Bulwark Takes - Trump’s DC Press Conference Was Genuinely Horrifying

Episode Date: August 11, 2025

JVL, Sam Stein, and Andrew Egger take on Donald Trump’s latest press conference — part authoritarian cosplay, part surreal stand-up routine. From talking about “good violence” and floating military takeovers of blue cities, to comparing DC to Baghdad and rambling about a new presidential ballroom, the spectacle was as bizarre as it was alarming.

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And placing the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department under direct federal control, and you'll be meeting the people that will be directly involved with that. Hey, guys, Sam Stein, managing editor at the bulwark here with JVL and Andrew Eger. We are here to talk about the announcement. Oh, welcome back, JVL, by the way. We're here and you, too, Eger. Welcome back. We're here to talk about the announcement that Donald Trump will be instituting home rule for Washington, D.C., sending the National Guard to take over the law enforcement responsibilities here.

He is putting the D.C. Metropolitan Police under the jurisprudence of Pam Bion. our attorney general. He's not ruling out the possibility of sending the military into our nation's capital. He had a press conference. The press questions element of it went off the rails pretty quickly. The statement element of it was not much better, but it does add up to a fairly, I don't know, chilling, honestly, decision by the president considering crime is fairly down in the nation's capital. I mean, it's still a problem, but it's down. But JVL, why don't you start us off? What were your main takeaways from this? I mean, he wants to put the military in the streets of America's cities, right? I mean,

it's just as simple as that. We saw this in Los Angeles. He's going to do it here. I think we should all basically plan for this to happen in every blue state-type city between now and the elections. And he purpose, I mean, very, very pointedly did not rule out doing more of that. during this press conference? No, in fact, you went through a list of cities and discussed them as if they were next targets, right? Baltimore, Oakland, Chicago, I'm sure I'm missing a few. Not Houston.

Interesting enough. Not Houston. Weirdly enough. Not Oklahoma City. No, nothing like that. That's so bizarre. The other thing, Andrew, that really just sort of jumped out. I mean, we can get to the hypocrisy stuff in January 6th.

I want to get to that in a second. But it was just sort of like the kind of, embrace of police brutality. Like, if they spit on you, we're going to hit him back much harder. I mean, it's just like outwardly embracing the idea that the cops should just come down incredibly hard without any apology on people who commit crimes, which, look, it might be smart politics for him, but it is just an outward embrace of police brutality. Yeah, yeah.

And that's, I mean, there's a couple different things that are going on here. One is that Trump is, like, channeling just sort of like this sort of broad grievance about crime in general. I mean, this is kind of his super power forever. It's like, I'm going to solve everything. All the people who were in power before are fools and dummies. And, and, you know, there's, there are real reasons why a lot of, you know, a lot of concerns about crime have come to the fore, especially coming out of, you know, COVID a few years ago when it was all really spiking everywhere. But, I mean, obviously that is no longer true. But he is still sort of channeling that same kind of angst. And then, and it's weird to like see him. I mean,

this is a classic Trump too, right? He's kind of going off his prepared remarks about law and order and about how, you know, we're going to, we're going to make the streets safe for tourists and stuff. And then he kind of hops into his own register, which is, uh, you're sort of speaking lovingly about, about the violence, you know, good violence, good violence, violence for a good cause of the, of, you know, you, you don't need a lot of police officers. You just need police officers to be able to do whatever the hell they want, as he said here. Uh, he, you know, the, you have to be able to rough up these protesters, though, Andrew. The capital police officers are not. I'm not allowed to do whatever the hell they want.

In fact, they went too far, right? That was the problem. You know, it's a very, very fine line that you got to cut here. Okay, but let me just put a bow on this because it's, it really is, I mean, he, he's explicit about it. He's talking about, you know, the stuff that's been happening in D.C. recently. And he's talking about just sort of like roving gangs of, of, of juveniles in the city streets.

And he's basically like, you have to let police officers beat the hell out of them because this is another direct quote. That's the only thing they understand, right? I mean, it's really this kind of elemental, like, you just have to unleash violence on the bad Americans to make things, you know, more orderly for the good Americans. And I, I mean, I don't know, what do you guys, how do you guys think this is going to play? Like, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, grotesque in a lot of ways. Sure, but I'm struck, I guess, to answer your question about how it plays, and maybe you can pick this up, too, JVille, but like, I'm kind of struck by how much of Trump's worldview is just based around late 80s, early 90s, New York City. Yeah.

