Stop Trying To Make Sense Of Trump's Occupation Of D.C.

The way you know the Trump regime’s occupation of Washington, D.C. is dripping with the nastiest kind of bad faith is the darkly funny presence of American soldiers on the National Mall. 

There is perhaps no safer place in the nation’s capital than the Mall, filled with fanny pack-toting tourists and wide-eyed school children and professional types hurrying back and forth, heads down in their phones, utterly unconcerned about whatever crime is supposed to be happening in every square inch of the city. As far as I'm ever concerned about crime, being on or around the National Mall has never sparked any anxiety in me. It's a nice place. You should see it sometime.

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That the regime is lining up federal troops along the National Mall tells us the emergency Trump has burped out of his weird mouth is a total farce, a complete joke, and in bad faith, like everything fascists do in finding new and awful ways to implement their desired policies. 

There’s been too much thinking – too much analysis – of why Trump is occupying D.C. with troops he sees as his own personal playthings, like a fantasy football team with kevlar and machine guns and big-ass vehicles that used to occupy other countries until – inevitably – our militarism came home to roost. There’s so much roosting going on right now. I look forward to the day when the roosting ends, or at least subsides. I’ve had enough roosting. 

I wrote last month that the country feels occupied, as if a foreign enemy had stormed out shores, jailed and killed those in charge, and taken over. That feeling – that sense of occupation – will only intensify with the regime's attacks on politically unfriendly cities. It is now a mainstream Republican belief that the U.S. military can and should be used to crush the party's opposition.

Over the past few days, since our mad king declared a public safety emergency in the nation’s capital because a couple children punched one of Elon Musk’s DOGE boys in the nose, opponents of the mad king have whipped out the charts and graphs – bigger and brighter than ever – to prove crime is actually down by huge margins in D.C. The numbers, they cry, the numbers.

It’s the Leslie Knope theory of politics – pointing to facts and figures as if they matter in an age of unreality – and it never works because reality – what’s actually happening – doesn’t matter to the American right, and hasn’t for some time. The whole point of piecing together an alternate reality – an unreality – is to give cover to power brokers who wish to use that unreality to make their preferred programs and policies appear reasonable, if not necessary. One doesn’t have to wonder why Trump and his cronies are declaring a crime emergency and taking over the city’s cops while crime is down. Crime is not down in the right-wing reality because Big Balls bloodied on the streets of D.C. Log on to the X platform formerly known as Twitter and you'll see a nation besieged by crime, with white people being brutally assaulted wherever they go. This is reality for tens of millions of our fellow citizens.

It Feels Like An Occupation

Every facet of American life is being taken over by people who recognize no limits on their power or reach

Bad Faith TimesDenny Carter

The right wing propaganda machine kicked into full gear the minute Trump declared D.C.’s crime emergency and announced the city would be invaded and occupied by American troops. Every far-right podcaster and blogger alive suddenly had stories of rampant crime in Washington: They were shot, stabbed, chased, they were kidnapped, their children were attacked, their houses were burned to the ground, mass shootings happened just outside their door, feral teens from Mad Max were riding dangerous vehicles on neighborhood streets, things of that nature. One Republican congressman says he doesn’t buckle his seatbelt in D.C. because he wants to be able to escape during a carjacking. It has seemed over the past three days that one must be a right-wing influencer to have witnessed crime in D.C. 

What really happened is fairly obvious. These fascists once saw an encampment of unhoused people and decided they had no choice but to advocate for the end of American democracy. They looked out their window and saw a group of brown and black youths walking down the sidewalk, bothering no one, and turned off all the lights in their house and hid under the bed while praying the rosary. They ordered a $21 salad in Georgetown and the person taking their order didn’t speak perfect English. A neighbor had a Black Lives Matter sign in their yard five years ago. A car parked down the street has a rainbow bumper sticker on it. Their sister's kid is trans. These are their red-pill moments. These are their rabbit holes to radicalization. They just can’t admit that. 

It's all bad faith rooted in racism, naturally. When the president declares he will save a black city from "savagery, filth, and scum," we know what he's saying. It's hardly even coded. The regime's social media channels have been a hell of a lot less subtle of late. The vile groypers who control those accounts have been clear about the plan for D.C., and it has a lot to do with returning to a bygone era of white dominance of the city. The fascist dance – so big and bland, full of tension and fear – looks frighteningly similar everywhere it catches on. The goon squad has come to town. Beep beep.

There’s no reason to waste time or mental energy trying to understand how the mad king could justify the deployment of federal troops to harass and intimidate D.C. residents (I say this as someone who chronically overanalyzes every single thing that happens in my life). Theories abound: Perhaps Big Balls, also known as 20-year-old Edward Coristine, had become so beloved in fascist circles for slashing aid to developing nations and causing untold thousands of deaths that Trump felt he needed to do something about Little Eddie's public humiliation. Maybe Trump can't deny his inner real estate developer – as The New York Times opined in its latest sane washing of the mad king – and simply must clean up the unclean city that happens to have a large black population. Maybe Trump wants to try out an occupation of a blue city so he can copy and paste in other blue cities ahead of the midterms.

Stop thinking. You're giving him too much credit.

Trump is doing this because he wants to do it, because he now has a pretext to do it after Big Balls got punched, and because there is no one who can stop him. That’s what it comes back to every time: He can act like a king because congressional Republicans and the abominable Republican activists on the Supreme Court have told him explicitly that he can act like a king. He knows he has no limits on his power because every part of the conservative establishment has dropped to their knees and begged him to rule us all. It doesn’t matter at all that Congress needs to approve the president’s emergency crime prevention powers if this occupation is going to last more than thirty days. It will last longer than a month because Trump wants it to last longer than a month. 

After a half century of ceding power to the executive, that’s what we get. The roosting is intensifying. I yearn for less roosting. 

Follow Denny Carter on Bluesky at @dennycarter.bsky.social.