Trump Bests His Hero Robert E. Lee, Seizes Washington D.C.
No, this isn't a 'distraction.'
Donald Trump, our second Confederate president, has invaded Washington, D.C. Monday, he announced that he’s putting D.C. police under federal control so he can “take our capital back.”
There is obvious irony here, as Trump inspired an attack on the Capitol in a final, desperate attempt to remain in power. Now, Americans have willingly returned this fascist to power for egg-related reasons, and he’s having his revenge on a city that has overwhelmingly rejected him at the ballot box.
Pam Bondi, Kash Patel, Pete Hegseth joined Trump for his lie-filled press conference. Their official titles are attorney general, FBI director, and defense secretary, but they are probably more accurately described as Trump’s caporegimes. The stated justification for this federal takeover is that D.C. has been “taken over by violent gangs and bloodthirsty criminals.” You’d think it was like January 6 every day.
Facts obviously contradict Trump’s propaganda. Former Time editor Richard Stengel, who served in the Obama administration, posted on social media, “Crime in DC is at a 30-year low. It's not even in top 10 dangerous cities in US.”
Memphis, Tennessee, is at the top of that list. However, Trump has predictably focused his ire at cities in Democratic-run states. He claimed on Monday that New York City, Baltimore, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Oakland are “so far gone.” Whenever he talks about U.S. cities, he sounds like Travis Bickle writing in his journal.
The native New Yorker has never liked cities, which coincidentally tend to have a significant minority population. “Our inner cities are a disaster,” he said at the final 2016 presidential debate. “You get shot walking to the store. They have no education, they have no jobs.” He also said murders were at a 45-year high, which was a lie. He actually inherited the lowest murder rate in 50 years. The murder rate was actually higher when he left, making him the first president in 30 years to claim that dubious honor.
In 2019, he called Baltimore a “disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess” and in 2020, he said Detroit was like “living in hell.” He smeared Detroit again during the 2024 presidential campaign, but he managed to carry Michigan in the general election.
Stengel added, “Throughout history, autocrats use a false pretext to impose government control over local law enforcement as a prelude to a more national takeover. That’s far more dangerous than the situation he says he is fixing.”
Trump has legal authority over the D.C. police and the D.C. National Guard that he doesn’t have in other cities, who could more easily resist. Section 740 of the DC Home Rule Act stipulates that 30 days is the maximum length for a federal takeover. Then Trump would need a joint resolution from Congress to continue his reign of terror. However, the current Congress exists primarily as a giant rubber stamp for the mad MAGA king.
D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser had tried appeasing Trump to avoid this outcome. She met went to Mar-a-Lago to meet with Trump after he won the 2024 election. Her office refused to send immigration enforcement guidance to D.C. public schools in January to avoid provoking Trump. In February, she said she’d stopped calling D.C. a “sanctuary city.” In March, she announced the removal of Black Lives Matter Plaza, claiming “we have bigger fish to fry.” Her efforts had the usual Lucy and the football result.
During her own press conference Monday, she said, “While this action today is unsettling and unprecedented, I can’t say that, given some of the rhetoric of the past, that we’re totally surprised.” She vowed to “work every day to make sure [Trump’s takeover] is not a complete disaster.”
Still, this might’ve been avoided or at least more difficult if D.C. were an actual state and its 700,000 residents — more than the population of Wyoming and Vermont — had true representation and sovereignty.
Democrats tried to pass DC statehood in 2021, but Senate Republicans blocked the effort with help from coal-powered roadblock Joe Manchin.
"If Congress wants to make D.C. a state, it should propose a constitutional amendment and let the people of America vote,” Manchin said. However, his own state of West Virginia was granted statehood in 1863 through legislation. So was Hawaii in 1959.
Manchin’s defenders will insist that he supported Joe Biden’s agenda more often than not, but it was always under his own terms. Biden never successfully persuaded Manchin to back his specific priorities, especially when it came to Black Americans. Manchin also openly opposed the For the People Act in 2021, which he called “the wrong piece of legislation to bring our country together and unite our country” because the doofus considered anything that Republicans didn’t like inherently “divisive.” He agreed to a “bipartisan compromise” on the John Lewis Voting Rights Act — legislation that might right now prevent Republicans from suppressing the Black vote in “red” states — but his “bipartisan” buddies weren’t enough to break a GOP filibuster, which Manchin loved more than democracy. Barack Obama called the filibuster a “Jim Crow relic,” and indeed the filibuster helped pave the way for neo-Confederate rule.
Dr. Martin Luther King once said, “A society that has done something special against the Negro for hundreds of years must now do something special for the Negro.” At the core of Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema’s insistence on “bipartisan” action was a deep-seated refusal to act specifically on behalf of Black Americans. Thus, D.C. statehood and voting rights protections were dismissed as “divisive” distractions from glad-handing infrastructure legislation. At least we’ll have some nice roads and bridges to cross on the way to our Trump-branded internment camp.
What was especially galling is that D.C. statehood and voting rights were obvious deliverables for the demographic who helped put Biden in the White House and turned out in “phenomenal” numbers in Georgia to flip the Senate. Manchin and Sinema never even listened to the people who had empowered them.
Yet Biden frequently told Black voters, “I have your back,” as if those words were more than just a bumper sticker sentiment in practice.
“I have your back, as much as any president has in American history since Lyndon Johnson,” Biden said in March 2024. Even if that were true — though it’s a bit of a ding to Barack Obama, it’s more damning than celebratory. LBJ signed the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act. The latter might soon cease to exist in any actionable form.
Many Democrats and very smart pundits insist that Trump’s federal takeover is just a “distraction” from the Jeffrey Epstein files or the economy he’s tanked. However, Trump attacked the U.S. on January 6, 2021, and now he’s started seizing cities. That’s not a “distraction.” That’s a war.
"No, this isn't a 'distraction.'"
It's a rehearsal for the upcoming elections.
Taking over cities he doesn't like IS part of TACO's agenda. It's also a distraction from the other parts of his agenda that are very unpopular and are tanking the economy. And everything he does is a distraction from Epstein. Both can be true - whatever TACO does is a distraction, but also what he really wants to do. He's flooding us with shit, and hoping that we will give up on fighting him. You are right - this is a war.