The Opinions - Trump’s Political Theater Won’t Save D.C.

Episode Date: August 16, 2025

President Trump deployed the National Guard in Washington, D.C., and is threatening to do so in other American cities. On this episode of “The Opinions,” the Opinion national politics writer Michelle Cottle is joined by the columnists Jamelle Bouie and David French to debate what Trump is really talking about when he talks about crime and the risks of using the military as a police force.Thoughts? Email us at [e-mail] episode of “The Opinions” was produced by Vishakha Darbha. It was edited by Alison Bruzek. The rest of the show's production team includes Derek Arthur, Kaari Pitkin, Kristina Samulewski and Jillian Weinberger. Mixing by Carole Sabouraud. Original music by Pat McCusker, Isaac Jones and Carole Sabouraud. Fact-checking by Mary Marge Locker. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta and Kristina Samulewski. The director of Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

This is The Opinions, a show that brings you a mix of voices from New York Times Opinion. You've heard the news. Here's what to make of it. I'm Michelle Cottle, and I cover national politics for New York Times Opinion. And I am here today with my fantastic colleagues, columnists David French, and Jamel Bowie. Guys, welcome. Hi, Michelle. Hello, hello. All right, so this, sadly, is our last roundtable of the summer.

before we all scoge off to exotic locales or at least a little bit of beach reading. How are we all feeling? You know, other than the bad things happening in the world, I feel pretty good. There's a way in my family that we talk about that when someone who says, how are you doing? The answer is personally, great, politically. You know what I'm going to steal that? I like that. Personally, I'm rocking.

Well, before we vanish, this week, we're going to talk about President Trump's deployment of the National Guard. backyard and is taking control of Washington, D.C.,'s Metro Police Force. Trump claims he's doing this because of a public safety emergency here in the district, though, in fact, violent crime is at a 30-year low. But I have lived here for more than 30 years. I am well aware of Washington's long-term crime issues, and you know what's not going to help? Cheap political theater. So there's a lot to get into here.

But first, the requisite time stamp. We're recording this on Wednesday morning. So all this news is still fresh. People are trying to figure things out. The situation is fluid. So who knows, by the time this reaches your ears, Trump may have indeed saved Washington from what he has called our bloodshed,

bedlam, and squalor. So let's get to it. First, I want first reactions to this. Jamel, kick us off. My first reaction, I guess, comes in three parts. The first part, as you pointed out, there is no public safety emergency in Washington, D.C. Crime is, as you said, at a 30-year low. At least violent crime is.

Violent crime is a 30-year low. I think actually it's worth emphasizing about that is that most of these troops are deployed to areas surrounding the White House, National Mall, downtown, so and so forth. But when you actually, if you were to make like a heat map of criminalizing, activity in Washington, D.C., you would find that it is not in those places, right? That if you're going to do this, you would put soldiers in other places. And this gets to, I think, a reality about crime that's important to understand. Most violent crime especially happens in specific, discrete geographic areas among specific

individuals, right? It is not the case, either in D.C. or New York or wherever, that you are particularly likely to be the victim of, like, random violent crime. What is the case is that people in networks were. there are people who do violent crime are more likely than not to be victims of violent crime. And so when you begin to actually understand the social geography of crime as well as the physical geography of crime, all this makes even less sense as a measure. Second part, I think this is a sign of the president's weakness.

I think that a president who is capable of doing anything like ordinary negotiation, compromise, deliberation, would not be leaning on this or leaning on emergency powers in general. But the third thing is that the fact that the president, I think, is actually quite weak in a lot of ways, should not, like, diminish the fact that this is quite dangerous and that he has announced his intention to do this kind of thing in other cities, which is, I think, a pretty profound violation of basic ideas about power in the United States that go back to even before the founding. David, is this even legal?

Yeah, that's a great question. The answer is, probably we'll see. So the probably part is that, look, the president has. more authority over the National Guard in Washington, D.C. than anywhere else. More inherent automatic authority. The Guard is under his direct control, whereas in the States, the Guard is under the control of governors unless the Guard is federalized. Here, you don't have to really go through that step. Also, there's been sort of a longstanding DOJ position that the Guard can be used more for

law enforcement purposes in D.C. than it can say in other places without violating the Posse Cometatus Act, which is this post-Reconstruction law. prohibiting the use of federal troops for law enforcement. However, a lot of these things are just theories. A lot of this is untested because presidents have historically been really reluctant to call out the troops. Now we've seen him do this at the border. We've seen him do this in Los Angeles.

