Diogenes
Nemo me impune lacessit
Trump tried to take over over the D.C. police force. City leaders pushed back
The summer of 2020 had been marked by massive demonstrations across the country over the police killing of George Floyd, including one in Trump’s own front yard, just outside the White House. So on June 1 of that year, Trump hinted at a plan he had been privately discussing with top aides: invoke a little-known federal law to take over the D.C. police force.
“If you don’t dominate your city and your state, they’re gonna walk away with you,” Trump said during a phone call that day, according to a transcript of the exchange obtained by CNN. “And we’re doing it in Washington, in D.C. we’re going to do something that people haven’t seen before. But we’re going to have total domination.”
The plan never came to fruition. Soon after the call, D.C. leaders — including Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) and then-Police Chief Peter Newsham resisted the pressure, successfully.
Trump’s former chief of staff John F. Kelly, a retired Marine Corps general, warned in interviews published this week that Trump ruled like a fascist dictator, with no grasp of the Constitution or rule of law.
Trump has repeatedly derided the nation’s capital as a dirty, violent and out-of-control place that he wants to “take over.”
The relationship between local officials and Trump has been fraught since his election in 2016, when he secured the support of only 4.1 percent of the city’s voters and the D.C. Council largely sat out his inauguration. In the ensuing years, Trump launched slights at the District and tangled with Bowser on social media, casting her on Twitter as “incompetent” and “out of control.”
Taking over the D.C. police force, the local street cops serving a city of nearly 700,000, would have represented an unprecedented concentration of presidential power over a major American city, an exertion of executive power never before attempted by any U.S. president in modern history.