The federal government is everywhere in the District of Columbia — it owns golf courses, public parks, waterfronts, sidewalks, road medians and those little plots of land inside the city’s famous traffic circles. Its hand is in the city’s finances, its courtrooms and its schools. It watches over every law the city passes and every local dollar it spends.

This omnipresence — even before the president took over the city’s police department and deployed the D.C. National Guard this week — has long made many basic aspects of life in Washington harder for local officials to manage.

And now President Trump and his allies in Congress are hammering the District for not managing it all better. Mr. Trump described the capital as a wasteland and vowed a crackdown on crime.

“This is Liberation Day in D.C.,” the president said on Monday, announcing plans to rescue the city from bloodthirsty criminals, roving youth, violent gangs and homeless people. “We’re going to take our capital back.”

But in fact, the capital has in many ways long been controlled — in mundane details and with sweeping consequences, much of it touching criminal justice and quality of life — by the federal government.