How does this end? Stop Trump's DC takeover before it escalates and spreads
He’s acting out all his fantasies in the capital, and I fear where that may lead.
When Donald Trump said he’d patrol the streets of my city last week with the National Guard and federal law enforcement officers, I rolled my eyes. What a photo op, right?
Imagine it: The commander in chief, surrounded by a phalanx of masked, uniformed agents, looking solemn (or maybe gleeful?), perhaps wearing a bulletproof vest (insert your own super-size joke here) to protect him on the mean streets of Washington, D.C.—in areas like Union Station near the Capitol, Smithsonian museums devoted to history, science and art, and Logan Circle, so scary it even has a Whole Foods.
Alas, it was not to be. Trump merely made a pizza delivery stop at U.S. Park Police headquarters to greet officers from many, many agencies, diverted from their duties to ambush moped delivery people (at least the ones brave enough to go to work these days) and suffer taunts, middle fingers, and a hurled salami sub from infuriated D.C. residents.
This feels increasingly like we’re involuntary participants in some kind of sick remake of the disconcerting 1998 Jim Carrey film, The Truman Show: D.C. as a giant soundstage for Trump to act out every narcissistic, sadistic, autocratic power fantasy he’s ever had, with a huge cast of suck-ups enabling him and cheering him on.
It’s been revealing, to say the least.
“We've had some incredible results that have come out, and it's like a different place. It's like a different city,” Trump said—a blatant lie unless the “difference” he’s talking about is that some neighborhoods feel like they’re under military occupation, people who live and work in them are on edge, and most of the city is angry.
He kept up the drumbeat of lies the next day, telling reporters that “DC was a hellhole and now it’s safe,” and there had been “no murders in DC in the last week. That’s the first time in anybody’s memory that you haven’t had a murder in a week.” Except that current records show it wasn’t. Just this year, CNN reported, “There were no murders reported from May 4 through May 11, April 11 to 17, and a more than two-week-long period from February 25 through March 12.”
But that didn’t stop him. “After only one week, there is NO CRIME AND NO MURDER IN DC,” Trump said Sunday in a nasty, threatening Truth Social post targeting Baltimore, Maryland Gov. Wes Moore, and repair money for “his demolished bridge.”
‘People that will never be any good’
Many of Trump’s remarks are deeply disturbing. This one, from the Park Police confab, stood out: “It's working unbelievably, much faster than we thought. We've arrested hundreds of criminals, hardline criminals, people that will never be any good."
Unbelievable is an appropriate word, though not in the way he meant. D.C. is not in the middle of a crime wave, in fact it has measured a marked decline in violent crime since 2023. And there’s no estimate yet of how many “hardline criminals” have been arrested since Trump’s Aug. 11 executive order on “restoring law and order” in the capital.
NPR quoted an unnamed White House official as saying arrests so far have been about 40 percent immigration-related, but gave no further details. “Outside of immigration enforcement,” local ABC affiliate WJLA reported, “there have been 379 arrests documented. There were more misdemeanors and traffic citations issued than violent crime arrests.”
As for “people that will never be any good,” this is directly contrary to the Trump-MAGA movement’s purported Christian faith, with its Biblical themes of redemption and second chances. I’ll just note that my immediate thought on reading the phrase was, “If the shoe fits.”
That’s another surreal aspect of the D.C. takeover. The self-assigned dictator-in-chief is a serial violator of the law and the Constitution whose moral compass is permanently set at “I’m going to get mine.” That applies to geopolitical enemies and allies, businesses, universities, law firms, pretty much everyone everywhere all at once. For him, D.C.—with no senators, no voting House member, presidential control of its National Guard and congressional control over its laws—is an easy mark.
Some of Trump’s “D.C. domination” (The Trump Show Season 2, if you count Los Angeles as Season 1, with Chicago and New York reportedly up next) is ridiculously, shallowly, theatrically New Yorkish. For instance, you’d think it would be enough for Trump to take over the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, get rid of “woke” board members, weed out “woke” potential Kennedy Center Honors recipients, name himself host of the televised Dec. 7 awards ceremony, and announce last week that the center would host the World Cup draw Dec. 5.
But no, he also suggested (or possibly joked) that he may give the center a new name. “Some people refer to it as the ‘Trump Kennedy Center,’ but we’re not prepared to do that quite yet. Maybe in a week or so,” he said.
Trump is also trying to be an interior decorator, festooning the Oval Office with tasteless golden trinkets and wall mountings ("WalMart Liberace Hoarder chic," as writer Tom Nichols put it); a landscaper who scattered white tables with yellow umbrellas across a paved-over Rose Garden and now is promising to “beautify” DC by making it look like a Trump golf resort (thanks, but no thanks); a developer, adding a new ballroom to the White House; and a contractor, overseeing major and no doubt Trumpy renovations at the (so far still just) Kennedy Center. He’s also trying to be a mayor, with rats, homeless encampments, and what he considers sub-par lightbulbs, asphalt, and grass in his sights.
Courting violence and death
For Trump, it’s all fun, games, and building the brand. For D.C., not so much. I’d wager that the lives of hundreds of hard-working, law-abiding but undocumented immigrants already have been upended if not entirely ruined by the DC crackdown. The capital, already reeling from mass layoffs of federal employees, is now in even more economic distress as nervous restaurant workers and patrons stay away. The military presence could also repel tourists and discourage the school groups that normally flock to the capital to take in its unparalleled monuments and museums.
And then there’s Trump’s constant sabotage, conscious or not. “When people come from Iowa, Indiana, all of the beautiful places … they’re not going to go home in a body bag,” he said the other day. He may think that’s reassuring and welcoming, but it’s not.
So far, in addition to Trump’s callout of the D.C. National Guard, Republican governors from six states—West Virginia, South Carolina, Mississippi, Louisiana, Ohio, and Tennessee—have sent Guard troops at his behest. What we don’t know is how many more states will glom on, how long any of this will last, or how it will all play out.
Trump has a short attention span, which is good news, but he also has a flair and penchant for drama. Anything could happen before he loses interest. Even violence or death.
“We are moving toward a situation that, in many ways, mirrors the afternoon of 4 May 55 years ago in Kent, Ohio,” retired senior CIA intelligence officer Margaret Henoch wrote early last week in an article headlined “In another turbulent time, a president turned to the National Guard.” Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young memorialized what happened then in “Four Dead in Ohio.”
But history and its lessons mean nothing to this president and his team. In his Park Police pep talk Thursday to the federal agents, Trump told them to be strong, be tough, and do “whatever it takes to do your job." A day later, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth authorized National Guard troops to carry guns in DC.
It’s enough to make me wish all of us here, 702,000 strong, could do what Jim Carrey did in The Truman Show: Finally figure out we are living in a make-believe TV program, with actors pretending to care about us, and bust out via a tunnel, a boat, a staircase and a basement door into the real world, where people are free to determine their own fates.
If only.
I see Trump's invasion of D.C. as gasoline and an open flame in the same room. Something awful will happen. But we shouldn't blame Trump. We knew from the start what he was capable of. But because his promises were so outrageous, we never thought it would become our reality. Now he is well into a demented mental state, void of clear thinking and responsibility. The blame lies with his staff and the Republican Party. Instead of utilizing the 25th Amendment, they are egging him on to do more damage. It is obvious that the man needs help, not encouragement. Which makes me wonder where are the Christians who consider Trump their Messiah? For even holy men succumb to injury and illness, and dementia is not the common cold.
People in Beverly Hills; good friends of Donald Trump, have told him that they sleep at night with their mouths open so that the criminals and thieves can simply come in and take their fillings without damaging their veneers. True story!