And the legal authorities for doing all of this are, in many cases, pretty ambiguous. So the concepts are not fully tested in court, but if he can do it anywhere or in America, he can do it in D.C. So I think the legal attack on this is probably going to fail. More interesting question also is the federalization, putting under federal control, the D.C. Police Department. Again, D.C. is not a normal city. This is one that is, there's a home rule act, but ultimately, ultimately Congress is responsible for D.C. And so there's much more leeway and flexibility and taking control of this local police department. But that's not supposed to happen after 30 days. there has to be congressional authorization. Now, of course, Jamel and Michelle, this Congress will

absolutely stand up to this president. No, of course not. So how much will that really matter in the real world? So what we're dealing with here is a very carefully chosen city for this intervention. Can I just add real quick in terms of the DC being carefully chosen? It's also a city for which the president's reliance on tropes about crime and dystopian crime and all these things, I think is not only more effective, but like there might be a more willing audience for, for the simple reason that D.C. has been known for a long time as being a majority black city. It's not quite majority black anymore. I think it's like just under half, but it has this identity. And that identity, I think, is very much a part of the president's demonization of D.C.

Devenization of D.C. as kind of a John Carpenter-esque hellscape, demonization of the residents of D.C. as essentially incapable of self-government. Like, it plugs into longstanding tropes about the ability of Black Americans to exist in mainstream society. To put it in the most sterile way I possibly can. Yeah, I mean, nothing else. Trump's butter quite like the chance to militarize things. But he is hardly the first Republican to play politics with this. city. I mean, the district has been a favorite target for years. Nixon liked to hate on D.C. And I do think you're right about, and I like the way you put it, the most sterile way you can put it. But there's also just his tendency to demonize all things, Washington. I think at this point, you know, you can, you can look at how people responded to tens of thousands of federal government employees having their jobs threatened or taken away. You know, plenty of people were like, Oh, that's great.

They deserve it. Deep State, blah, blah, blah. They pretend that Washington, D.C. is some kind of, you know, hellscape, as you put it, that needs to have somebody come in and just bulldoze it, which makes the rest of the country a little bit more likely to be like, meh, whatever. I'll say what is interesting is there hasn't been much polling,

but the one poll I've seen on this has 47% of Americans disapproving of this action, and it's like 34 or 35 percent saying that they're okay with it. So I think, you know, thinking about the political aspect of this, and to go back to our conversation earlier in the summer about L.A., I think I argued then that the public doesn't like disorder, and when the president does things like this, it creates the impression that there is disorder, that the president is responsible for it. And I think that that dynamic might assert itself here as well. Yeah.

David, you can also address the kind of broader view of this, but I think one of the issues is that D.C. has long had a problem in terms of how it deals with crime. And when you have a couple of high profile issues that Trump can take, like, I think this was all provoked, right? Because a member of the administration got his butt kicked at 3 a.m. by a group of people in a fairly popular. area in a part of D.C. considered, you know, safer than others, right? Can we say big balls on here? Okay. I was waiting for someone to breach that wall. An administration official, a young man whose nickname is Big Balls was jumped and Trump

completely freaked out. So now here we are with, I think the National Guard has been dispatched on the National Mall because that's where the problem is. I mean, I live in a very safe neighborhood. keep waiting for them to come secure my street from like the porch pirate who occasionally will steal my Amazon packages. But anyway, I digress here. Yeah, here's one thing, one caution I would add. Yes, crime in D.C. is at a 30-year-old low, violent crime. And D.C. is at a 30-year-old but it's still a pretty violent city relative to other U.S. cities. And there's also a lot of people,

