Trump’s DC takeover is a modern-day ‘Rebirth of a Nation’

In 2025 it’s the federal authorities, not irate white locals, enacting the takeover. However the crucial to purge and seize management of a Black-controlled house is identical.

What ought to alarm all People is Trump’s use of the big energy of the presidency to hold it out, brazenly and with none sense of deliberation or due course of. Trump has cited the assault of a white protégé of Elon Musk by a few Black youngsters as proof of D.C.’s crime emergency. However the true inciting occasion is the fiction, pushed by Trump for the reason that 2020 mass protests for racial justice, that large cities with massive populations of shade are inherently harmful and should be subjugated to revive legislation and order. What’s scary is how Trump is able to just do that.

Donald Trump speaks with members of legislation enforcement and Nationwide Guard troopers on Aug. 21 in Washington, D.C.

It’s been famous many instances in the previous couple of years that most of the most populous American cities now have Black mayors, together with Muriel Bowser in D.C., Karen Bass in Los Angeles, Brandon Johnson in Chicago and Eric Adams in New York. The development has been celebrated as actual racial progress however has additionally run into the headwinds of Trumpism, which equates Black presence with city decay and decay typically. The takeover actually started, and remains to be taking place, in L.A., the place Trump referred to as within the Nationwide Guard and the Marines over the objections of Bass and different native and state leaders in response to protests over federal immigration raids that began in June. The sometimes violent protests had been shortly portrayed in video clips as an emergency, utilized by the Trump administration to justify overriding state and native rule, in a brazen present of drive and authority.

In D.C. and L.A. the administration’s willpower to indicate Black and brown individuals who’s boss is identical. Not simply boss, however savior: In June, Homeland Safety chief Kristi Noem declared ICE was in L.A. to “liberate the city from the socialists and the burdensome leadership that the governor and the mayor have placed on this country,” echoing the identical pro-coup language employed by white insurrectionists in Wilmington again in 1898. Trump repeated this language on Aug. 11 when he declared his federal takeover of police from a White Home podium as “Liberation Day in D.C., and we’re gonna take our capital back.”

After all, L.A. will get additional animus as a result of Trump hates California for its resistance and refusal to capitulate to his insurance policies, from declaring sanctuary cities to adopting stringent clear air measures. However its actual sin, the one which necessitated federal intervention, is being too mushy on individuals of shade.

All this dates again to The Start of a Nation, the seminal 1915 D.W. Griffith movie launched 17 years after the Wilmington bloodbath. That cinematic milestone was white supremacy agitprop that posited, amongst different issues, that Black individuals had been completely unfit to control. It solid the Black equality experiment of Reconstruction as a harmful failure, with Black males (principally white actors in blackface) portrayed as dolts, predators and savages incapable of civilized habits. The ethical of its massively common story was that the North was on the unsuitable facet of issues, Black management was an oxymoron, and solely white individuals (particularly the Klan) may very well be trusted to maintain actual People secure. It’s this robustly racist message that Trump is sending now along with his makes an attempt to “liberate” a considerably Black metropolis. When he threatened to develop the federal takeover to different supposedly crime-ridden cities, it was telling that he singled out Chicago, L.A., Baltimore and Oakland. Not solely have they got massive populations of shade that voted decisively towards him in 2024, additionally they have Black mayors.

If Trump was actually involved about crime in our nation’s capital, he wouldn’t have pardoned practically 1,600 of his supporters who had been charged for his or her involvement in one of many largest single-day crime waves in D.C.’s historical past, the Jan. 6, 2021, rebellion. If he cared about legislation and order he wouldn’t have granted blanket clemency to individuals who had been convicted or pleaded responsible to violent crimes, together with the assault on legislation enforcement officers.

What a horrible miscarriage of public belief and customary decency {that a} president who instigated an tried coup in D.C., one which desecrated the Capitol constructing itself, is making an attempt to engineer one other coup in the identical metropolis. This one may look totally different, however they’ll go down as two intently associated chapters within the nation’s lengthy historical past of white takeovers that Trump appears wanting to advance. However D.C. has nice symbolic weight. As a result of on the very second he’s taking up town’s legislation enforcement, Trump is beginning his long-promised resurrection of Accomplice monuments by bringing again a statue of Accomplice normal Albert Pike. For over 100 years it was the one such monument in D.C., one in all many across the nation that was broken or introduced down by a nationwide motion, powered by Black Lives Matter, to cease publicly honoring the legacy of slavery and people who betrayed the Union.

Trump is making an attempt to overthrow that motion, a part of a broader effort to decrease and delegitimize Black energy in methods which might be changing into an increasing number of blatant. The truth that he’s launching this pro-Accomplice marketing campaign within the nation’s capital whereas additionally usurping its native police authority isn’t coincidence, however a form of consolidation. Name it “Rebirth of a Nation,” circa 2025, with a white supremacist film fantasy being dropped at life earlier than our eyes, in actual time. How the film ends remains to be an open query.