It’s worth noting, before the apologetics start, focusing on DC’s role as a federal enclave and mostly eliding the obvious falsity of his claim, necessary under the federal Home Rule Act, that “special conditions of an emergency nature exist,” that Donald Trump is not only talking about effectively turning the District of Columbia into a piece of American territory patrolled by the American military via the National Guard. He is also threatening “to expand such efforts to other cities, including Chicago, if they did not deal with crime rates he claimed were ‘out of control.'” That is to say, he is arguing that the executive branch should federalize and militarize law enforcement in some number of non-federal enclave cities of his choice. (He is, of course, naming substantially Democratic-voting cities in substantially Democratic-voting states, not those in substantially Republican-voting states, regardless of whether the crime rate is up or down and regardless of whether those other cities in fact have higher, and increasing, rates of violent crime. This is fully in keeping with his general tendency to, on the one hand, justify extraordinary executive power on the ground that he represents all the people and, on the other, treat different parts of the country differently on grounds of either partisan politics or sheer personal dislike. It is hardly surprising that a president who believes a substantial portion of the country is enemy territory would look to the troops.)
Of course this may not come to pass. But that is hardly reason not to note the concern and the substantial possibility that it will. After all, his criteria for what does or doesn’t constitute a justification for acting are largely arbitrary. Moreover, he gets irrationally angry when people question his bases for acting, and his legal apologists, who in some cases have apparently decided that the best (or most prudent) way to justify Trump’s actions is to remain entirely silent about Trump’s actions, seem to confuse a (rebuttable) presumption of regularity for either actual regularity (which they know not to be the case) or an absolute, indefeasible fact of regularity. Both of these things blunt the possibility of effective pushback. Finally, his theory of executive staffing and his management of the executive branch are designed to guard against people who might “betray” him by giving sober, honest advice or telling him what he can’t, needn’t, or shouldn’t do. So, yes, the possibility that he will seek to militarize and federalize law enforcement in larger swaths of the United States than just the capital should be taken seriously.
Although his impulse is obviously authoritarian, I think it should be understood in somewhat different terms. So far as I can see, Trump is not enormously curious about things like federalism, subsidiarity, or even executive power. His vision, rather, is rather crude, cumulative, and hierarchical. Executives are powerful, and the president is the biggest executive there is, so the president must be more powerful across any dimension than any other executive. Mayors and governors have a lot of toys to play with. And if they have them, surely he gets to have them too, across an unlimited roving jurisdiction that has nothing to do with whether something is or isn’t a federal enclave or a federal role. Vance may have a more complicated, German-authority-citing view of executive power, and his intellectual cadre are busily developing their own bases for being indifferent to federalism and hostile to things like a distinction between public and private. With Trump, however, I don’t know that one need complicate things in that fashion. Sheriffs, mayors, and governors get to do things; he wants to do those things too; and no one, including those best positioned and most morally or intellectually obliged to do so, is going to tell him any different.
Posted by Paul Horwitz on August 11, 2025 at 02:19 PM