especially if you are not used to and have not seen the improvement in D.C., especially since the pandemic, that sometimes if you come from other cities, what you'll sort of see in that kind of low-level disorder category in D.C. can be pretty shocking to people who are not used to it. And so I think one mistake that people can make here is to sort of say, you know, look, he's doing this and D.C.'s fine. D. C. is fine. I don't think we should say D.C. is fine. But what we should say is DC is improving substantially, and this is not the way you achieve further improvements. And this is, I think, a consistent pattern in dealing with Trump. Often people will look at an institution or a place that he's attacking. And there's this instinct to rally completely to its

defense. Well, sometimes these institutions do have problems. They do need reform. It's just not his reform. And what happened to our friend Big Balls was terrible. That was terrible. That was terrible. That should not happen. That's awful. But then to say about that incident that that is then the pretext, that's the instigating incident for bringing in the guard. You know, what this reminds me of is that it's not so much that Trump is tough on crime. It's really that he really wants to be tough on his enemies. And that is a different thing than being tough on crime. Because being tough on crime requires a lot more intelligent thought. It's a lot harder than calling in this National Guard and plopping them on them all. Jamel, that speaks to your point about him not being

able to actually govern or... Right. I have many thoughts. I think that to David's point about the real problems that DC has and questions of public disorder, I think part of the problem is one ought to make a conceptual separation, right, between like public. disorder and crime, right? Like a homelessness problem isn't a crime problem. It's a housing cost problem. It's the private problem. It's a social services problem. But it's not a crime problem. It may, in some acute circumstances, produce criminal activity, but it's not primarily a crime problem. And what I push against is the conflation of all these things into crime for two reasons. One, that makes it harder to solve, even if you were inclined to give the president the benefit, the doubt here,

Once you take the view that this is a question of like bedlam and lawlessness, then that leaned toward these sorts of militaristic responses versus things that are much more attuned to the actual problems at hand. It's worth noting that DC's neighbor, Baltimore, they've sliced their murder rate in half. And that was in part a product of better and smarter policing. And it was in part a product of like really investing in social services and doing the kind of hard work it takes to identify the community, and the people, and I said communities, I mean, like the blocks, right? Like the neighborhoods. And the people, the individuals who are, you might describe as criminogenic, right, like more

likely to spread crime. And kind of addressing those people and those places in the specific and targeted way. And so I think when you conflate disorder, however you want to, whatever you want to include in that. And I'll say something that, it seems like some of that people include in that just sort of like the ambient noise of cities of just like lots of humanity together. And I think that's also why I'm often kind of like... Trump doesn't want to live in a real city.

He wants to live in Mar-a-Lago where everything is painted gold. I'm often kind of like, let's figure out what we're talking. Like, when you say disorder, do you mean visible homelessness? Do you mean seeing a drug needle on the street, a problem? Or do you mean homelessness is a problem, visible homelessness as well? Or do you mean like working-class black people walk it around? Right? Like, what do you mean here?

And I think it's important to maybe... to force people to specify what they mean when discussing this, but also recognizing that Congress and the administration has been quite hostile to providing D.C. with the kind of resources it needs to, like, address these problems. So it's all theater for the sake of a president who, as David says, wants to punish his enemies and a president who, like, imagines himself as a strong man doing strong man things. Well, and I'm glad you brought up Baltimore because the Baltimore, story is a remarkable story. And it does not involve the U.S. Army. It is a year-on-year crime drop

that's the stuff of dreams almost. It's really amazing. And Jamel, I think that you raise a very good point. There is a difference between crime and disorder, although I think people experience disorder when people experience is often very deeply unsettling. Yeah. And they often feel like that crime is about to happen when they're in the presence of disorder. But, and I think that's a very good point taken, but I think that it's very important to get the word out and to get the message out to American people that, A, blue cities are taking crime very seriously, and B, they're actually achieving results that good things are happening in these cities, because Trump thrives off the sense that nobody is doing anything until I came aboard. So just like Jamel has his hobby

horses, one of my hobby horses is the long tale of the pandemic and how people just thought it was going to snap be all over. So I know in D.C. in particular, the pandemic was devastating for the youth population. And one of the things that Trump has complained about is the youth crime rate in the city. Well, what happened is the pandemic wound up with all these kids on the street, out of school, nowhere to go, lots of trouble to get into. And it took a while for the city to catch up and figure out what, to do about that. And so you've seen, I think, the problem spiked in 2023, and we've been watching it go back down as they try to address what is a very real, very complicated problem that people

