What’s Life Like in Washington, D.C., During Trump’s Takeover?

On Thursday evening in Washington, D.C., the weird juxtapositions of life in this city, eleven days into the Trump Administration’s unprecedented takeover of the District’s local law enforcement, were on full display. Around dinnertime, Donald Trump made a rare foray outside the White House into the streets—though only as far as a U.S. Park Police facility. Earlier in the day, his visit had sounded as if it might be a bigger production, something with some Presidential gravitas, or the flashy authoritarian menace he favors. Trump had told the conservative radio host Todd Starnes that he was “going out tonight, I think, with the police, and with the military, of course.” The right-wing activist Charlie Kirk could barely contain his excitement, posting on X that “President Trump is going out on patrol tonight in DC. Shock and awe. Force. We’re taking our country back from these cockroaches. Just the start.” In the end, Trump’s “patrol” consisted of a rambling speech to several hundred federal agents, National Guardsmen, and local police, in which he praised them for looking “healthy” and “attractive,” announced that “everybody’s safe now,” and talked about “re-grassing” the city, so that it would more closely resemble the “Trump National Golf Club.” He left pizza from a place called Wiseguy and burgers from the White House kitchen for the assembled law-enforcement agents, and split.

Across town on the National Mall, meanwhile, soldiers from various states’ National Guard units that Trump had summoned to deal with what he’d described as “bedlam” in the city were patrolling a pastoral twilight scene: tourists in matching neon T-shirts, co-workers playing softball, locals walking dogs, on an uncharacteristically fresh and temperate late-August evening. The museums that line the Mall had closed for the day, and twenty or so Guard troops were sitting at picnic tables eating takeout barbeque—ribs, corn, mashed potatoes—in Styrofoam clamshells. When I asked where they were from, they said “Louisiana.” Earlier in the week, National Guard troops had begun arriving from six states with Republican governors who had complied with Trump’s orders to help bring D.C. to heel: Ohio, West Virginia, South Carolina, Mississippi, Tennessee, and Louisiana. Major cities in those last three states—Jackson, Memphis, and New Orleans—all have murder rates significantly higher than D.C.’s.

I had spoken with Christina Henderson, an at-large member of the D.C. city council who had posted a video in which she strolled around the national monuments, wondering what D.C.’s own National Guard was doing there. She was even more puzzled by the introduction of the other states’ troops. “I mean, Louisiana? It’s hurricane season. The Gulf of Mexico is right there—you might have an emergency in your own state in a week,” she told me. “And Jackson, Mississippi, as far as I know, your water system still does not work, and you’re sending National Guard troops here?” If the crime emergency that Trump had invoked were “real,” and the city’s own law enforcement was incapable of handling it, Henderson said, then surely the neighboring states, Virginia and Maryland, many of whose residents commute to D.C. every day, would have sent National Guard troops. (Virginia’s Republican governor, Glenn Youngkin, said that he hadn’t been asked, but that D.C. is “extremely dangerous”; Maryland’s Democratic governor, Wes Moore, told CNN he was “heartbroken” that the Guard had been deployed for these purposes, and that he sent the Maryland Guard out only “in cases of emergency and true crises.”)

The National Guard soldiers I spoke with wouldn’t tell me what they thought of their mission, but, when I asked how they liked D.C., several proclaimed it “very nice” and said that they hoped to see more of it.

Meanwhile, pop-up protests were happening around the city, as they had been all week. It is true, as some commentators have noted, that Washington has not yet seen a mass protest against Trump’s show of force. The resistance the city has mounted is, in some ways, a microcosm of the resistance to Trump that has been launched nationally over the last few months: intermittent, lacking in robust leadership, especially from the Democratic Party, and perhaps disillusioned by the fading impact of large-scale demonstrations such as the 2017 Women’s March.

Still, in a Washington Post poll conducted last week, eight in ten D.C. residents said that they opposed the federal takeover of the local police and the presence of troops in the streets. And, if you drive around the city, there are plenty of signs of that disapproval. People are filming ICE arrests and confronting the agents, who are often masked and drive unmarked cars, about what they are doing. My neighborhood Nextdoor listserv, which is normally filled with recommendations for plumbers, pictures of pets, and a certain amount of handwringing about property crime, was now studded with warnings about ICE sightings around town. Fans of the local women’s pro soccer team, the Washington Spirit, spontaneously broke out into chants of “Free D.C.!” at a game last week. A Banksy-style graffiti image of a figure hurling a sub sandwich started appearing all over town—a tribute to Sean Charles Dunn, a thirty-seven-year-old former Justice Department employee who had thrown one, from Subway, at federal officers stationed on a street corner. (Jeanine Pirro, the Trump-appointed U.S. Attorney for D.C., charged Dunn with felony assault, a crime that can carry up to eight years in federal prison.)

And on Thursday night several hundred people gathered at the corner of U and Fourteenth Streets, the hub of a famous historically Black neighborhood, for a pro-D.C. rally. The day before, the White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller had made an appearance along with Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and Vice-President J. D. Vance at Union Station, where the National Guard and its armored vehicles had been on prominent view. The event had attracted protesters, and Miller had derided them as “elderly white hippies,” who are “not part of this city and never have been.” He added that “most of the citizens who live in Washington, D.C., are Black.” (D.C. was a Black-majority city until 2011; today about forty per cent of its residents are Black.) But the rally on Thursday evening was organized by Black activists, and all the speakers were Black, as were perhaps half the attendees. It featured plenty of go-go, the funk music with a strong D.C. identity. When Kelsye Adams, of the organization D.C. Vote, spoke to the gathering, she offered energetic shout-outs to go-go, D.C. natives, and D.C. statehood. “Give us full autonomy to run our city now!” she said. “Make some noise for D.C. statehood!” As Adams checked off the names of the federal agencies, starting with ICE, that are now policing the city streets, the crowd booed. “Guess what?” she said. “We didn’t want them here!”

