Trump’s Political Theater Won’t Save D.C.

0:00David French:Gun injuries are the leading cause of death for children and teens in the United States. Some people avoid talking about gun violence because they don't think they can make a difference. But every conversation matters. When it comes to gun violence, we agree on more than we think. And having productive conversations about gun violence can help protect children and teens. Learn how to have the conversation at AgreedToAgree.org. Brought to you by the Ad Council. This is The Opinions, a show that brings you a mix of voices from New York Times opinion. You've heard the news. Here's what to make of it.

0:45David French:I'm Michelle Cottle, and I cover national politics for New York Times Opinion. And I am here today with my fantastic colleagues, columnists David French and Jamel Bowie. Guys, welcome. Hi, Michelle. Hello, hello. All right, so this, sadly, is our last roundtable of the summer. Before we all scooch off to exotic locales or at least a little bit of beach reading, how are we all feeling?

1:10Jamelle Bouie:You know, other than the bad things happening in the world, I feel pretty good.

1:15Michelle Cottle:There's a way in my family that we talk about that when someone says, how are you doing? The answer is personally, great. Politically, uh.

1:23David French:You know what? I'm going to steal that. I like that. Personally, rocking. Well, before we vanish, this week, we're going to talk about President Trump's deployment of the National Guard in my backyard and his taking control of Washington, D.C.'s metro police force. Trump claims he's doing this because of a public safety emergency here in the district, though, in fact, violent crime is at a 30-year low. But I have lived here for more than 30 years. I am well aware of Washington's long-term crime issues. And you know what's not going to help? Cheap political theater. So there's a lot to get into here.

2:06David French:But first, the requisite timestamp. We're recording this on Wednesday morning. So all this news is still fresh. People are trying to figure things out. The situation is fluid. So who knows? By the time this reaches your ears, Trump may have indeed saved Washington from what he has called our bloodshed, bedlam, and squalor. So let's get to it. First, I want first reactions to this. Jamel, kick us off.

2:32Jamelle Bouie:My first reaction, I guess, comes in three parts. The first part, as you pointed out, there is no public safety emergency in Washington, D.C. Crime is, as you said, at a 30-year low. At least violent crime is. Violent crime is a 30-year low. I think actually it's worth emphasizing about that is that most of these troops are deployed to areas surrounding the White House, National Mall, downtown, so on and so forth. But when you actually, if you were to make like a heat map of criminal activity in Washington, D.C., you would find that it is not in those places, right? That if you're going to do this, you would put soldiers in other places.

3:09Jamelle Bouie:And this gets to, I think, a reality about crime that's important to understand. Most violent crime especially happens in specific discrete geographic areas among specific individuals, right? It is not the case either in DC or New York or wherever that you are particularly likely to be the victim of like random violent crime. What is the case is that people in networks where there are people who do violent crime are more likely than not to be victims of violent crime. And so when you begin to like actually understand like the social geography of crime, as well as the physical geography of crime.

3:42Jamelle Bouie:All this makes even less sense as a measure. Second part, I think this is a sign of the president's weakness. I think that a president who is capable of doing anything like ordinary negotiation, compromise, deliberation, would not be leaning on this or leaning on emergency powers in general. But the third thing is that the fact that the president, I think, is actually quite weak in a lot of ways should not diminish the fact that this is quite dangerous and that he has announced his intention to do this kind of thing in other cities, which is, I think a pretty profound violation of basic ideas about power in the United States that go back to even before the founding.

4:20David French:David, is this even legal?

4:22Michelle Cottle:Yeah, that's a great question. The answer is probably, we'll see. So the probably part is that, look, the president has more authority over the National Guard in Washington, D.C. than anywhere else, more inherent automatic authority. The Guard is under his direct control, whereas in the States, The Guard is under the control of the governors unless the Guard is federalized. Here, you don't have to really go through that step. Also, there's been sort of a longstanding DOJ position that the Guard can be used more for law enforcement purposes in D.C. than it can, say, in other places without violating the Posse Comitatus Act, which is this post-Reconstruction law prohibiting the use of federal troops for law enforcement.

5:04Michelle Cottle:However, a lot of these things are just theories. A lot of this is untested because presidents have historically been really reluctant to call out the troops. Now we've seen him do this at the border. We've seen him do this in Los Angeles. And the legal authorities for doing all of this are, in many cases, pretty ambiguous. So the concepts are not fully tested in court, but if he can do it anywhere in America, he can do it in D.C. So I think the legal attack on this is probably going to fail. More interesting question also is the federalization, putting under federal control the D.C. Police Department.

5:44Michelle Cottle:Again, D.C. is not a normal city. This is one that is, there's a Home Rule Act, but ultimately, ultimately Congress is responsible for D.C. And so there's much more leeway and flexibility in taking control of this local police department, but that's not supposed to happen. After 30 days, there has to be congressional authorization. Now, of course, Jamel and Michelle, this Congress will absolutely stand up to this president. No, of course not. So how much will that really matter in the real world? So what we're dealing with here is a very carefully chosen city for this intervention.