Like, this is. I mean, this is just, Dinkins. Right. And Dinkins into Rudy, right? It's like, let the cops, just be the cops. They can rough up a few Haitians. Who cares, right? Like, they can do it.

And then, you know, if we just reduce that, you know, visible crime, people will reward you for it. And I just feel like so much of what he does is based around that worldview. Totally. It's Donald Trump views the entire criminal justice system through the lenses of Bernie Gets and Amadu Diallo, right? And if you're not of a certain age or you didn't grow up in the New York metro area, those names, well, me anything to you, but go Google them. Yeah, exactly. You'll figure it out. It is, again, it's all they, them, and in-group, out-group. Because, again, the calls to violence are all, as I brought up the Capitol Police in January 6th, because this shows it isn't really about crime. It isn't about police.

it's about using force against the outgroup, right? In this case, the outgroup happens to be, you know, like black teenagers or homeless people or something. But if all of a sudden they're great patriots who are trying to overthrow the United States government, well, hold on now. Don't go getting crazy, right? And that's what it isn't really about crime. It is just naked fascism.

Like, I'm sorry, it's just naked fascism, right? It isn't, it isn't just, you know, hey, he's trying to clean up The streets. He's just like Duterte or something, D'Artie from the Philippines, something like that. That's not what this is. It's, that's how it's being coded. And how will it play? I mean, I have no idea, but it would not surprise me if it all plays very well. Because Americans have shown, of course, the last decade that they have a real taste for us versus them politics. And maybe not all of them, maybe not a majority of them. But like, do you think 40% of America? likes this sort of thing, I do. Well, I thought the in most telling line, well, one of them was when he started talking about the tourist from Iowa and Indiana, who wants to just come to the nation's capital

and can't because they're going to get mugged. And I think a lot of people who don't live here probably have this perception that you just literally cannot walk down the street, which is ridiculous. Can I ask you guys a question? Have you ever heard of the place called Anniston, Alabama, either of you? I have not, but I'd be willing to bet they've got a pretty high murder rate per per 100,000. They have, according to FBI data,

this is a quote, whopping 3,434 violent crimes per capita. This is a town of 22,000. That's about one violent crime for every seven people. It is one of the most violent places in the country. We're not sending anyone there. I mean, I've been wanting to go there as a tourist, Sam, for years. There are tourists. And I've just been terrified to go because I feel like if I step across the line

to that town, I wish we could send the National Guard in there to clean things. up. There are tourist attractions there. It's the site of a couple Greyhound bus bombings during the civil rights movement. So fun place. Not sure I'm going to go there in my family. Let's talk about the hypocrisy and irony here. Republicans with Trump signature took a billion dollars out of the D.C. budget during last government funding fight, money that could be used for public safety measures. They said they were going to put it back. They have not. This was a promise that Chuck Schumer made with Donald Trump in order to get his signature. Chuck seems to have played on that one. And then, of course, January 6. I mean, we cannot talk about this without

talking about January 6. They defaced a D.C. building, the Capitol, it's a federal building, what's in D.C. They spat on and hit and harmed and led to the deaths of several Capitol Hill police officers. And then Trump parted in the people who did it. And the fact that that was not, none of those questions were asking the press, before, I mean, maybe we're recording this kind of middle of the presser, but that's shocking to me. Like, those are just blatant, hypocritical acts. But Andrew, am I wrong? Well, the important thing, Sam, is that if you're from Iowa or Indiana and you come to D.C., you should be allowed to do what you want, right? If you just want to go around to the monuments

and visit some restaurants and have a good time, you should be able to do that unmolested. If you want to storm the U.S. Capitol on Donald Trump's behalf and, you know, try to hang Mike Pence, that's fine too. You know, people from Iowa and Indiana are in charge and we are catering to there. Actually, not to go off on too much of a tangent, I went to a Trump rally in Iowa right ahead of the caucuses last time around. And I happened to chat up a couple of people who were wives of January 6 prisoners, political prisoners, as they would say, who were at that time in prison. Now they're out. So who knows? Yeah, maybe they'll be coming back on a tourist a trip. But no, I mean, it's obviously, it's exactly what JBL said, right? I mean, it's that you back the blue

