U.S. President Donald Trump is planning to send up to 1,000 members of the National Guard to patrol the streets of Washington, D.C. this week in a move that critics are warning is another step toward authoritarian rule.
In a post on his Truth Social page on Monday morning — followed by a press conference — Trump framed the decision to deploy the National Guard as necessary to combat crime in the nation's capital.
"Washington, D.C. will be LIBERATED today!" Trump claimed. "Crime, Savagery, Filth, and Scum will DISAPPEAR. I will, MAKE OUR CAPITAL GREAT AGAIN! The days of ruthlessly killing, or hurting, innocent people, are OVER!"
However, the president's claim that the National Guard is needed to protect Washington, D.C. residents from purportedly unprecedented criminal violence does not hold water given that the city has seen a dramatic fall in crime recently. As noted by CBS News reporter Scott MacFarlane, violent crime in Washington, D.C. has fallen by 26% over the last year, highlighted by total homicides declining by 12% year-over-year.
In analyzing the news, some legal analysts were quick to label Trump's latest move a power grab that was wholly unjustified by the facts on the ground.
Joyce Vance, the former United States attorney for the Northern District of Alabama, argued on her Substack page that Trump's decision to plow ahead with deploying the National Guard in Washington, D.C. shows he "is going full bore to push the power of the presidency, even if it means ignoring actual statistics on crime that contradict his stated justification for acting in the nation's capital."
Vance added that Trump's actions in this instance also need to be understood as part of a broad sweep by the president to seize more power for the executive branch.
"In case you're wondering, just six months into his second term, Trump holds a commanding lead in the number of executive orders issued," she wrote. "These statistics from The American Presidency Project at the University of California at Santa Barbara show the totals for each president in light blue, so, in the first six months of his second term, Trump has signed 186 orders, compared to a four-year total of 162 for Joe Biden."
Georgetown University law professor Steve Vladeck wrote on his own Substack page that Trump does have some significant powers when it comes to deploying the D.C. National Guard in the nation's capital, although he said that the law clearly prevents him from "federalizing" the city as he has threatened to do in the past.
"The president does have two important authorities when it comes to 'local' law enforcement in the District of Columbia: He can use the (small) D.C. National Guard in circumstances in which he probably couldn't use any other military personnel; and he can require the use of [the Metropolitan Police Department] 'for federal purposes' for up to 30 days," he wrote. "That's not nothing, but it also isn't anything close to some kind of federal takeover of the nation's capital."
To actually do a federal takeover of Washington, D.C., Vladeck continued, the president would need to get an act passed through Congress that would almost certainly be filibustered in the U.S. Senate.
Legal experts weren't the only ones alarmed by the planned Trump National Guard deployment.
Karen Attiah, a columnist for The Washington Post, warned her Bluesky followers against writing off the deployment as an effort by the president to distract from his administration's handling of the Jeffrey Epstein scandal.
"Threats of the militarization of cities—including D.C., which has been fighting for self determination for generations—isn't a 'distraction,'" she said. "It's a massive, giant, red trial balloon for what an American president can do [in] YOUR city... I need people to wake up."
Kat Abughazaleh, a Democratic candidate for Congress in Illinois, similarly warned that Trump's National Guard deployment could be a blueprint for the rest of America.
"Trump's move to mobilize the National Guard against Americans in D.C. is another telltale sign of his authoritarian ambitions," she wrote on Bluesky. "But at some point signs of authoritarianism stop being signs and become symptoms of an autocratic regime. We're far past that point now."