You Can't Flatter Your Way Out Of Fascism

Washington D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser’s head is all the way in the tiger’s mouth and she’s trying to flatter its jaws open, if only for a moment. 

The idea of negotiating with a tiger when it’s eating you alive is from Winston Churchill, who was mostly wretched but had some banger quotes about fighting fascist aggression. I think of that head-in-tiger’s-mouth quote every time an elected Democrat takes the brave and principled stance of trying – and failing, naturally – to flatter their way out of total tyranny, to soothe the tiger’s ego until it relaxes its jaw and allows its prey to slip out of its mouth, smiling and unscathed. 

Except that never happens. The tiger bites down and blood goes everywhere and you become lunch. 

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Bowser this week thanked the mad king for invading the nation’s capital under the bad-faith pretense that the city’s crime was out of control since a teenager bashed a DOGE boy’s nose on the streets of Washington a few weeks ago. Bowser, who was apparently in the middle of a multi-day camp drop off with her kid in a posh New England town when Trump first occupied her city, told reporters that carjackings in D.C. had fallen since the military takeover, and that she was grateful for Trump’s help in slightly decreasing the number of stolen cars in the city (carjackings in D.C. were already falling precipitously along with most other crime metrics). 

“We greatly appreciate the surge of officers that enhance what MPD has been able to do in this city,” Bowser said at a press conference. “The difference between this 20-day period of this federal surge and last year represents an 87 percent reduction in carjackings.”

To Be Insulted By These Fascists Is So Degrading

It’s no game.

Bad Faith TimesDenny Carter

Bowser offered tepid criticism of the regime’s use of secret police nabbing immigrants – or people who look like immigrants – off Washington streets. “Having masked ICE agents in the community has not worked,” Bowser said. She added the deployment of armed National Guard troops was “an inefficient use of resources,” echoing a bloodless critique of the D.C. occupation offered by Maryland Governor Wes Moore, who bafflingly offered no moral component as to why the president of the United States should not use the military as an occupation force in cities that oppose his fascist agenda. 

As a Marylander, I could hardly be more disappointed in Moore’s technocratic response to the mad king threatening to stage a permanent military takeover of Baltimore. I have no choice but to drown my sorrows in crabs and light beer. 

Back to Bowser: I’m not going to cosplay an expert in D.C. politics. I live within ten miles of Washington and visit the city a dozen times a year. I listen to the local NPR segments dissecting the latest in the various fights between the mayor and the D.C. council (and congressional Republicans who have wanted to destroy Washington self rule for generations), but I am not exactly a Washington politics knower. So maybe Bowser has some good reason to capitulate to Trump and appeal to his giant, oozing ego as he runs her city illegally. 

Perhaps Bowser is publicly thanking the mad king for conquering her city because she so desperately wants a new stadium in the District and Trump would take great pleasure in killing that project if she so much as hinted that she doesn’t appreciate the occupation of the city that elected her for some reason (if Bowser thinks she’s going to get the king’s approval for a new stadium without the Washington Commanders changing their name back to their former slur name, she’s in for a terrible surprise). Maybe the cost for a new state-of-the-art stadium is thanking D.C. 's occupier for occupying it. Seems like a steep price.

Maybe Bower has been told that Trump’s troops will come after her and any other city official who speaks out about his tyrannical rampaging, the remaking of the city in his disgusting image. She doesn’t want to be prosecuted by a rogue Justice Department or hauled off to jail. I get that. Maybe she’s compromised, like everyone else in the Trump orbit, and she desperately does not want to be exposed by the sundowning mob boss slobbering all over the Oval Office. I get that too. 

Whatever the reason for Bower’s acquiescence to a total takeover of the city she’s supposed to represent, it’s a bad look and it undermines every other mayor and governor telling their constituents and the regime that a military occupation of their cities would be immoral, unnecessary, undemocratic, and flat-out fucking wrong. Bowser and powerless 88-year-old congressional D.C. House representative Eleanor Holmes Norton – who hasn’t been seen in public for months and who encapsulates the unforgivable failings of the Democratic Party’s geritocracy – are doing no favors of other public officials who could soon face the wrath of Trump’s military. They undercut anti-fascist resistance every day.