just, you know, didn't realize was going to last as long as it did post-pandemic. And when, Michelle, did the massive, massive crime spike, murder spike in particular occur in the United States during Trump's first term in 2020 when he was president. And so the murder rate absolutely spiked in Trump's last year of his presidency. And big cities and American state and local and federal governments have been struggling to get it under control since. But if you look at the arc, it's moving in very strongly positive ways. And that started during the Biden administration. he inherited an absolute crime disaster from Trump 1.0. So the sort of idea that Trump is the guy who can fix crime,

the last American crime disaster occurred under Trump. The thing that the thing, I have a sense that we want to move on, but the last thing I'll say about this, I think this is a very good point, is that in addition to militarization being not particularly helpful when it comes to dealing with problems of crime and disorder, It's also the case that Trump's entire rhetoric of cities opposing them as, again, these housecapes, these dystopian places, these inherently dangerous places, I think can contribute

to attitudes among law enforcement that make dealing with crime more difficult. Like, part of what you need in dealing with violent crime are relationships between the communities that are affected and law enforcement. There has to be a degree of trust between these people. Otherwise, if there is no trust, you're not going to go to a detective and say, hey, this happened, and I know it involved this person. If the president of the United States is spreading paranoia in distrust about these cities and these communities, then I think, you know, this, I feel like I sound like a 90-style conservative here. I think that that kind of rhetoric has a downstream effect on the culture of the country. And in this specific case, in the culture of law enforcement, which already isn't great, right?

Like, well-known fact, culture of American law enforcement could be better. And this doesn't help. So we cannot say that we weren't warned that this would happen. I mean, by Trump himself. He's long been open about his desire to deploy the military against Americans, you know, whether to suppress protest, fight crime, whatever has annoyed him that morning. And he is raring to blur the lines between law enforcement and the military, ostensibly in the name of public safety and order. But looking at this even beyond the sea where he's trying, what are the risks of where he's going? Look, between this LA deployment and this Washington deployment, what he's doing is introducing to the American people really sort of a kind of a slow rollout, although not all that slow, of the idea that, yeah, we could see American troops in American city streets is a thing you're going to see.

This is something that is a part of the fabric of American life. This is, you know, rather than a giant invocation, the Insurrection Act and immediate descent of thousands of thousands of troops in America. many American cities, which would trigger massive protests and response, what you're dealing with is a deployment to L.A., a small deployment to Washington, D.C., a few more to the border. You're leaking it into the American body politic in a way that from a purely kind of Machiavellian sense is kind of shrewd. So, look, that's the most obvious. He's normalizing troop deployments.

That's one thing that's happening. Number two, and this is something I think that needs to be discussed a bit more, is he's pulling the military into his partisan orbit. And by that I don't mean that the military is right now the military itself is being corrupted. What I'm saying is that he is using his commander in chief authority to make the military an instrument of his political ambitions. And you could have the highest ethics in the military. But their compulsion and their requirement that they follow these orders so long as they're lawful means, that as a practical matter, they become his instrument.

And I'm going to tell you, that is terrible for the military. Because they're one of the last institutions that the public has faith in, right? Exactly, exactly. And if a Republican president sort of dragoons them into his political project, then the military, even if it is following lawful orders, even if unwise or, you know, the obligation is you don't follow unlawful orders, you don't get to judge their wisdom. You don't get to say, well, that's a stupid decision to take that hill.

I'm not going to do that, right? And so that is going to pull, and the perception of the millions of American people will be, here are Trump's troops. And I cannot emphasize how dangerous that is for the American military over the long term. And so there's just so many different ways this is dangerous, this is counterproductive, this is ineffective.

So, Jamel, at what point does Trump constantly pressure testing or even circumventing the law come back and bite him, do you think? Oh, I don't. You tend to be more optimistic about these things than I do. I mean, it's not so much optimistic. Like, I start from the premise that Donald Trump is ultimately subject to some level of political gravity and that there are things that the public does, likes and dislikes that affect that. I think at this case, to David's point about the danger this poses to the military and to civilian military relations, which, you know, people, I think people who either have experienced the military who have studied in an academic way, the American military will note that the U.S. has a surprisingly long and pretty good history when it comes to stable and productive relationships between civilian and military leadership. Like this is not a country, right, where we have to worry about a rogue general deciding that they could do a better job leading the country than someone else. There's like a bargain that's been struck between civilian and military leaders in which, you know, everyone stays in their respective lanes.

