TANKS ON CITY STREETS AREN'T EFFECTIVE OR POPULAR

I nodded in agreement when I read this post:

The White House is mobilizing red state military forces to occupy a Democratic stronghold and let me tell you: No one has ever pretended something isn't happening harder than Democratic leaders are pretending this isn't happening right now.

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— Brandon Friedman (@brandonfriedman.bsky.social) August 16, 2025 at 9:10 PM

But there has been Democratic pushback to the overall militarization campaign, even from Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer (who actually said there was "No fucking way" Democrats in the Senate would approve an extension of President Trump's 30-day takeover of the D.C. police department).

However, the resistance to this from elected Democrats seems muted -- maybe because elected Democrats generally aren't very good at making noise, and maybe because the "liberal" commentariat is warning that Cities Are Hellholes, Actually. We had Maggie Haberman arguing that "In some cases we have seen [urban crime] come down but there are a lot of people who feel unsafe in big cities." We have Michael Powell in The Atlantic writing that "Trump Gains When Elites Downplay D.C. Crime."

But Democrats shouldn't be afraid to push back because, as Jamelle Bouie says in this New York Times roundtable, Trump's crackdown isn't popular:

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 percent of Americans disapproving of this action, and it’s about 34 or 35 percent saying that they’re OK with it.

That would be this YouGov survey:

Bouie understands why the move is unpopular:

So in 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. 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 dynamic might assert itself here as well.

Yup -- Trump takes action and suddenly there's chaos. Trump equals chaos. That's offputting to normal people (as opposed to Republican voters, who are eating this up).

The initial Democratic counterargument was Trump is just doing this to distract us from the Jeffrey Epstein case. I don't think that's true -- it might explain the timing to some extent, but Trump loves seeing troops under his command in the streets, and this is part of a larger GOP/Heritage Foundation plan to purge liberalism from American life, and probably to tip the results of the 2026 and 2028 elections. A better argument for Democrats to make is that their party is already lowering crime, not by producing made-for-TV-and-viral-video visuals, but by deploying strategies that address the problem directly. Bouie and David French talk about this in the Times roundtable:

Bouie: ... I think it’s worth emphasizing that most of these troops are deployed to areas running the White House, National Mall, downtown, so on and so forth. If you were to make a heat map of criminal activity in Washington, D.C., you would find that it is not in those places. If you were going to do this, you would put soldiers in other places. And this gets to a reality about crime that’s important to understand: Most violent crime happens in specific, discrete geographic areas among specific individuals....

It’s worth noting that D.C.’s neighbor, Baltimore, has cut its murder rate in half year over year. That was partly a result of better and smarter policing, and partly a result of investing in social services and doing the hard work needed to identify the communities and people — when I say communities I mean the blocks, the neighborhoods — and the individuals who might be described as criminogenic, meaning more likely to be involved in crime. Then addressing those people in those places in a specific and targeted way....

French: I’m glad you brought up Baltimore because the Baltimore story is a remarkable story, and it does not involve the U.S. Army....

It’s a year-on-year crime drop that’s the stuff of dreams, almost....

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 he came aboard.

All too often, liberals need conservatives to tell them, Hey, when you're right and the Republicans are wrong, you should say so. This is why I listen to right-wing apostates -- they didn't spend years marinating in self-hate the way so many Democrats have, so now, in the moments when they agree with Democrats and disagree with Republicans, they often urge Democrats to stiffen their spines and stick up for themselves.

Let's also hear from former Washington Post data guy Philip Bump:

Governors of three states — Ohio, South Carolina and West Virginia — are sending members of their state National Guards to D.C. to ... well, theoretically to combat crime but, if the past week is any indicator, mostly to stand near tourist sites and wear uniforms....

Data released by the FBI earlier this month ... shows that a lot of other places — including places in those three states — had higher rates of violent crime and homicide than did D.C....

The FBI reported that fully 43 cities in those three states had higher rates of violent crime in 2024 than did D.C. More than 1.2 million people live in those cities, including more than 900,000 in Ohio alone. Yet that state’s National Guard is being deployed to D.C. to protect the capital’s 700,000-odd residents. Half a million Ohioans live in cities with higher homicide rates than D.C.

Here's the map of violent crime rates. Before you ask what the dots are blah blah, just click through and use the interactive version!

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— Philip Bump (@pbump.com) August 16, 2025 at 11:58 PM

Democrats shouldn't be afraid to say all this forcefully and proudly: Democrats are reducing crime, and we're doing it without militarizing cities, by deploying police officers and other resources to the right areas at the right times -- oh, and by the way, we're doing it with cops and others who aren't afraid to show their faces. Putting troops and a Humvee in front of a famous tourist site makes a pretty picture, but if that's not where the crime is, then it's pointless. Trump isn't fighting crime -- he's making reality television. He's more interested in visuals than safety. He's more interested in acting tough than being effective. And the Republican governors who are working with him really ought to be looking at their own states if they want to reduce crime.

There -- is that so hard?