Their reaction to Trump’s D.C. police takeover is unconvincing.
W ashington Democrats have determined that a dysfunctional and wholly dependent geographic entity, which has a reputation for terrorizing its neighbors, deserves to be rewarded with statehood. But enough about Gaza.
Donald Trump’s edict taking “direct federal control” of law enforcement in Washington, D.C., for 30 days, barring congressional approval of a longer mission — a maneuver accompanied by the deployment of the National Guard to the capital city — has had its intended effect on the Democratic Party.
The initiative prompted the X handle “@TheDemocrats” to insist, with all the passion that unnecessary capitalization is supposed to convey, that it’s time for “STATEHOOD FOR D.C.” — a proposition that roughly two-thirds of Americans opposed when it was last a live issue in 2019. Legacy media outlets tripped over themselves to warn that the threat to the integrity of D.C.’s “homeless encampments” represented an intolerable encroachment on the rights of vagrants and their host cities. Too many Democrats to count insisted that Washington’s violent crime rate had substantially declined, presumably to the point of negligibility. “The crime scene in D.C. most damaging to everyday Americans is at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries wrote, by way of example. Even suggesting that D.C. had a crime problem was evocative of the “racist narratives” promulgated by white supremacists “to shape public opinion and justify aggressive police action,” according to no less a venue than the Associated Press.
The president and his allies must be astounded by the degree to which their political opponents are so easily manipulated by the president. The objections to the D.C. takeover expressed by the opposition party and their allies in the press afford Trump’s allies opportunities for one layup after another. And the administration has a point.
As pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson observed, by relying on the statistics (notwithstanding their questionable veracity) to contend that crime in the district isn’t all that bad, Democrats are falling into the very trap they set for themselves throughout the Biden administration in relation to inflation. Democrats kept asserting, often with the support of relevant data, that inflation was cooling. Voters kept responding by conveying to them via public opinion surveys that their personal experience with inflation was unendurable, cooling or not. It was hard to blame voters for concluding that Democrats had accepted the insufferable status quo as the new normal. It’s even harder to blame them for rejecting that premise.
Likewise, by arguing that D.C.’s violent crime rate has fallen lower than it was over the last several years, Democrats are implicitly arguing that the post-2020 status quo represents a new baseline crime rate we must simply accept. The argument Democrats don’t seem to know they’re making is that a certain amount of street crime is a quirky feature of the urban scene.
That’s not savvy politics. At some level, Democrats must know it. Or perhaps they simply forgot how to avoid taking the president’s bait. A cleverer response to what Democrats regard as a provocation by the president is not hard to envision.
The president’s suspension of home rule in the District was supposedly occasioned by the assault on a one-time DOGE staffer, but, by the administration’s own admission, there was no single precipitating event. The White House insists this was a long-delayed response to a general atmosphere of criminality. Okay. So are federal law enforcement and Guard forces deployed to the district empowered to do policework? Will they be making arrests and conducting investigations? Are they merely a presence designed to deter criminality? What are these soldiers and agents of the federal government not doing while they are deployed to the capital? The president has talked about the need for “rough” policing. Are there directives to that effect? Etc.
Democrats might insist that they need answers to these questions, and Republicans in Congress should want them, too. Let’s have committee hearings, subpoena witnesses and documents, and so on.
In this fashion, a competent political opposition might put the governing party on the backfoot. Pointed but good faith inquiries like these might raise some questions among fair-minded observers that the president and his subordinates could feel compelled to answer. At the very least, allowing these questions to fester unanswered is damning by implication.
We’ve seen precisely none of that. Instead, we’ve been privy to what is by now a boring and reflexive tic on the part of progressive activists and the lawmakers who cater to them in which the president’s ephemeral power grabs are said to represent the descent of authoritarianism across the land. But on that score, the Democratic Party has cried wolf once too often.
We have a pretty recent example of this phenomenon. The president’s deployment of National Guardsmen and Marines to Los Angeles in June to play a supporting role in the LAPD’s efforts to quell localized riots was denounced in a similarly hyperbolic fashion. It was “unconstitutional” and “downright un-American,” said Senator Patty Murray. Trump sought to “provoke chaos” and sow “fear,” Kamala Harris agreed. “Democracy is under assault before our eyes,” said California Governor Gavin Newsom, fretting that “this moment we have feared has arrived.” To New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg, the deployments were a prelude to “martial law” in America. This is “what autocracy looks like,” she warned.
In fact, the uniformed personnel in L.A. conducted themselves professionally and lawfully. And when the mission was over, they quietly folded the operation. One wonders if the Democrats who tore at their garments in full public view during the L.A. deployments have revised their assessment of that operation, or whether they just moved on to the next assault on the very foundations of the republic.
It’s not just that the Democratic Party has become hostage to its emotions and is, therefore, uniquely susceptible to elementary psychological manipulation. It seems to have forgotten the basics of political communication, the first rule of which, if you’re in the opposition, is to convey to the voting public that you are suited to leadership. Democrats aren’t leading anything. Rather, they’re reacting, and reaction tends to be improvisatory.
In his New York Times column, David Brooks once made note of the 1951 observation by political scientist Samuel Lubell that American politics follows a cosmic dynamic. There is a “sun party,” which sets the agenda, and a “moon party,” which shines only because it is reflecting the light cast on it. In 2011, Brooks determined that U.S. politics was bereft of a sun; it was beset by two moons, both struggling to eke out a majority coalition by presenting itself as the beset minority incapable of realizing its own objectives.
Brooks’s diagnosis was arguable in the Obama years and in Trump’s first term. It seemed incontrovertibly true during Joe Biden’s administration. But it no longer pertains. The Republican Party — really, Donald Trump — calls the tune, and everyone dances to it, including the people who despise him.