An Authoritarian Dress Rehearsal

Each ​“liberation” Trump declares follows a similar pattern: by claiming emergency powers, the president can wield the full legal might of the state to deal with enemies foreign and domestic and renew U.S. primacy. In different ways, all are based on lies and distortions: that the country has been invaded and occupied by migrants; that the United States is the victim of the global economic order; that D.C. is undergoing an unprecedented crime epidemic, when in fact crime rates are at historic lows. And all these ills can be laid at Democrats’ door: for flooding the nation with undocumented workers, letting America be swindled by international trading partners, allowing the capital to collapse into disorder. As Trump advisor Stephen Miller claimed: ​“Democrats are trying to unravel civilization. Pres Trump will save it.”

Declarations of emergencies, demands for ​“law and order” and deploying concentrated state violence against poor and marginalized communities have long been primary tactics of authoritarianism in advanced capitalist societies. Under President Richard Nixon, as abolitionist scholar Ruth Wilson Gilmore observes, the ​“ascendant Right used the fact of [urban] disorder to persuade voters that [Democratic] incumbents failed to govern.” In the United Kingdom in the 1970s, as cultural theorist Stuart Hall explains, Margaret Thatcher’s neoliberalism rose on the back of racist narratives that scapegoated migrants of color and young Black men for widespread social complaints. 

In both cases, hard turns to the Right relied on moral panics: episodes when real public anxieties are projected onto events and groups singled out as threats to social stability. In this way, moral panics provide what Hall calls a ​“vocabulary of discontent” that fosters popular legitimacy, and a mass base, for increasing authoritarianism.

While Trump’s declaration of an emergency in D.C. resembles previous moral panics around urban crime — including his own notorious intervention into the Central Park jogger case, when he clamored for innocent Black and Latino youths to receive the death penalty — his current campaign against disorder in major cities is more transparently manufactured than its precursors.

While the administration has cited violent incidents in the capital as pretext—most recently one involving Edward ​“Big Balls” Coristine, a 19-year-old former Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) staffer who was assaulted during an attempted carjacking — the militarization of public safety is not responding to any popular demand. If this moral panic has an audience, it is solely among Trump’s MAGA base, who are little represented in D.C. or other urban centers. (During a recent press conference, where he lambasted the idea of D.C. statehood as ​“unacceptable,” Trump complained about the single-digit support he received from capital voters last November.) 

Trump’s attacks and threats against Democratic mayors of major cities channel both his long-term habit of criminalizing Blackness and his agenda of tearing down any sanctuary city provisions that might hinder his deportation machine. This was transparently part of the goal of the administration’s failed attempt to replace D.C. Police Chief Pamela Smith with a Trump appointee from the Drug Enforcement Administration. While a federal court rejected that proposal, shortly afterwards Smith signed an executive order expanding her department’s collaboration with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and other immigration enforcement agencies, effectively creating a ​“loophole” to the city’s 2020 Sanctuary Values Amendment Act, as migrant rights groups pointed out.

It’s just one example, as sociologist of policing Alex Vitale notes, of local mayors ​“allowing their own police to act as force multipliers for ICE, while maintaining the illusion of being ​‘sanctuary cities.’”

While Trump and MAGA treat multiracial, progressive cities as enemy territory in general, the targeting of D.C. is also closely linked to Trump’s obsessive concern with remodeling the capital to fit his visions of grandeur — plans that go well beyond his tacky gilding of the Oval Office or his planned replacement of the East Wing with a massive ballroom. In this light, the takeover is part of a broader makeover Trump laid out in his March executive order, ​“Making the District of Columbia Safe and Beautiful.”

That order combined draconian new ​“safety” measures — including the capture and deportation of ​“illegal aliens” and a massive federal law enforcement presence around the capital’s major attractions — with aesthetic demands to coordinate ​“beautification and clean-up efforts,” including the restoration of public monuments that have been ​“damaged or defaced, or inappropriately removed or changed.” Chief among these is a statue of Confederate General Albert Pike, torn down by protesters in June 2020, signaling how much the D.C. takeover is driven not just by the deportation agenda but also the long backlash against the Black Lives Matter movement.

