THE D.C. CRACKDOWN IS PROBABLY ABOUT THE MIDTERMS -- AND ALSO ABOUT TRUMP'S YOUTH

I'm back. Thanks, Yas, for some very smart posts while I was away.

In the past couple of days, President Trump began the process of turning Washington, D.C., into an occupied territory. Trump's D.C. crackdown is based on his gut sense that Washington is a crime-ridden hellhole ("Our capital city has been overtaken by violent gangs and bloodthirsty criminals, roving mobs of wild youth, drugged out maniacs and homeless people"), even though statistics make clear that crime has plunged in the District since the early 1990s, and hit a 30-year low in 2024, according to the Justice Department.

But Trump and other Fox-addled Republicans believe in anecdotes, not statistics -- particularly anecdotes that are looped and endlessly repeated on Fox.

He saw a black guy break a window on Fox and the network reaired the footage 300 times so Trump thinks there’s an epidemic of blacks gone wild breaking windows. This is literally how he comes up with “policy.”

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— Oliver Willis (@owillis.bsky.social) August 12, 2025 at 7:55 AM

I think Trump also has a weird nostalgia for the high-crime 1980s and early 1990s. I think he romanticizes that era, much the way American Psycho does, in both novel and film form.

Trump's feelings about the crime statistics during the era when he was a cash-flashing chick magnet are basically the same as your feelings about the bands you loved when you were fifteen. He just doesn't want to hear about anything that's happened since then.

— Steve M. (@stevemnomoremister.bsky.social) August 12, 2025 at 8:10 AM

Trump romanticizes that era of higher crime because he thinks it means he was a tough guy for surviving it. (Of course, people who rode limos everywhere they went in that era had close to a 100% survival rate.) I'm sure Trump's rescue fantasies took shape in that era, in between sexual encounters and bad deals. And I'm sure Trump's beliefs about urban violence were developed behind the smoked glass of a limousine, which is still where he does his thinking about cities. On Sunday, The Guardian reported:

In a social media post on Sunday, Donald Trump has demanded homeless residents of Washington DC leave the country’s capital or face eviction....

The post was illustrated with four photographs, all apparently taken from the president’s motorcade along the route from the White House to his golf course. Two of the images showed a total of 10 tents pitched on the grass along a highway on-ramp just over a mile from the White House. The third image showed a single person sleeping on the steps of the American Institute of Pharmacy Building on Constitution Avenue. The fourth image showed the line of vehicles that whisk Trump to his golf course passing a small amount of roadside litter on the E Street Expressway, near the Kennedy Center.

A Politico reporter thinks that's an appropriate way to make policy:

"For the president, this is something that hits home, because he is a visual person and the visuals of him driving to his golf course and seeing those homeless encampments" -- Politico's Dasha Burns puts on a masterclass in Trump sanewashing on Fox News

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— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) August 11, 2025 at 6:59 PM

This is about life as seen from a limousine window, but I think it's also part of the GOP's plan to steal the midterms. Yesterday, Trump promised a widespread militarization of Democratic cities.

President Donald Trump said he might expand his crackdown on crime in the nation's capital to other major U.S. cities as he announced plans to send 800 National Guard troops into Washington, D.C.

Trump singled out New York City, Los Angeles, Baltimore, Chicago and Oakland, California during a Monday, Aug. 11, news conference as potential future targets in what would be a drastic escalation of federal presence on the streets of American cities.

This seems like a variation on a recent policy proposal from Kevin Roberts of the Heritage Foundation, which I wrote about late last month:

Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts urged right-wing state legislators this month to “de-charter” liberal capital cities and replace them with “state municipal districts.” ...

"When we have cities like Austin, or Nashville, or other capital cities whose local government is not representative of the will of the people, de-charter them and establish them as state municipal districts in the name of common sense,” he urged....

Roberts’ justification for this brazen attack on democratic self-governance? He claimed that the biggest threat to the Trump-Vance agenda, which is essentially the Project 2025 agenda promoted by Roberts and Heritage, is “that there are government entities that illegitimately are imposing something other than the American dream on their people.”

Roberts want this done at the state level, in order to remove any risk of a Democratic challenge to permanent one-party rule by the GOP, particularly in his home state of Texas. But Trump seems to be working toward urban disenfranchisement at the federal level, starting the process a year before the midterms. Blue cities in blue and purple states send a lot of Democrats to the House, and provide the votes some Democratic senators need in order to win. A military crackdown that intimidates Democratic voters in big cities could, alongside Texas-style redistricting in red states and a mid-decade census that excludes undocumented residents, reduce the chances that Democrats could gain some power in Washington. (Please don't tell me that the Constitution requires the undocumented to be counted in a national census. I know that. I also know that the Federalist Society Supreme Court will allow Trump to violate this constitutional provision if he decides to do it.)

Trump fantasizes about being America's savior. He also likes the idea of a military occupation in an aesthetic sense -- we know he was hankering for a military parade in his first term and finally got one for his birthday this year, even if it was a flop. But beyond all that, he's trying -- presumably under Heritage Society influence -- to turn America into a "competitive authoritarian" pseudo-democracy, i.e., a democracy that's not competitive at all but has the appearance of competition. He hopes troops in the streets, in D.C. and elsewhere, will make that a reality.