UPDATED: Donald Trump said Monday that he was deploying the National Guard in Washington, D.C. and placing the city’s Metropolitan Police under federal control.
Portraying the capital city as a crime-ridden hellhole, Trump told reporters that the city “is becoming a situation of complete and total lawlessness.”
“We’re taking our capital back,” Trump said.
Attorney General Pam Bondi will oversee the city’s police department. She was present along with Jeanine Pirro, the former Fox News host, FBI director Kash Patel, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum.
While there is a crime problem in D.C., and while stats are meaningless to victims, the rate actual fell last year, per the Metropolitan Police, with violent crime down 26%.
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Trump also has announced efforts to clean up the city and rid the area of homeless encampments, and said the city would no longer be a sanctuary for illegal aliens.
Even before Trump’s announcement, which was expected, Democrats cast it as an effort to change the subject from a sputtering economy and continued inflation, as well as the Jeffrey Epstein scandal. And as the president has tried to characterize himself as a president of law and order, opponents point to his pardoning of those who stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6, including those who attacked police officers.
Trump posited cases of suspects spitting on cops, and said that the federalized D.C. police force will be able to do “whatever the hell they want.”
As Trump spoke, protesters were gathered on 16th Street, near Lafayette Park, singing “D.C. is our home. You can’t have it Trump.” In the 2024 election, Kamala Harris received 90% of the district vote compared to Trump. The president also has created further dismay among city residents with the mass layoffs of federal workers, which has been a gut punch to the region’s economy.
The president’s action is his latest effort to exert more control over D.C. and its institutions in his second term. He ousted Biden-appointed board members of the Kennedy Center and ensured that he was named chairman, while ousting the Librarian of Congress and paving over the grass lawn near the White House Rose Garden.
Trump controls the National Guard in the city, and he cited a provision in the Home Rule Act in federalizing the city’s police department.
Trump’s action follows some high-profile incidents, including the assault of a staffer for the Department of Government Efficiency during a carjacking.
Trump’s press conference today was carried by major news networks, with coverage also on local network broadcast stations. MSNBC broke away at one point for commentary, but returned when the president took reporters’ questions.
In his remarks, Trump decried a “sick woke culture,” as he referred to the toppling of statues following the killing of George Floyd in 2020. The protests near Lafayette Park beset the area near the White House for about a week, with a fence barrier erected around the grounds.
Trump also said that it was essential to clean up the streets — from sidewalks to medians — to make a show to foreign leaders and tourists on their visit.
District of Columbia Mayor Muriel Bowser did not challenge Trump’s authority to deploy troops or to take over the Metropolitan police. But she challenged his depiction of the city as one where crime was spiraling out of control, pointing to statistics showing falling rates. She suggested that the president’s characterizations were outdated to the Covid era, when violent crime was on the upswing.
“While this action today is unsettling and unprecedented, I can’t say that, given some of the rhetoric of the past, we’re totally surprised,” she said. She also pledged to coordinate with Trump administration officials as they exapnd the federal presence.
Trump’s deployment of the National Guard follows his federalizing of troops in June in Los Angeles, as protests broke out over his administration’s ICE raids.
He also signaled that he planned to take action in other cities, including Chicago, with his actions in D.C. as a model.
“Maybe they will self clean up; maybe they will self do this,” Trump said, while he also cited cities with cashless bail.
As he tends to do, during his press conference, Trump veered off into other topics, including transgender men playing in women’s sports, and that the 2020 election was “rigged,” adding fuel to Democrats’ argument that his press conference was an attention ploy.
“Trump is testing his ability to take over entire cities with military force. This is terrible federal overreach,” the Democratic National Committee said in an X post.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s press office posted on X, “Washington, DC — here’s what you can expect now that the president wants to cosplay as dictator in your city, too: Soldiers sitting around with nothing to do; Lies from all levels of the federal government; No meaningful impact.”
Rep. Eleanor Holmes Norton, who represents the district in Congress but does not have a vote, said that the president’s action was “an historic assault on D.C. home rule, is a counterproductive, escalatory seizure of D.C.’s resources to use for purposes not supported by D.C. residents, and is more evidence of the urgent need to pass my D.C. statehood bill.”
The DC Police Union said that it supported Trump’s move, with chairman Gregg Pemberton saying that the district “cannot continue on this trajectory. Crime is out of control, and our officers are stretched beyond their limits. The federal intervention is a critical stopgap, but the MPD needs proper staffing and support to thrive. This can only happen by repealing the disastrous policies that have driven out our best officers and hindered recruitment.” While the union welcomed Trump’s federal takeover as a “sort-term measure,” they said that “it must not replace local control and accountability.”
