Trump Is Taking Over D.C. Police Because He's a Racist Thug

[Celerity]

Trump doesn’t care about “crime.” He cares about the right white people being in charge.

https://newrepublic.com/article/199001/trump-dc-takeover-police-racist

https://archive.ph/iO9HL


Flanked by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Attorney General Pam Bondi, Donald Trump delivers a speech during a press conference at the White House, on August 11.

It’s still possible, despite my daily exposure to horrific announcements from the Trump administration, for a White House press conference to make me sick with dread. On August 11, the president announced that he was taking federal control of the police force in Washington, D.C., and deploying the National Guard to its streets. As has become routine, Trump attempted to give legitimacy to his entirely gratuitous actions with executive orders, one declaring a nonexistent “crime emergency” in Washington, the other “restoring law and order” by directing Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to activate the D.C. National Guard. As Trump’s press conference meandered on, various Cabinet members peppered their remarks with praise—that Trump is “saving” the city, etc. Some blocks away, at Lafayette Square, residents of our nation’s capital protested the coming occupation of the district. “While this action today is unsettling and unprecedented,” said D.C. Mayor Murial Bowser, “I can’t say that given some of the rhetoric of the past … we’re totally surprised.”

In the response to this takeover of Washington’s law enforcement, there has been a tendency to hit back with fact-checks. News stories cite statistics showing that crime in D.C. is at record lows. There is no evidence, contrary to Trump’s claims, that “caravans of mass youth rampage through city streets at all times of day.” However, as a political response to such lies, or to Trump’s invocation of “violent gangs and bloodthirsty criminals, roving mobs of wild youth and drugged-out maniacs,” along with the other racist tropes that he regularly invokes, crime numbers alone are inadequate. Uniting the blundering theater of the White House press room and the careless bombast of the executive orders is a deeper story: Today Trump has claimed the power to take over an American city, casting the city’s leadership as inept and its police as powerless “because of woke,” which is another way of saying because the right white people are not in charge.

At the press conference, an array of the right white people could be seen flanking Trump on the cramped riser. Hegseth and Attorney General Pam Bondi were there, along with other Cabinet and top law enforcement officials. But Trump’s invocation of the dangers of “woke” was evidenced by more than just the identities of the people he hired to praise him and carry out his decrees. “The radical left got out of control, and they started trying to rip down statues,” Trump said. “I found an old statute, very old, early 1900s, that said if you so much as touch or think about destroying a statue or a monument in Washington, D.C., you go to jail for 10 years, no probation, no anything.” Setting aside whatever this “very old” statute actually says or does or means, its mention showed that Trump was attempting to link his seizure of Washington’s law enforcement and his decision to send in the Guard to the very recent removal of some Confederate statues. “This was a sick, woke culture that I think we’ve largely ended,” Trump said.

Why would Trump turn to this story when announcing a police crackdown on Washington? The reference was a pointed throwback to the summer uprisings of 2020, after police in Minneapolis murdered George Floyd. But it was also a way of emphasizing that for Trump, what divides “law” from “lawlessness” is power. He’s far more invested in defending symbols of white rule, not to mention actual white rulers, than in defending people’s safety, in any city.

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