Flooding the zone once again, among a myriad of scandals and norm-shattering actions, President Donald Trump has escalated his mission toward outright authoritarianism even further. The headline this past week was the president’s unprecedented federal takeover of Washington, D.C.’s police force.
Declaring a so-called emergency under a federal law no other president has before, Trump called in the National Guard onto the streets of D.C., a city, as The New York Times reported, that the president derided as a “filthy and crime-ridden embarrassment” and “a rat-infested, graffiti-infested shithole,” despite violent crime in the nation’s capital reaching a 30-year low in 2024.
For many, this may seem like a silly and desperate ploy from Trump to shock the public. Some have even suggested Trump is distracting his seething base from his latest scandal: his association with the late Jeffrey Epstein, the notorious child trafficker.
But this is not some meaningless political tactic from Trump with no repercussions. This is a fascist, authoritarian push for power, one that should not be minimized as some PR move. This is a serious breach of what we claim to be a centerpiece of American democracy: self-governance.