Big Takeover

DC as home and warning

The morning after Donald Trump sent federal authorities across the District of Columbia, I left for my morning run wary and mindful of the city I’m so fortunate to call home. DC was wrapping up a blissful ten days of near-perfect, low-humidity weather and slipping back into its dense, milky August air, the kind of weather that makes distance running feel less enjoyable and energizing and more like I’m paying penance for some forgotten sin.

One of the things I love about running is the way it connects me to the topography of the District, forcing me to confront its hills, grow familiar with its thoroughfares, and develop a detailed mental model of the city in all climates—where the trees provide the most shade in the summer, where rain will block otherwise open paths, which intersections are downright dangerous to try and cross on foot at any hour (looking at you, Florida and H Street NE). Despite the propaganda of the Trump White House, I’m rarely afraid for my physical safety in DC, but it has happened–the man who flashed his genitals from his car after asking for directions, the man who asked me for change on the metro then tried to sit practically in my lap when I said no, the time while running across the Benning Road Bridge I saw a discarded 9mm pistol just lying on the sidewalk (I called 311 and a city worker picked it up).

Being trans, I’m also statistically more likely to experience violent crime from a stranger, and yet I’m also aware of how feeling safe is not the same as being safe, with the former so often weaponized against the very people unlikely to be the latter and reliant on a perception of safety filtered through prejudices and agitprop. I feel particularly safe while running even though I’m at my most vulnerable—far from home, always alone, armed with nothing but a cell phone and housekey strapped to a spandex belt. But the sight of a running girl (and, it should be said, a running white girl at that) in DC is so typical, so expected—On Monday, a brief clip of flak-jacketed officers strolling along the reflecting pool of the Lincoln Monument went viral, the dissonance of their presence heightened by a jogging brunette idling past them. Her mere presence is a stand-in for safety and banality in contrast to the jackboots and assault rifles of federal officers and camo-clad troops.

I’m concious this is an assumption not afforded to others–shortly before the 2020 murder of George Floyd would launch international protests against racist police violence, three men in Georgia shot and killed Ahmaud Arbery while he was jogging. The New York Times ran a series of responses from their readers on the experiences of “running while Black” including the run-ins with suspicious cops, the warnings given to their children, the mace they carry. “I run more than 20 miles a week,” one runner told the Times. “And each mile is not a carefree mile. I carry the weight and burden of the fears of what may be a harmful or detrimental experience that is undocumented and unjustified.”

In general, much of the discourse (including my own) about the federalization of DC is focused on rebutting the claims made by Trump and his confederacy of sycophants and cable news hosts. Not only is violent crime in the District is at a 30-year-low, but where violent crime does occur (largely in the neighborhoods southeast of the Anacostia’s bend) is not where federal officials have become most visible this week. A map of engagements by federal law enforcement in the city compiled by The Washington Post shows them doing traffic stops and harassing food delivery drivers in the city’s gentrified Northwest neighborhoods, disrupting weekend partygoers and arresting people for low-level offenses like smoking weed in public.

When footage spread of federal officers walking through, of all places, Georgetown, it was clear to most the entire takeover of DC was not about being tough-on-crime but was simply another means of “traumatizing” the federal workforce, the educated liberal elite of the city, and anyone else who may resist Trump’s rising authoritarianism and its accompanying ideologies. These are not the people most at risk of the invasion’s worst effects—that would be the homeless people now having their few possessions rounded up or the undocumented people likely to be targeted by the city police department’s newfound cooperation with federal immigration officials. But we are plainly the audience—video spread yesterday of ICE officers taking a parodic photo by an “immigrants are welcome here” banner in Mount Pleasant before tearing down the sign and leaving behind a dildo. As far as these people are concerned, we are the elitist “deep state” Marxists waging a war on “heritage Americans” and DC is nothing more than a treehouse they get to raid.

Their ability to do so is of course enabled by the fact that DC is not a state, and 150 years of denying the District statehood has rested on a combination of racism and redbaiting. During a Senate vote ultimately removing the District’s ability to elect its own mayors and city council in 1890—not coincidentally the decade when the District’s Black population numbers began to overtake it’s white population—one southern Senator justified his vote by claiming “you burn down the barn to get rid of the rats, the rats being the Negro population and the barn being the government of the District of Columbia.” In his book Revolting Capital tracking over a century of Black resistance to federal incursion on DC’s self-determination, the historian Gerald Horne recounts a 1959 interview by one Congressman “bitterly opposed to home rule” over fears the “Negro situation” might cause “revolutions arising from the local populace to overthrow the government” and that statehood for DC would only bring “two U.S. Senators controlled by Socialistic influences.”

It’s hard not to hear echoes of that history in Trump and Republican’s own derisions of not just DC but major cities in general, rhetoric that is meant to not only spread racist fears but justify a denial of self-determination and self-governance for the residents of those cities. At the heart of Donald Trump’s lies about the 2020 presidential election were false claims that votes from diverse metropolitan centers in states like Michigan, Wisconsin, and Georgia were rife with fraud and not to be trusted. In the gerrymandering war currently unfolding between Texas and California, its the specter of racially-diverse cities that Greg Abbott and Texas Republicans are relying on to justify a map that would leave Austin of all places with a Republican member of Congress. Announcing the takeover of DC, Trump listed off other cities—al with Black mayors—he’d also like to send the National Guard, including Baltimore, Chicago, and Oakland. I even suspect it’s what’s behind the tepid non-endorsements of Zohran Mamdani for New York City mayor by many in the Democratic establishment, even after Trump threatened to have Mamdani denaturalized and deported and cozied up to Mamdani’s chief competition, Andrew Cuomo.

