A number of high-profile Democrats have held back from directly calling out the authoritarian nature of President Donald Trump’s takeover of Washington, D.C., in part, it appears, because they’re concerned about being perceived as soft on crime. But it’s dangerous for the republic to soft-pedal criticisms of Trump as he experiments with an all-out police state.
Trump, under the guise of fighting crime, has deployed National Guard troops to patrol the streets of the capital and federalized the D.C. police in a shocking abuse of executive power. But Rep. Ritchie Torres, D-N.Y., told The New York Times in an interview that “Democrats should be careful not to cede the issue of public safety to Donald Trump and Republicans.” As the Times puts it, Democrats are “treading cautiously as they seek to forcefully oppose the federal incursion into the nation’s capital, something no president has ever attempted, without getting caught up in a debate over public safety on Mr. Trump’s terms.”
Trump is quickly developing powerful tools that can be used to subvert democracy. That doesn’t call for cautiousness but for alarm.
We see that cautiousness in the way some Democrats describe Trump’s takeover of D.C. as a mere theatrical gesture. In a statement that echoed his social media response to Trump’s recent actions, Maryland Gov. Wes Moore told the Times, “I see this as performative and nothing more.” In a post on X last week, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer called Trump’s takeover of D.C. a “political ploy” and an “attempted distraction from Trump’s other scandals,” and he called out Republicans for being inconsistent on giving “localities their rights.” Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., has called it “political theater” that is intended “to create chaos and uncertainty, and to draw the attention from other issues like Jeffrey Epstein.”
Many of these Democrats have correctly pointed out that D.C. is experiencing a 30-year low in violent crime. But they’ve been hesitant to name what Trump is doing on a substantive level: finding new ways to accumulate powers of repression, surveil civil society and socialize the public to accept the president using the military as a policing tool.
Such cautiousness is a mistake. Democrats need to hammer home that Trump’s actions not only have nothing to do with crime, but also that they have everything to do with seizing autocratic power and chipping away at the foundations of democratic life. In the nation’s capital military vehicles are patrolling civilians. Residents are being made to pull over into arbitrary checkpoints. They're being man-handled by masked law enforcement officers. That’s more than just “performance” — it is the enactment of excessive power.
As Melissa Wasser, senior policy counsel for the ACLU for the District of Columbia, recently wrote for MSNBC: “The aim is clear: Make fear the norm. If we don’t call it out, this playbook will be used again and again.” And she warned against complacency: “People across the country must see this moment for what it is: an authoritarian maneuver to expand executive power at the expense of local democracy.”
I am sympathetic to how hard it is to be a Democrat in the Trump era when it comes to message discipline. Every week there’s a new scandal, a new abuse of power, a new threat to the U.S. economy. If Democrats constantly change their narrative about what the biggest threats to Americans are, then it’ll make it hard for them to have a clear set of messages going into the midterm elections. But it is a matter of (lower-case d) democratic survival for the party to be clear-eyed in describing what Trump is doing in D.C., what he did in Los Angeles and what he has hinted at doing in more cities across the country. And it is important that the (upper-case D) Democrats alert the public to the stakes of what’s going on. Trump is quickly developing powerful tools that can be used to subvert democracy. That doesn’t call for cautiousness but for alarm.