provisionally, which means you back the blue most of the time, because most of the time, they are just sort of, you know, in a face-off with, like you say, the gangs of black teenagers in the streets of D.C. But when it comes to a face-off between, you know, D.C. Capitol Police and a more protected class, even than the police, which is our brave Maga Patriots, it's pretty clear which side you have to get on for that one. I got a question for you guys. Go ahead. Go ahead. Go ahead. Do you guys think they're going to, the Republicans and Trump are going to try to repeal the, was the 1973 legislation granting home rule to? Do you think that? Do you think that? that's where this has, that this is a sort of a preemptive, got to make sure that Democrats

don't really pursue D.C. statehood, one of the ways we can do that is by repealing this legislation. So that was, there was a little bit of reporting around this this morning that that is, in fact, the angle here for a few of them, right? Like a guy named Mike Davis, who's kind of in the shadows of the legal warfare stuff for conservatives. That's, that's what he wants. And it certainly seems that way. And I think, To a degree, what we're seeing here is just sort of like, it is sort of a test run to see what they can get away with and if they can do that, right? Like touch the hot stove, see how big a reaction you get.

And look, I mean, if they, if they, I think we all expect them to turn around and say, hey, we got this under control, look at what the federal government can do, so on and so forth. But yeah, I mean, I don't know. How would that, how does that work practically? You got to put up for legislation, obviously. I mean, I'm assuming Democrats don't go for it. So I don't know how that works in theory, but I do think it's the end goal.

Yeah. Andrew, do you have thoughts on it or no? Or is it the case that, like, Trump never cares about legislating on anything? Like, you just like doing stuff. He can sign an executive order wrong and then declare victory. Yeah, I don't know the ends and outs of the home rule stuff, but it was interesting today listening to Trump talk about legislation because he mentioned that a couple of times. But his big thing for legislating, he was not talking about, you know, anything in particular of like the ends and outs of, of, of, of, of, of, of, you know, of. how D.C. is going to fare. He was just talking about sort of like the big policy

strokes like, we're going to end cashless bail. And, you know, then, then Janine Piro got up and talked about how, you know, we're going to stop judges from, from, you know, coming down too leniently on the, I mean, it's all, on these offenders. It's all, it's not a policy program, right? It's all, it's all just in service of this, this sort of broad, generic sense that criminals are being treated too nicely. They're getting away with too much. are letting them do all this stuff. And that's why, you know, that's why there's this sort of lawlessness that you see on the news. Javier, let me ask you this to close it out. So you're predicting that it's going to, this is a test case. They're going to do it in other cities. Let's talk about

D.C. specifically. What's the next couple weeks going to look like, do you think? I mean, I assume that a big part of this is really tied to homelessness and that Trump just hates the idea they're being homeless people around his presidential palace. And that, I mean, I I just assume that they're going to do something like cleansing, basically, you know, just make all the poor people disappear or shove them into a part of the city that Trump never goes to. He said it. He said it in his post. Move him away from the city. He's going to take him and move him away from the city.

And, but this is, I mean, this is all part and parcel with the entire fascist. I'm sorry to say, like, I come back from vacation. I'm just like, I don't know. Can't we just say the F word? Like, it's fascism. And this feels like this is, this is that, right? And it's, it's all with, he started this press conference talking about the new ballroom they're building, right?

And it's going to be very real, going to be done faster than you can even imagine. It's going to be so beautiful. And I, again, this is, this is Uday and Kusei, Hussein type stuff. And like, you know, why is he building a presidential ballroom on this compound to make it look like Mar-a-Lago North? Is it because he plans on leaving in three years? I don't fucking think so, right? And I don't know, man.

Like, maybe it's just I come back with no forks to give after being away for a week. But it all looks really bad. And when you combine, I know these seem very desperate, but combine this with the like, hey, we don't like the labor statistics. So we're going to make it so that nobody can trust the, the, economic numbers coming out of the federal government, right? And it's, because that's just the way it is now. We can't trust the numbers coming out of the federal government. Why do that? And the answer is because they think they can do pretty well in a post-truth world where people are just

reduced to, are we listening to our guys or their guys, right? And there is no more objective reality anymore. We just obliterate all of that. There are no homeless people, right? Look, see, the homeless people are all gone. It doesn't matter. or we've just, where has them someplace else or something off of the street? Like, this is... That's very interesting, because he could have done this in a different way. Let me just kick the tires on this one. Crime is decent.

