Trump's massive gamble has a fundamental flaw

It’s happening.

This morning, President Donald Trump took the largest step since he took office to test the limits of his power. And he did it in a way calculated not to alarm most Americans.

Trump announced that he was essentially supplanting the D.C. police with the National Guard and — most inappropriately — FBI agents to address what he termed an “emergency” crime problem in the nation’s capital.

It’s a perfect testing ground for an unprecedented expansion of presidential power. And understand that it’s a guardrail test, not a response to an actual crisis.

The residents of Washington D.C. face neither an emergency nor a crisis — and Trump fully understands that. Crime is empirically down, and even if it were not, nothing has transpired in the past seven months that would remotely rationalize this seizure of police power.

Trump views Washington D.C. as a petri dish.

Given that most Americans have long harbored an irrational distaste for D.C. — which happens to have an overwhelming Black majority population — it provides the ideal backdrop for Trump to invoke the national fear of crime. Any action advertised to fight crime in D.C. can count on a warm embrace from millions of Americans.

And in this case, the fact that Trump can declare a crime emergency where there is none — and get away with it — is a feature, not a bug. Because if he can do it in Washington D.C., he can eventually branch out federal police power to cities like Los Angeles, New York City, Minneapolis, Chicago and beyond.

The bluer the state, the better.

Trump’s action today also provides a test for a principle that we’ve seen unfold in alarming ways: He used his mastery of social media — and his mind control over a feared and powerful political base — to introduce false crises and invented issues that never occurred before he took office.

Just consider how many times Trump has successfully unleashed some bizarre new premise that had never been contemplated — much less debated — in the past presidential campaign. Or anytime, in any serious way, in the nation’s discourse.

Here are just a few examples:

• Instituting a vicious trade war with our closest neighbor, Canada. As well as other erstwhile allies across the globe.
• Repurposing ICE as a secret police force and using it to arrest judges and politicians.
• Invading and annexing Greenland.
• Re-seizing the Panama Canal.
• Renaming the Gulf of Mexico, which, by the way, is still the Gulf of Mexico.

That list goes on. This isn’t an abstract debate.

The seizure of D.C. police fits an ominous pattern of Trump unilaterally declaring an emergency based on nothing but the reach of his megaphone — and a grip of power over Congress, sanctioned by a partisan U.S. Supreme Court, that is arguably unprecedented in U.S. history.

What makes this particular move ominous is that Trump has launched it without the slightest provocation or even the remote appearance of a crisis. He doesn’t need a fig leaf.

Trump initiated his seizure of police power against a backdrop of falling crime in the nation’s Capitol:

• Violent crime: Down 26% in D.C. year-to-date
• Homicides: Down 12%
• Robberies: Down 28%
• Aggravated assaults: Down 20%
• Total crime: Down 7%
  (Source: Metropolitan Police Department data)

Regionally, the D.C.-Maryland-Virginia area has seen overall crime drop 13%, with homicides down 30%. The picture is clear: the “crime surge” is political theater, not statistical reality.

It’s almost incidental that the takeover undermines Home Rule and local democracy. It’s such an obviously false pretext for federal overreach that his MAGA apologists might as well admit that the best defense is that Trump’s doing this because he wants to.

And he can.

Trump is counting on a very specific bet: that much of the country either dislikes Washington, D.C., on instinct or simply doesn’t care what happens there.

This is a trial balloon. It’s a calculated test of guardrails.

If we as a nation allow it to stand, we do so at our own peril.