6:19Jamelle Bouie:Can I just add real quick in terms of the D.C. being carefully chosen? And it's also a city for which the president's reliance on tropes about crime and dystopian crime and all these things, I think, is not only more effective, but like there might be a more willing audience for it. For the simple reason that D.C. has been known for a long time as being a majority black city. It's not quite majority black anymore. I think it's like just under half. But it has this identity. And that identity, I think, is very much a part of the president's demonization of D.C., demonization of D.C. as kind of a John Carpenter-esque hellscape, demonization of the residents of D.C.

7:01Jamelle Bouie:as essentially incapable of self-government. Like, it plugs into longstanding tropes about the ability of Black Americans to exist in mainstream society, to put it in the most sterile way I possibly can.

7:17David French:Yeah, I mean, nothing melts Trump's butter quite like the chance to militarize things, but he is hardly the first Republican to play politics with the city. I mean, the district has been a favorite target for years. Nixon liked to hate on D.C. And I do think you're right about, and I like the way you put it, the most sterile way you can put it, but there's also just his tendency to demonize all things Washington. I think at this point, you know, you can look at how people responded to tens of thousands of federal government employees having their jobs threatened or taken away. You know, plenty of people were like, oh, that's great.

7:56David French:They deserve it. Deep state, blah, blah, blah. They pretend that Washington, D.C. is some kind of, you know, hellscape, as you put it, that needs to have somebody come in and just bulldoze it, which makes the rest of the country a little bit more likely to be like, meh, whatever.

8:16Jamelle Bouie:I'll say what is interesting is there hasn't been much polling, but the one poll I've seen on this has 47 % of Americans disapproving of this action. And it's like 34 or 35 % saying that they're okay with it. So I think, you know, thinking about the political aspect of this and to go back to our conversation earlier in the summer about L.A., I think I argued then that the public doesn't like disorder. And when the president does things like this, it creates the impression that there is disorder, that the president is responsible for it. And I think that that dynamic might assert itself here as well.

8:51David French:Yeah, David, you can also address the kind of broader view of this. But I think one of the issues is that D.C. has long had a problem in terms of how it deals with crime. And when you have a couple of high-profile issues that Trump can take, like, I think this was all provoked, right? Because a member of the administration got his butt kicked at 3 a.m. by a group of people in a fairly popular area in a part of D.C. considered safer than others, right?

9:26Jamelle Bouie:Can we say big balls on here?

9:28David French:Okay. I was waiting for someone to breach that wall. An administration official, a young man whose nickname is Big Balls, was jumped and Trump completely freaked out. So now here we are with, I think the National Guard has been dispatched on the National Mall because that's where the problem is. I mean, I live in a very safe neighborhood. I keep waiting for them to come secure my street from like the porch pirate who occasionally will steal my Amazon packages. But anyway, I digress here. Yeah.

10:00Michelle Cottle:Here's one thing, one caution I would add. Yes, crime in D.C. is at a 30-year low, violent crime in D.C. is at a 30-year low, but it's still a pretty violent city relative to other U.S. cities. And there's also a lot of people, especially if you are not used to and have not seen the improvement in D.C., especially since the pandemic, that sometimes if you come from other cities, that what you'll sort of see in that kind of low-level disorder category in D.C. can be pretty shocking to people who are not used to it. And so I think one mistake that people can make here is to sort of say, you know, look, he's doing this and D.C.'s fine.

10:39Michelle Cottle:D.C.'s fine. I don't think we should say D.C.'s fine, but what we should say is D.C. is improving substantially. And this is not the way you achieve further improvements. And this is, I think, a consistent pattern in dealing with Trump. Often people will look at an institution or a place that he's attacking. and there's this instinct to rally completely to its defense. Well, sometimes these institutions do have problems. They do need reform. It's just not his reform. And what happened to our friend Big Balls was terrible. That was terrible. That should not happen. That's awful. But then to say about that incident that that is then the pretext, that's the instigating incident for bringing in the guard, You know, what this reminds me of is that it's not so much that Trump is tough on crime, it's really that he really wants to be tough on his enemies.

11:36Michelle Cottle:And that is a different thing than being tough on crime. Because being tough on crime requires a lot more intelligent thought. It's a lot harder than calling in this National Guard and plopping them on the mall.

11:48David French:Jamel, that speaks to your point about him not being able to actually govern or... Right.

11:54Jamelle Bouie:I have many thoughts. I think that to David's point about the real problems that DC has and questions of public disorder, I think part of the problem is one ought to make a conceptual separation between public disorder and crime. A homelessness problem isn't a crime problem. It's a housing cost problem. It's a private problem. It's a social services problem. But it's not a crime problem. It may, in some acute circumstances, produce criminal activity, but it's not primarily a crime problem. And what I push against is the conflation of all these things into crime for two reasons. One, that makes it harder to solve.