Crime in D.C. is down. It is, statistically. He's been president for seven and a half months. In theory, this would never, I don't think he would ever done this, but in theory, he could have said, hey, look at me. Seven and a half a month in, crime's down. I'm doing the job. But that's not what he did.

That's not what he did. He said, it's out of control. and I need to get in there. So I do think, you know, I don't read into it what you will, but there is something of, well, not something, it's all about, to me, creating this reality that doesn't exist so that people are impressed by you or give you the permission to do things that otherwise you wouldn't get. Can I say one other thing on that too, which is that just to illustrate the way they're totally playing with monopoly money with all of this stuff, right along lines of what you were just

saying, Sam, when Doug Bergam then got up at the press conference, Secretary of the Interior, got up to talk about homelessness specifically in D.C., he said, during Joe Biden, they let homelessness run rampant around here. And we're cleaning that up. That was kind of the narrative he gave, specifically on national park land in D.C. And the circles and the triangle parks in D.C. I covered this stuff while it was happening coming out of the pandemic in 2020 and 2021. What happened is in 2020, during Donald Trump's presidency, Park Police relaxed a lot of the guidelines about camping on public land. And that meant there were a lot of these homeless encampments. that sprung up in D.C. in 2020. And as the pandemic kind of dragged on, people got really sick of those because they were

just kind of like everywhere and sort of in a bunch of high traffic and business areas and things like that. And it created a lot of tension. And in mid-2020, in Joe Biden's first year, the park police basically started to crack down on that. And that sort of, it didn't go away because, I mean, they're homeless people, right? They're around. You can't just, like, put them all in jail and say you can't be on the street.

anymore. But the stuff that Bergam was talking about was a Trump first-term phenomenon that then was dealt with in certain ways in Joe Biden. But none of that matters, right? I mean, like, it's nobody's going to fact-check him and be like that. It's all, again, it's all this broad strokes, who's addressing your grievances, who agrees with you that this stuff is a problem? And you put it all in Joe Biden and you say Donald Trump is going to come clean it up. And there are a lot of possible outcomes, but the guaranteed outcome is that Trump gives himself more and more permission to accrue more and more power to himself, no matter what happens. Can you say one more thing?

This is a, the difference between Democrats and Republicans is, again, Democrats are, you know, Democrats confront homelessness. It's like, well, what policy levers could we push to ameliorate this? Should we be building more affordable housing? Should we, you, Yimbies versus the, the socialists and, right? And, you know, and Republican just come in and it's like, we're going to disappear them. And, like, I just, I don't know, like, if America is okay with that, and not even all of America, if 40% of America is okay with that, then that's what we're going to get. And we're moving to, like, a post-policy world and a world which is really, really different from what existed in America for the last 50 years.

Hard agree. Let's leave this by listening to Donald Trump, compare D.C. unfavorably to back. Baghdad? Some charts. These are different cities throughout the world. Red is, okay? The red is a place called Washington, D.C. Look at these. Baghdad is, we doubled up on Baghdad. Panama City, Brasilia, San Jose Costa Rica, Bogota, Colombia, heavy drugs. Mexico, Mexico City. I'm mentioned Lima, Peru, all double and triple what they said. Do you want to live in places like that? I don't think so. I don't think so. And I think the people in this room, if you wrote correctly, you'd see, look at the kind of numbers we have. DC, 41 per 100,000, number one, that we can find anywhere in the world. Other cities are pretty bad, but they're not as bad as that. All right,

there you have it. We are worse than Baghdad here in our nation's capital. Andrew, JVL, thank you guys, both. Really appreciate it. JVL, you bring up such sunshine and you return from vacation. It's like, yeah, how do we survive without this, without you this past week? I'm sure you're all much happier without me for a week. Definitely, definitely happier, yeah.

Andrew, thanks, man. Appreciate it, JVL. Thank you guys. Thank you for watching this. Subscribe to our feed where you get more uplifting conversations like this. Talk to you from the Occupy D.C. soon. Later.