It’s this weakness on display in D.C. that infuriates those who oppose Trump. It’s why the Democratic Party’s approval is circling the fucking drain even as the mad king’s approval drops precipitously by every conceivable measure. People opposed to this shit want strength from their leaders. They want fearlessness. Bowser is among the many, many Democrats who have shown nothing but weakness and spinelessness in the face of tyranny. Bowser is under the impression that one can flatter oneself out of authoritarian domination. She’s not the first one in history to think enough nice words, enough compliments, enough capitulating, will function as a ticket out of the tiger’s mouth. Probably she won’t be the last. But like every other public figure who has tried to sweet talk their way from between those razor sharp teeth, Bowser will fail. She will eventually be Trump’s lunch. 

How The Anti-Fascism Thing Is Done

It’s not as if Democratic officials don’t have an example to follow. Illinois Governor JB Pritzker, a longtime Bad Faith Times favorite, gave an impassioned warning last week for the king not to send his military to Chicago, another city Republicans fear for reasons that are painfully obvious, but that no one acknowledges for fear of giving away the bad-faith game. 

Not only did Pritzker reject a hostile takeover of Chicago as plain-as-day fascism; he explicitly reminded regime officials and their secret police that there are people in power today taking down the names of those who commit crimes against the republic and its people. It was refreshing to hear an elected Democrat saying without apology that he will not let this criminal behavior go unpunished, that there will be a price to pay for those having a whole lot of fun during this fascist free for all, that there is a tomorrow, and in that tomorrow, the bill will come due. 

Finally, to the Trump administration officials who are complicit in this scheme, to the public servants who have forsaken their oath to the Constitution to serve the petty whims of an arrogant little man, to any federal official who would come to Chicago and try to incite my people into violence as a pretext for something darker and more dangerous: we are watching and we are taking names.  This country has survived darker periods than the one that we are going through right now, and eventually the pendulum will swing back, maybe even next year. Donald Trump has already shown himself to have little regard for the many acolytes that he has encouraged to commit crimes on his behalf.  You can delay justice for a time, but history shows you cannot prevent it from finding you eventually. If you hurt my people, nothing will stop me, not time or political circumstance, from making sure that you face justice under our constitutional rule of law.

Pritzker has spoken forcefully and eloquently about refusing to compromise with fascism. In the first days of the second Trump regime, Pritzker told his constituents that they would have to be brave and principled in the face of the fascist fury that was going to define the coming years. He didn't shy away from the horror, and he didn't imply that there was a path back to pre-Trump normalcy (there's not, as the Biden people found out so rudely and predictably). In sober and straightforward ways, Pritzker has been one of the few elected Democrats to grapple with the reality of a declining democracy sliding into competitive authoritarianism, the last step before totalitarianism.

There are, thankfully, examples of nations that stopped the slide before it was too late. All of them had honest and forthright leaders – like our guy JB – and functioning courts, which we mostly have if you discount the highest court in the land, a compromised and captured institution that must be destroyed and remade at our earliest convenience.

Pritzker might as well have been talking directly to Bowser when he pleaded with fellow elected pro-democracy leaders not to play ball with the tyrant betraying the country with his every breath. There is no threshold of sweet talk you can achieve to make Trump go away, Pritzker says. No tyrant in history has ever done a solid for his opposition because they were just so fucking nice to him.

"Cooperation and coordination between our states is vital to the fabric of our nation and it benefits us all. Any action undercutting that and violating the sacred sovereignty of our state to cater to the ego of a dictator will be responded to," Pritzker said during his recent address. "The state of Illinois is ready to stand against this military deployment with every peaceful tool we have. We will see the Trump administration in court. We will use every lever at our disposal to protect the people of Illinois and their rights."

Washington leaders should be in the streets every day calling for an end to the D.C. occupation, making a public and media spectacle of an intolerable violation of the city's autonomy. Instead we see Bowser, calculating and afraid, lavishing praise on the sociopathic occupier of her beautiful city, believing wholeheartedly that she can talk sense into a ravenous tiger before he bites down. Good luck to the mayor.

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