The executive order also focuses extensively on removing unhoused people—82.5% of whom are Black in D.C.—thereby presenting homelessness as both an aesthetic and safety concern: an eyesore to be expunged, rather than a social problem to be addressed. 

While Trump cannot yet, to borrow from Bertolt Brecht, ​“dissolve the people and elect another,” his vision of safety and beauty is anchored in removing anyone who interferes with the MAGA movement’s ethnonationalist vision of greatness — one where the capital’s ​“monuments, museums, and buildings should reflect and inspire awe and appreciation for our Nation’s strength, greatness, and heritage.”

Trump loathes the people of D.C. but loves its buildings, their marble, their ​“bones.” As he declared at the Kennedy Center this August: ​“We have the greatest bones. When you look at that Supreme Court building, I think it’s one of the most beautiful buildings.” It’s perhaps a fitting example, since in 1933, the architect of that building, Cass Gilbert, returned from a visit to Rome with a rave review, telling reporters that, ​“Mussolini is carrying on a very important and admirable project of restoration, cleaning up the slums, clearing away old buildings, building new streets and without in any way impairing the beauty of the ancient city.” 

On a much smaller scale, Trump’s vision for D.C. follows from the same mentality underlying his genocidal fantasy of a Gaza without Palestinians, transformed into an international tourist resort.

Trump is similarly intent on ​“cleaning up” the capital’s cultural institutions. In February, he appointed himself chairman of the Kennedy Center, whose new board quickly moved to eradicate ​“woke” programming. In mid-August, Trump announced that he will personally emcee its annual awards ceremony this December, honoring, among others, the right-wing actor Sylvester Stallone, who has called Trump ​“the second George Washington.” 

The same week, Trump’s Office of Management and Budget (now led by Project 2025 architect Russell Vought) announced a new review of the Smithsonian Institution, to purge eight museums of ​“divisive or ideologically driven language” — like reminding us ​“how bad slavery was” — and replace it with exhibits and programming that ​“celebrate American exceptionalism.” Trump shortly followed up by announcing on Truth Social that he has instructed his staff ​“to go through the Museums,” suggesting a coming legal pressure campaign targeting cultural institutions similar to what he’s done to colleges and universities.

Trump’s D.C. takeover speaks to his love of stunts and surfaces, bluster and buildings, spectacle and shows of force. But we can’t ignore the deeper designs these spectacles express. In MAGA world, ​“safe and beautiful” means that the ultra-nationalist and reactionary imperatives of the culture war will be buttressed by the increasing militarization of civic spaces, in preparation for what one martial law expert calls a ​“domestic forever war.”

If that sounds alarmist, consider the resolution being advanced by Rep. Andy Ogles (R-TN) to remove the 30-day limit on the federalization of D.C. police, in order to give Trump, as he put it, ​“all the time and authority he needs to crush lawlessness, restore order, and reclaim our capital once and for all.” Or listen to Congressman James Comer (R-KY), who told Newsmax this month: ​“Our military has been in many countries around the world for the past two decades, walking the streets, trying to reduce crime. We need to focus on the big cities in America now, and that’s what the president is doing.”

On Friday, after threatening to repeal the Home Rule Act and remove D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser from her post, Trump suggested he may soon send troops — the National Guard or even the military — to other cities, musing, ​“I think Chicago will be next.” Over the weekend, officials told the Washington Post that the Pentagon has already drawn up plans for this deployment. 

Earlier this month, the National Park Service announced that, in keeping with Trump’s executive order, it will reinstall the statue of Confederate hero Albert Pike that was pulled down in 2020. Five years after those protests — where federal and military law enforcement attacked D.C. protesters with tear gas and rubber bullets, all at Trump’s behest — the new administration is still fighting to reverse the social movement that led to that uprising. 

The capital is a key battlefield in this campaign of reaction. While at present, the takeover may manifest mainly as what New Republic writer Matt Ford calls a ​“pageant of authoritarianism,” there is little doubt that, given the huge resources heaped upon ICE and federal enforcement agencies, and their intensely partisan politicization, any social explosion approximating the scale of BLM will be met with an even more violent crackdown than the last time around. 

The D.C. takeover is not just part of an authoritarian makeover; it’s a dress rehearsal for the real crisis to come.