12:36Jamelle Bouie:Even if you were inclined to give the president the benefit of the doubt here, once you take the view that this is a question of like bedlam and lawlessness, then that leans toward these sorts of militaristic responses versus things that are much more attuned to the actual problems at hand. It's worth noting that D.C.'s neighbor, Baltimore, they've sliced their murder rate in half. And that was in part a product of better and smarter policing. And it was in part a product of like really investing in social services and doing the kind of hard work it takes to identify the communities and the people.

13:11Jamelle Bouie:And I say communities, I mean like the blocks, right? Like neighborhoods. And the people, the individuals who are, you might describe as criminogenic, right? Like more likely to spread crime. And kind of addressing those people and those places in a specific and targeted way. And so I think when you conflate disorder, however you want to, whatever you want to include in that. And I'll say something that, it seems like some of the people include in that just sort of like the ambient noise of cities. I'm just like lots of humanity together. And I think that's also why I'm often kind of like.

13:42David French:Trump doesn't want to live in a real city. He wants to live in Mar-a-Lago where everything is painted gold.

13:47Jamelle Bouie:I'm often kind of like, let's figure out what we're talking. Like when you say disorder, do you mean visible homelessness? Do you mean seeing a drug needle on the street a problem? Or do you mean homelessness a problem, visible homelessness as well? Or do you mean like working class black people walking around, right? Like what do you mean here? And I think it's important to maybe to force people to specify what they mean when discussing this, but also recognizing that Congress and the administration has been quite hostile to providing D.C. with the kind of resources it needs to, like, address these problems.

14:23Jamelle Bouie:So it's all theater for the sake of a president who, as David says, wants to punish his enemies and a president who, like, imagines himself as a strong man doing strong man things.

14:36Michelle Cottle:Well, and I'm glad you brought up Baltimore because the Baltimore story is a remarkable story. And it does not involve the U.S. Army. Right. It is a year-on-year crime drop that's the stuff of dreams almost. It's really amazing. And Jamel, I think that you raise a very good point. There is a difference between crime and disorder, although I think people experience disorder when people experience it is often very deeply unsettling.

14:59Jamelle Bouie:Yeah.

14:59Michelle Cottle:And they often feel like that crime is about to happen when they're in the presence of disorder. And I think that's a very good point taken. But I think that it's very important to get the word out and to get the message out to American people that A, blue cities are taking crime very seriously and B, they're actually achieving results, that good things are happening in these cities because Trump thrives off the sense that nobody is doing anything until I came aboard.

15:30David French:So just like Jamel has his hobby horses, One of my hobby horses is the long tail of the pandemic and how people just thought it was going to snap me all over. So I know in D.C. in particular, the pandemic was devastating for the youth population. And one of the things that Trump has complained about is the youth crime rate in the city. Well, what happened is the pandemic wound up with all these kids on the street, out of school, nowhere to go, lots of trouble to get into. and it took a while for the city to catch up and figure out what to do about that. And so you've seen, I think, the problem spiked in 2023, and we've been watching it go back down as they try to address what is a very real, very complicated problem that people just, you know, didn't realize was going to last as long as it did post-pandemic.

16:28Michelle Cottle:and when, Michelle, did the massive, massive crime spike, murder spike in particular occur in the United States during Trump's first term in 2020 when he was president. And so the murder rate absolutely spiked in Trump's last year of his presidency. And big cities and American state and local and federal governments have been struggling to get it under control since. But if you look at the arc, It's moving in very strongly positive ways. And that started during the Biden administration. He inherited an absolute crime disaster from Trump 1.0. So the sort of idea that Trump is the guy who can fix crime, the last American crime disaster occurred under Trump.

17:17Jamelle Bouie:The thing that I have a sense that we want to move on, but the last thing I'll say about this, I think this is a very good point, is that in addition to militarization being like not particularly helpful when it comes to dealing with problems of crime and disorder, it's also the case that Trump's entire rhetoric of cities, opposing them as, again, these housecapes, these dystopian places, these inherently dangerous places, I think can contribute to attitudes among law enforcement that make dealing with crime more difficult. Like part of what you need in dealing with violent crime are relationships between the communities that are affected and law enforcement.

17:56Jamelle Bouie:There has to be a degree of trust between these people. Otherwise, if there is no trust, you're not going to go to a detective and say, hey, this happened and I know it involved this person. If the president of the United States is spreading paranoia and distrust about these cities and these communities, then I think, you know, I feel like I sound like a 90s-style conservative here. I think that that kind of rhetoric has a downstream effect on the culture of the country. And in this specific case, in the culture of law enforcement, which already isn't great, right? Like, well-known fact, culture of American law enforcement could be better.

18:39Jamelle Bouie:And this doesn't help.

18:40David French:So we cannot say that we weren't warned that this would happen. I mean, by Trump himself, he's long been open about his desire to deploy the military against Americans, you know, whether to suppress protest, fight crime, whatever has annoyed him that morning. And he is raring to blur the lines between law enforcement and the military, ostensibly in the name of public safety and order. But looking at this even beyond the sea, where he's trying, what are the risks of where he's going?