And this unsettles the bargain and makes that it makes it more likely that we see the kinds of things that we've seen in other countries. But that's not the point I want to make. The point I want to make is that you are deploying American soldiers on a mission that isn't really what they're trained for whatsoever. and may in fact end up reducing morale, right? Like, people don't sign up to go police, you know, a city that they might be from, right? Especially if we were talking National Guard. They're not signing up to police their friends and neighbors or people who are like their friends and neighbors. Not signing up to point guns at people who might have been classmates, right?

And so that that degrades, I think, morale among soldiers. And if we do face an actual emergency that requires the use of military force, we will be facing it with a military that has seen its morale and perhaps its readiness degraded as a result of these actions. I think this is actually a story you can tell about the entire administration across multiple areas. The White House has been on this systematic effort to dismantle the nation's readiness to deal. with all manner of crises. It's really only a stroke of luck thus far that we haven't run into something truly catastrophic. And I'll say even then,

we've had big natural disaster, storms, flooding that have demonstrated the importance of having a competent and professional federal bureaucracy and federal service that can respond to these things. I'm reading right now, the historian Andy Horowitz's book Katrina, History, 1915 to 2015.

And that book, you know, speaks not just of Katrina, but of hurricanes in the 60s, Hurricane the beginning of the 20th century, that were arguably as destructive. If the United States faces something like that, right, in the next couple of years, will we be ready to respond, right? If there is a terrorist attack on American soil,

we'll be ready to respond. You know, politics aside, the danger is that, like, you have to, the country has to be governed. Like, that's the thing that has to happen. Like, the presidency is a real job. I know the president imagines it as basically, sort of like he gets to be America's favorite television character. But like

in reality, this is a real job. And these agencies are real responsibilities. He just, as of our recording, he is nominating for head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, just some hack. No, I mean, no. Complete hack. Yeah. I was supposed to say no offense because I'm

trying to be polite. No, no, offense intended. You intend a fence. That's fine. Like a total hack. A guy who has like one, he has his PhD, one citation, who's done nothing to really Mark himself is qualified for what is a genuinely important position in government and maintaining the integrity of the American economy. It's like, yeah, if things go perfectly well, this is still a terrible decision, but maybe

you can weather it. But as soon as there's like a little something that goes wrong, you've just made a house of cards that will collapse. And that's the danger of all of this. And there's another thing here. Look, so far as a percentage of the military, we're talking about a pretty small percentage of soldiers who are being put into this domestic law enforcement role. But I will tell you, a military is designed to confront and defeat battlefield enemies.

And the more you turn a military into a domestic law enforcement agency, as many dictators do, as many authoritarian do, that doesn't tend to do very much good for the battlefield effectiveness of that military. If you care about American national security, we should be jumping up and down and saying this is not their mission. Their mission needs to be laser focused on the possibility of conflict in Europe, the possibility of conflict in Taiwan. Korea is always volatile. That requires intense focus. We still have some anti-IS fighting to do.

This requires intense focus, training, planning, not diversions into American streets for political theater. I mean, this is one of the things that's made this particularly dispiriting so far is that nobody seems to even know what the goal is here. The National Guard has been dispatched, but the local authorities don't know what they're going to do. They're not going to be making arrests. They're there to protect federal assets, but how are they supposed to be working with local police? It does not give me a great sense of optimism that I should take this seriously as a legitimate effort to help. the district. You know, and I got to love the double game that people in MAGA play. Yeah, Trump is deploying the troops. And then you go, this is dangerous. And they go, stop clutching your

pearls. They're not going to be arresting anybody. She's like, wait, what is it? Yeah. Where are they on all this? I assume they love it, right? Maga? Oh, for sure. Oh, for sure. Yeah, yeah. As soon as he does it, it's, they're all rallying to Trump's defense. Yeah, of course, of course. That's what a real man would do. It's just, it's just like a point about, like, on this readiness question on, like, responsibilities and such. Earlier in the year, the administration basically did layoffs of the FBI. And then it turned a bunch of FBI agents towards immigration enforcement. And now it's turning FBI agents towards domestic law enforcement.