The stated fears of crime in these discourses is and has always been a farce—not because violent crime isn’t real, but because it’s use as rhetorical wedge to deny these cities self-governance is a white supremacist power play. Helping those with no conception of DC understand the ludicrous nature of soldiers standing guard outside of a Soulcycle in Georgetown is useful, but rebutting claims of crime in the District with facts—or worse, attempting to give them creedence by promising more tough-on-crime politics from city officials—misunderstands the dynamics at play. “You’re never going to get the city so clean that [Republicans] give it statehood,” political reporter David Weigel said of the District, “unless it started voting like West Virginia.”

West Virginia, not coincidentally, is one of (as I’m writing this) three Republican-controlled states that will be sending hundreds of National Guard troops to the District, nearly doubling the total to 1,500, many of whom will now apparently be armed. What they will be doing in DC is yet to be determined given the troops already here don’t seem to be up to much. Running through the city this week, I had my eye out for the khaki camo Humvees of the National Guard, having seen videos of them wandering around the Washington Monument, or flak-jacketed DEA and FBI agents. They mostly seem to be doing what everyone else is doing—staring at their phones.

The sight of them reminded me of the summer of 2020, when Trump responded to protests following the murder of George Floyd with tear gas, photo ops, and notably, military helicopters buzzing fifty feet off the ground between buildings downtown. It was then a terrifying sight, but one that seemed to energize a city quite used to being ignored and exploited by a government in which it had no real representation and a capped level of self-governance. The day following that night of the helicopters in June 2020, I marched alongside tens of thousands of others down 16th Street Northwest toward the White House, high on the connection of mass movements and wary of the terror I had felt seeing peaceful protesters kettled into rowhomes by armed soldiers just hours before.

It was, up to that point, the least safe I had ever felt since moving to DC. It was only topped six monts later when, one late chilly January morning, I went for a run between Zoom calls around Capitol Hill. As a frightened Capitol Police officer informed me and other pedestrians, the Trump rally I was told was taking place that day nearly two miles away at the Ellipse was actually storming the Capitol itself at that very moment. While the National Guard was notably nowhere to be seen that day, the entire neighborhood of Capitol Hill—an actual residential area with schools, churches, markets, and apartment blocks—was sent into lockdown.

A repeat of this in the coming federal election cycles is genuinely my biggest fear of the deployment of these troops. As far as Trump and the right are concerned, any election they lose is thus “stolen” and any power that is not their own is, ipso facto, illegitimate. In the 8 months since returning to office, Trump and his ilk have shown a particular fetish for turning the tools used against them in defense of democratic self-governance against those who dare provide checks and balances to their authoritarianism, such that arrests of Democratic lawmakers or liberal judges are excused away with “nobody is above the law,” the same mantra Democrats relied on during Trump’s many prosecutions and investigations. It is not hard to see this pattern returning in a prolonged occupation of Washington, DC designed not only to intimidate the city’s residents or terrorize its most vulnerable but put in place an armed show of force to defend whatever authoritarian power grab may yet be left to come.

The un-democracy experienced by DC—heightened this week but prevalent across 250 years of history—is clearly the goal of the authoritarian right for the country as a whole. Despite the fact that most Americans now live in a city, the right views cities as a threat to the national identity, and DC’s lack of home rule renders it particularly vulnerable to the kind of revanchist militancy they clearly want to use to tame all diverse, queer, and liberal urban centers. DC is and has always been a laboratory for the weakening of representative government. Because Los Angeles was the first city Trump sent the National Guard to in his second term, Gavin Newsom felt the need this week to tell DC “welcome to the club.” Respectfully, DC founded the club.

I will never understand the kind of person whose sense of safety is increased by the sight of masked armed men tackling their neighbors or soldiers equipped for warfare standing guard on their daily commute. I have always feared power more than strangers and, being a transgender woman, am concious of how feeling unsafe because of hypotheticals fueled by constructed nightmares can be weaponized to increase the actual risks faced by those on the margins. These guards around DC do not make me afraid for my own physical well-being but they do make me fear for my home, this city and its people.

As Horne writes in Revolting Capital, DC has always been a thematic contradiction at the heart of American empire, a colony at the service of a national government that swears it represents the home of the free. Lately I have come to realize how central a home is to the material reality of freedom, that where one is at home they must also be free to determine the conditions of that home, that this is the very function of democracy itself. The consquences of losing it—or perhaps never having it—are nothing as abstract as feeling less safe but, in fact, being less safe, bound as you are to the will of people who may object to your very existence.

This is as equally true of one’s own body as it is of one’s neighborhood, city, and country. That self-determination has never existed for DC should be a warning for anyone else who has found themselves running and working and living in their own city, taking for granted the sense of belonging they have. Not because your city may also be subject to this armed occupation—though it may—but because of how that denial of self-determination is, and always has been, at the center of American power itself.