Of course President Donald Trump wants to extend his declaration that D.C. has a crime emergency. Ever since he sent in the National Guard, hardly anyone has been talking about the Jeffrey Epstein files.
Trump has brilliantly orchestrated a legal coup
Complacency is not the proper response to the president’s seizing control of D.C. law enforcement.
August 15, 2025
When 100 bombs are dropping at once, how and where do you direct your attention?
This has worked rather well, given Trump’s “successes” — from deporting and/or caging undocumented immigrants to taking over the Kennedy Center. (You can hold your breath waiting for it to become the Trump Center; it shouldn’t be long.) Already, he has assumed the role of host for the annual Kennedy Center Honors, the recipients of which he was “very involved” in selecting.
He has defunded public media, gelded traditional media, dismantled government and educational institutions — or tried — and put fear and loathing in the hearts of D.C.’s 700,000-plus population, more than 40 percent of which is Black. (We might want to keep an eye on the demographics of Trump’s crackdown targets.)
In no small feat, he rid himself of late-night nemesis Stephen Colbert, who on July 14 criticized Paramount, the parent company of CBS, for paying Trump $16 million to settle a lawsuit related to a “60 Minutes” interview with Vice President Kamala Harris before the 2024 election. Trump has claimed that the network edited the interview to favor Harris. Colbert called the settlement a “big fat bribe” meant to curry favor with the Trump administration for a pending $8 billion merger of Paramount and Skydance Media.
Three days later, CBS announced it was canceling “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert,” calling it “purely a financial decision,” effective May 2026. On Aug. 7, the merger was approved.
So things go these days. As Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) said, Trump has signaled to CEOs that he’s “open for business.” But he isn’t interested only in money. Like his other nemesis, Russian President Vladimir Putin, Trump wants to remake the United States in his own image. He’s a real estate guy, he says, and he can’t help himself: He wants to make things big and beautiful. To do this, he needs greater control and, therefore, more crises. Nothing works better than fear to organize the masses.
Within days of declaring a crime emergency that data contradicts, Trump is deploying up to 800 National Guard troops. He has commandeered the D.C. police department and sent 500 federal law-enforcement agents into the District to combat crime, he says. D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) has warily accepted the personnel support, as long as it remains only that. At the same time, she warned parents to keep their teenage children off the streets, lest a rowdy group of them be mistaken for criminals and thrown in the clink.
As of Wednesday, when Trump asserted that the Republican-controlled Congress would grant his request to assume responsibility for D.C. public safety, 111 arrests had been made — 66 on the first two nights and 45 on Wednesday. Alleged offenses were related to guns, drugs and being in the country illegally. It took a military occupation to pull this off?
Well, yes, it did. In fact, 1,450 officers participated in Tuesday night’s operation to arrest 43 people. This comes to 34 officers per alleged offender. On Wednesday night, 1,650 officers participated, which breaks down to about 37 officers per alleged criminal. And on Thursday, 20 officers arrested a plainly overwrought man who allegedly threw a sandwich at a Customs and Border Protection agent at 14th and U streets NW.
Your tax dollars at work.
As it turned out, the poor fellow, 37-year-old Sean Charles Dunn, worked for the Justice Department. No more — and now he’s charged with assaulting an officer, a felony. In a tirade captured and circulated on social media, Dunn approached a group of agents, pointed his finger at one man’s face and called him a fascist. All things considered, I’m pulling for the guy who wields sandwiches. GoFundMe, anyone?
Kidding aside, complacency is not a proper reaction to what is happening to D.C. right now, or to what Trump wants to happen in other liberal-leaning cities: New York, Baltimore, Los Angeles, Oakland and Chicago — all places where the mayors happen to be Black.
Regardless of whether National Guard troops carry weapons, their presence is a warning that the city is under Trump’s control. I don’t want to suggest that Trump is acting like a military dictator. But I have seen — and felt — this type of intimidation before, when I was a student in Spain and witnessed tactics employed by Gen. Francisco Franco, who ruled from 1939, at the end of the Spanish Civil War, until his death in 1975. Franco and Trump share not only an obsession with loyalty but also a willingness to use military force to maintain civilian order.
Franco’s heavily armed “Guardia Civil,” in their spiffy tricorn hats, were visible reminders of the dictator’s power. Even in private settings, no one dared speak critically of “El Caudillo,” as he was called, lest they be hustled off to prison. This came as a shock to a 19-year-old recently of American college campuses where protesters stuck flowers in National Guard troops’ gun barrels. In 1970, when the Ohio National Guard shot 13 unarmed students at Kent State University, killing four, the world witnessed what could happen in a tense environment with government troops at the ready.
In the absence of a real crisis — riots, bedlam, natural disasters, alien invasion — this sort of federal intimidation has no place on America’s streets. Citizens should have the right to move about as they like, to gather peacefully, to think, speak and breathe freely, without fear.
What’s happening now in D.C. is not of the people, by the people or for the people. It is for Donald Trump alone.
Speaking of whom, anything new on those Epstein files?