But there are still terror threats. They're still human trafficking. There's still things that the FBI has to attend to as a federal law enforcement agency. And so not to be like the FBI so great. But like, are there threats? are there literal criminal conspiracies that are not being addressed because the FBI is being told

to help arrest a bunch of abuela or being told to sort of like stand on U Street, right? Okay, I would love to think that Americans are getting fed up with Trump's overreach on this. But I mean, honestly, much of the country seems to be going through some jacked-up testosterone at a who's your daddy phase.

So they're ultimately just going to be like, nah, whatever. This, you know, it's just Trump being Trump. One of you tell me I'm wrong. Just please tell me I'm wrong on this. I think Trump has figured out something that is quite unsettling, which is that he does not think or care necessarily if what he does is popular so long as he believes he's more popular than the Democrats.

And so a lot of this polling that shows that, 60% of Americans disapprove of this and 55% improve of that, disapprove of that. I can tell you in MAGA circles, they're not looking that at all. They're looking at polling that says the Republican Party is more popular than the Democratic Party. Now, I think that some of that polling is deceptive because a lot of the disaffection against the Democrats is coming from a left that is very upset with Democrats and is never going to vote Republican. And so I think Republicans might be feeling their oats a bit too much. But this is part of the calculus.

it's not, hey, we need to be popular. It's just that we need to be more popular than those guys. And I think that is where he's pinning his political hopes and where MAGA pins its political hopes. Yeah, I tend to think that that's just not a good strategy. If you stop paying attention on like election night last year, you would have gotten the impression that Donald Trump won a commanding majority of the American public.

But if you just, like, tuned in, and kept following the count for another month and a half, what you would have seen is that, in fact, he got little less than half of the voting public in that election. It was almost a split decision, if you want to use those terms. And under those conditions, your political capital, such that it is, is actually a pretty valuable resource. You don't actually have as much of it as you think.

I think MAGA seems to think of the election as like an enabling act for Trump authoritarianism. But in point of fact, what it was is a small but critical number of Americans said, we want to go back to 2019. That's it. That was the election, right? That was the whole thing. And if I were in Trump's position, I would be very jealous of maintaining my approval to

accomplish my goals, but also really to prevent the bottom from falling out. And I actually think that this is the most poorly constructed car you can imagine. And if there's any bump in the road, the literal bottom falls out. A wheel starts careening off of a car. And the president's approval collapses. You know, what happens when the guy who thinks, imagines himself a dictator, realizes no one likes him? Uh, it doesn't seem great. But, you know, I do think that that's, there's a real risk there.

Even all this gerrymandering stuff, we're not going to talk about it, but like, yeah, okay, gerrymender, whatever. Yeah, don't get me started on that. If the bottom falls out in the national environment next year is D plus seven, D plus eight, then you've just guaranteed yourself like a catastrophic wave election against you. And you lose all those gerrymender seats. So if we're looking at that framework, Jamel, is there anything that you see that Democrats should be doing to increase those bumps and the car falling apart? You know, this is last little conversation of ours of the summer. I'll just repeat something I've been saying all summer. You just got to be aggressive, capture attention.

Don't be afraid of creating waves, even if there's some backlash to you. I think the one thing Trump understands correctly is that it's more important to get your message out than to deal with the backlash, the immediate backlash to you. So just got to be ready to get into the fight, the tussle. Take some punches. Okay. Throw some punches, be willing to take punches. and if you get a cut lip or a black guy, but you're giving the other guy a black guy,

you're in good shape. All right. We're going to give you the last word on that. Guys, it's goodbye for now. The crazy is going to be here when we get back. We got a gubernatorial election in Virginia. I'm excited to talk about that. Oh, yeah.

Yeah, yeah. And don't forget New Jersey. We got New Jersey, too. Yeah, we got an election in Virginia. All right, all right. Point taken. Okay, guys. Thanks so very much.

Have a good one. Thank you, Michelle. Thank you. If you like this show, follow it on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. The Opinions is produced by Derek Arthur, Bashaka Darba,

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