It’s not hard to imagine a scenario in which Trump will treat this occupation as a performative stunt. In a few weeks, he might declare victory—something that he loves to do prematurely—and claim that he’s cleaned up the hellhole that was D.C. And he’ll try and move on to another Democratic-led city—Chicago, perhaps, or New York. He’s already been boasting about how much safer D.C., a place he’d said was on the brink of “complete and total lawlessness” a little more than a week ago, has become. “Friends are calling me up, Democrats are calling me up,” Trump said on Monday in the Oval Office, seated next to Ukraine’s President, Volodymyr Zelensky. “And they’re saying, ‘Sir, I want to thank you. My wife and I went out to dinner last night for the first time in four years, and Washington, D.C., is safe and you did that in four days.’ ” (I’ve lived in the city for thirty years and I don’t know anyone who’s afraid to eat out.) But, as it happens, restaurant bookings last week were down as much as thirty per cent over the same week last year, possibly because people aren’t eager to go out in a city where they might be stopped at a traffic checkpoint manned by ICE and Homeland Security or have to dodge one of the outsized armored transports known as MRAPs, for “mine-resistant, ambush-protected” vehicles, that the Guardsmen are tooling around in. (Last Wednesday, one of the MRAPs ran a red light and crashed into a car, injuring a civilian.) Maybe when Trump picks a new target, D.C. will go back to being what it is, a city with a largely Democratic citizenry who aren’t allowed to send a voting member to Congress—a reasonably vibrant, reasonably high-functioning American city, with housing that’s too expensive and a crime problem that is real but improving. Then again, because the President is angry at D.C.’s mayor, Muriel Bowser, for calmly pointing out that D.C.’s violent crime rate was falling before all this, he may seek to punish the District with further aggressive incursions on D.C.’s home rule. “Mayor Bowser better get her act straight,” he said on Friday, “or she won’t be mayor very long because we’ll take it over with the federal government, run it like it’s supposed to be run.”

And besides, damage has already been done. Trump has now partially normalized the idea of using federal troops for local law enforcement, a practice for which Americans have long maintained a healthy skepticism. Joseph Nunn, a legal scholar at the Brennan Center who focusses on domestic uses of the military, told me, “I think what we are seeing here is the Trump Administration further inserting the military into routine law enforcement in a way that has no precedent in this country’s history, except perhaps for the period of military Reconstruction in the former Confederacy. The last person who asserted the authority to use military personnel for routine law enforcement anywhere in the country for any reason was King George.”

I asked Nunn what he thought about the prospect that some of the National Guard troops deployed in D.C. would henceforth be armed. On Friday, Hegseth made it official: Guard troops can now carry weapons. “It’s already one thing to have military personnel in uniform standing on street corners,” Nunn said. “That already sends a message, and it’s not one we associate with living in a free society. If they are armed, that sends a still stronger message.”

Trump’s project has emboldened ICE agents in frightening ways, too. On the night of August 13th, just a couple of days after Trump’s takeover began, ICE and Homeland Security agents, together with D.C. police officers, manned a hastily established traffic checkpoint in the Fourteenth Street night-life corridor, which may well have been of dubious legality. (A Supreme Court ruling in 2000, Indianapolis v. Edmond, held that traffic checkpoints for purposes of generalized crime prevention violate the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution. And there would, at the very least, be questions as to whether D.C.’s location, within a hundred miles of a maritime border, had suddenly authorized customs and border-patrol agencies to conduct searches of cars in the middle of town.) In the diverse but historically Latino Mount Pleasant neighborhood, ICE agents tore down a handpainted banner condemning the agency, and then posted a video of themselves doing it. (A new version of the banner was back up by the end of the week.) The Washington Post reported that ICE is “seeking to spend millions of dollars on SUVs and custom, gold-detailed vehicle wraps emblazoned with the words ‘DEFEND THE HOMELAND.’ ” Many agents continue to be masked, to drive unmarked vehicles, to conduct snatch-and-grab arrests in broad daylight, and to answer absolutely no questions. In videos that circulated widely last week, six men—presumably ICE agents, though their vests said only “Police,” so who knows—are seen tackling a moped-riding delivery driver to the ground—he had just emerged from a café on Fourteenth Street with an order. One of the unidentified “police” tells passerbys and reporters who are asking what agency he’s with to “shut the fuck up.” When someone shouts “You guys are ruining this country,” an agent answers, “Liberals already ruined it.” (According to the Washington Post, after videos of the moped driver being hustled away in a black car were shared on social media, and reporters continued to ask questions about the incident, a Department of Homeland Security spokeswoman identified the detained man as a Venezuelan national who she said had illegally entered the United States in 2023.)

At the rally last week, I talked with Robert White, Jr., another at-large member of the city council, who was there to address the crowd. I asked him what he and other local officials were hearing about who these agents were and what they were doing. “Federal government is telling us very little,” White said. “A part of it is that they’re not well organized, but part of it is deliberate.” He added, “For all the people that have been snatched up by ICE agents, even as a government official, I cannot tell you where they are. No one I know in the government can tell you where they are. Imagine,” he said, “if that was your family member.” ♦