents, including contraception, same-sex marriage, and even same-sex relationships.

Davis served six days in jail for refusing to issue the licenses. Her appeal marks the first time that the nation’s highest judiciary has been formally asked to reconsider the landmark decision.

“If there ever was a case of exceptional importance,” Staver wrote, “the first individual in the Republic’s history who was jailed for following her religious convictions regarding the historic definition of marriage, this should be it.”

Gay marriage was effectively legalized in 2015, when the Supreme Court ruled in Obergefell that keeping marriage licenses from same-sex couples was discriminatory. The decision mandated that all states issue licenses to gay and lesbian couples, and required states to recognize marriages performed in other jurisdictions, as well.

Marriage equality was further protected at the federal level in 2022, when the Respect for Marriage Act became law, requiring all 50 states to recognize same-sex marriages performed in other states. It did not, however, formally legalize gay marriage, so if the Supreme Court were to take up Davis’s case and overturn Obergefell, gay marriage rights would fall with it.

Roughly 69 percent of Americans support same-sex marriages, according to a 2024 Gallup poll. Republican support for gay couples’ equal rights has dipped in recent years, however, from a record high of 55 percent in favor of it in 2021 to 46 percent in 2024.

President Trump’s takeover of Washington, D.C., was directly inspired by the homeless people he saw from his motorcade window on the way to his golf course.

“We’re having a News Conference tomorrow in the White House. I’m going to make our Capital safer and more beautiful than it ever was before. The Homeless have to move out, IMMEDIATELY. We will give you places to stay, but FAR from the Capital,” Trump wrote Sunday on Truth Social, attaching four pictures to his post.

Two of the photos showed a total of about 10 tents on the side of the road near a highway ramp The Guardian identified as about a mile from the White House. One picture showed a person sleeping on the steps of the American Institute of Pharmacy Building on Constitution Avenue. And another was a picture of some trash in the E Street Expressway by the Kennedy Center.

This is the route the president takes to his frequent outings to his Trump National Golf Club in Virginia.

On Monday, Trump unfortunately made good on his threat, announcing that he plans to send the National Guard into Washington, D.C., and invoke Section 740 of the D.C. Home Rule Act of 1973, a rare move granting 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.”

While Trump spent much of the press conference focusing on what he thinks is a crime epidemic, he also emphasized his plans for D.C.’s “beautification.”

“We’re going to be removing homeless encampments from all over our parks, our beautiful, beautiful parks, which now a lot of people can’t walk on. They’ve been very, very dirty, very, a lot of problems, but we’ve already started that. We’re moving the encampments away, trying to take care of people, some of those people, we don’t know how they even got there, some of those people from different countries, different parts of the world,” Trump opined. “Nobody knows who they are. They have no idea. But they’re there getting rid of the people from underpasses and public spaces from all over the city.”

While every city in America could be cleaner, Trump’s version of “beautification” is forcibly removing homeless people so he doesn’t have to see them on his way to go play golf.

Donald Trump on Monday seemed to forget the location of his upcoming summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin—once again raising concerns about the cognitive ability of the 79-year-old president.

The president had announced the summit, which will take place in Alaska, in a Truth Social post Friday. “The highly anticipated meeting between myself, as President of the United States of America, and President Vladimir Putin, of Russia, will take place next Friday, August 15, 2025, in the Great State of Alaska,” Trump wrote.

But on Monday, the president, twice, erroneously claimed the summit would take place in Russia. The mistake came during a press conference where Trump discussed a nonexistent crime wave in Washington, D.C. The fictitious scourge, he said, harms America’s reputation on the world stage.

“It’s embarrassing for me to be up here, you know,” the president said. “I’m going to see Putin. I’m going to Russia,” he continued, putting particular emphasis, amid otherwise soft-spoken and listless remarks, on the name of the incorrect country.

Trump repeated the error later, suggesting it wasn’t just a misstatement but a memory lapse. “It’s going to be a big thing,” the president said. “We’re going to Russia. It’s going to be a big deal.”

As Trump has grown older, he’s shown an increasing propensity for such gaffes, be that forgetting names of people, forgetting where is, or, recently, forgetting actions he took during his first term, such as appointing Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell or signing a 2020 trade deal.

When Trump first announced his meeting with Putin in Alaska, critics spoke out against the choice of location, with some observing that hardline Russian nationalists have long called for Russia to retake Alaska, which the U.S. purchased in 1867.

Criticizing Trump last week for his perceived tendency to cave to Putin, commentator David Frum wrote on X, “Let’s all hope that Putin doesn’t ask to take Alaska home with him as a souvenir, or Trump might give that away too.” With Trump’s Monday slip-up, many on social media were quick to joke that the president had, in a way, accidentally done just that.