Donald Trump isn’t simply trying to remake the federal authorities. He has his sights set on town of Washington, too.
In his first few weeks in workplace, the president has moved to drastically alter the material of the nation’s capital.
He ordered hundreds of Washington-area federal employees to return to the workplace — a few of whom his administration is shifting to put off. He injected himself and his allies onto the board of the John F. Kennedy Heart to recast “woke” performing artwork tradition. And town’s mayor mentioned she has been briefed on a pending govt order on subjects like public security and homeless encampments within the metropolis.
The flurry of actions drives residence that Trump has a darkish view of his adopted, part-time residence — presumably influenced by the truth that greater than 90 p.c of its residents supported his opponent within the 2024 election. He known as the District a metropolis of “filth” and “decay,” an insult paying homage to ones he has hurled at different main cities he has feuded with like Baltimore or New York.
Trump has forged his departure from Washington in 2021 as a pivot level for town. He not often returned to Washington throughout his 4 years out of energy — with a notable exception being an August 2023 journey from Ronald Reagan Washington Nationwide Airport to a D.C. federal court docket, throughout which he pleaded not responsible to 4 counts to overturn the 2020 elections.
It was “very sad driving through Washington, D.C. and seeing the filth and the decay and all of the broken buildings and walls and graffiti,” Trump mentioned on the tarmac simply earlier than leaving the D.C. space. “This is not the place that I left. It’s a very sad thing to see.”
D.C. is rebounding from the pandemic, which battered the area’s financial system that’s supported by in-person work from federal workers, ushered in a since-diminished spike in crime and exacerbated town’s homelessness disaster.
The president and Congress have the authority to undercut the District’s political equipment by rejecting any invoice the native administration places ahead and proposing their very own. And Trump’s congressional allies have already moved to disrupt the ability steadiness within the District by means of laws launched earlier this month that might undo a Nineteen Seventies-era regulation that allowed the nation’s capital to largely govern itself.
Republicans have made comparable threats to undermine the D.C. authorities throughout Mayor Muriel Bowser’s decade-long tenure. However they had been toothless due to Democratic opposition in Congress or the White Home.
Even when Republicans gained management of the Home and Senate throughout Trump’s first time period, he didn’t observe by means of on his threats, together with one that will have overridden D.C. governance by briefly overtaking companies just like the Metropolitan police. Trump additionally relied closely on govt orders to go after immigrants from sanctuary cities like D.C., however these weren’t focused particularly to his then-home metropolis and had been largely rescinded by former President Joe Biden.
This time, a reenergized Trump armed once more with a Republican majority in Congress has mentioned he would tighten his grip on D.C.
The White Home didn’t reply to a request for remark for this text.
If Trump and congressional Republicans dip into metropolis affairs, they’d drastically shift the connection between the Bowser administration and the federal authorities, which has largely stayed out of native politics lately.
About two years in the past, Congress stymied native efforts to lower crime penalties, marking the primary time in three a long time that Capitol Hill officers have efficiently flexed this muscle. Congress has additionally repeatedly handed a rider blocking industrial gross sales of leisure marijuana within the District.
Republicans on Capitol Hill have justified the native authorities takeover by skewering the Bowser administration for a latest surge in crime that they are saying she has mishandled. Homicides surged throughout the pandemic to a decades-long zenith of 273 circumstances in 2023, although this determine dipped by 32 p.c in 2024, based on D.C. police knowledge.
“The radically progressive regime of D.C. Mayor Bowser has left our nation’s Capital in crime-ridden shambles,” Rep. Andy Ogles (R-Tenn.), one of many co-sponsors for the newest congressional push to defang D.C.’s authorities, mentioned in a press launch. “Bowser and her corrupt Washington City Council are incapable of managing the city.”
Bowser and the council have grown harder on crime since Trump’s first time period. Final March, as town reeled from a spate of carjackings and homicides, the native authorities handed against the law omnibus package deal that imposed harsher penalties for crimes like retail theft and unlawful gun possession.
“We will not tolerate violence and we will not tolerate criminal activity that disrupts our sense of safety and our ability to build thriving neighborhoods,” Bowser mentioned in an announcement following the passage of the invoice.
Bowser has tried to additional soothe Trump and different Republicans by specializing in “shared priorities for the president’s second term,” like bringing the D.C. area’s federal workforce again to underutilized federal buildings and growing extra inexperienced areas and infrastructure, she mentioned in December.
Now, as town makes an attempt to keep up diplomacy with Republicans, the largely Democratic D.C. Council has to get inventive to cross their agendas.
Earlier than Republicans took management of Congress and the presidency on Election Day, town council was about to cross a pair of payments that will have required insurers to check reparations and totally cowl vasectomy procedures. Weeks after the GOP assumed management of Congress and the presidency, the council modified the identify of the vasectomy invoice to the “Insurance Regulation Amendment Act” as a part of a preemptive effort to dodge ire from Republicans, who had launched a nationwide campaign in opposition to reproductive rights.
“When we had a fight over the revised criminal code, the Council lost control of the messaging,” Council chairman Phil Mendelson advised The Washington Publish. “Lesson learned. We need to be sensitive to messaging.”
For her half, Bowser nonetheless seems optimistic about her relationship with Trump — who she met with at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida in December — even because the president additional derides her metropolis and management.
“I agree with the president-elect on this point,” Bowser mentioned in December. “We want to make our nation’s capital the most beautiful capital in the world.”
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