Trump: Now the Cops Can 'Do Whatever the Hell They Want'

[justaprogressive]

Some tweets on The Washington Post’s website today reported that FBI and ICE agents were on Washington’s U Street Corridor (a center of Northwest D.C. nightlife) last night, and made an arrest at 15th and U. My own one-man U Street patrol last night, however, came too late to find any action at all, though I traversed that same 15th Street corner. Even U Street, apparently, is quiet on Monday midnights. I flagged down one cop in a passing patrol car and asked if there were National Guard or other agents out there. She told me if there were, I wouldn’t see them; they’d be “blending into the walls.” Which meant no Guards, but maybe plainclothes FBI, whom perhaps I had mistaken for the handful of guys sitting on bus benches waiting disconsolately for the 12:20 to Anacostia. An FBI agent dragooned into midnight outdoor duty on a steamy D.C. August night wouldn’t have to work hard to look disconsolate.

So far, Trump’s takeover of the D.C. cops and militarization of the city is conceptually both outrageous and dangerous, while in actuality, a good share of it is still blending into the walls. The number of uniformed Guardsmen who’ll be deployed at any one time is supposed to number 200, clustered around prominent intersections and providing some kind of ill-defined support for the police. They have no power to make arrests, while roving FBI and ICE agents do have that power. What that means is that, as was definitely not the case in Los Angeles in June, Trump’s legions will not be assembled en masse or storming places of work to make mass arrests. Their deployment is a wholesale outrage on a retail scale.

As was absolutely the case in Los Angeles, Trump sends in the troops in hopes of provoking a backlash in a city he knows hates his guts, which he uses to justify further deployments and a drift toward martial law. D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser all but openly said yesterday that that was her primary fear. The way to protest, she told D.C. residents, was to revive the cause of D.C. statehood in Congress (though that would require a Democratic majority in the House and a 60-vote supermajority in the Senate). What “would be a disaster,” she said, would be “if people who aren’t committing crimes are antagonized into committing crimes. That would be a disaster.”

Antagonized into committing crimes. Her fear is Trump’s hope; it would pave the road to the militarization of civil life. Unlike L.A., as of now there won’t be the massive deployment of Guards that brought thousands of demonstrators to confront them, nor will individual arrests here have the same effect that the ICE raids have had on California. Also unlike L.A., of course, D.C. is the site of the White House, where there are sure to be angry demonstrations. Trump doubtless hopes they’ll turn violent, opening the door to a more violent repression. The cops and the feds will surely stage shows of force at busy nightlife centers when they’re busy (if I’d gone up 18th Street instead of along U Street last night, I’d have seen them), but whether those assemblies will become flashpoints is as much, if not more, up to the cops and their new federal helpers than it will be to any protesters.

https://prospect.org/blogs-and-newsletters/tap/2025-08-12-trump-federalizing-washington-dc-police/]

[Blue Owl]

1. Can they go and arrest the criminals inside the WH already?

[underpants]

2. And on the roof. DC's crazy

[Eliot Rosewater]

3. Unfortunately no, despite assurances even around here

That the Supreme Court would not give a piece of shit immunity, they did.

And as for the rest of the criminals in the White House, who’s going to arrest them when the piece of shit controls the people who would arrest them.

[mike_c]

4. the violence will begin...

...when the police instigate it. They always do.