autocracy

Washington, DC, youth activist Afeni Evans has become the most recent symbol of US President Donald Trump’s federal takeover of the city’s police.

On August 15, Metro Transit Police officers pepper-sprayed and forced the 28-year-old Evans to the ground at the Navy Yard subway stop for allegedly committing fare evasion. Evans and other Harriet’s Wildest Dreams volunteers were at the station on “cop watch” to ensure the federal takeover would not lead to harassment of Black youth. Yet, it happened to three Black youths anyway, prompting Evans to intervene, which led to her arrest.

After public protests in DC and on social media, she was released to cheering crowds outside the court, and the charges against her were dropped the next day.

Like with so many other issues related to Trump and his attempts at autocracy, his use of the National Guard and US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to stifle community ecosystems especially impacts Washington’s Black, Brown and Queer residents. This effort to squash potential dissent is more than a distraction from the Epstein files controversy or America’s economic troubles.

Locally, it is a partial end to the District of Columbia’s half-century of home rule, which otherwise makes the city independent of direct federal oversight. Nationally, it is an open question about whether DC can remain a site of protest, a place where marches and other gatherings can effect change or even occur at all in the current autocratic climate.

Trump’s executive order announcing his takeover of DC’s police force on August 11 should not have come as a surprise, especially given his attempts to bring the federal government’s power to bear in California back in June. “Crime is out of control in the District of Columbia”, the order reads, stating that the “increase in violent crime in the heart of our Republic… poses intolerable risks to the vital federal functions that take place in the District of Columbia”.

But the truth is, Trump’s executive order manufactured a crisis out of far-right fantasies. Six days before Trump’s announcement, two teenagers carjacked Edward Coristine, a 19-year-old former staffer at the Department of Government Efficiency, in DC’s Logan Circle. “We’re going to do something about it. That includes bringing in the National Guard,” Trump said in the aftermath of the incident.

However, the two alleged carjackers in police custody were from Hyattsville, Maryland, in Prince George’s County, and not DC.

Trump’s moves also fly in the face of another truth: Crime is no bigger an issue in DC than it is anywhere else in the United States. At the beginning of the year, a joint report from the US Attorney’s Office in DC and the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) showed that the city’s violent crime rate had dropped by 35 percent in 2024, reaching its lowest rate since the mid-1990s. “Armed carjackings are down 53%,” according to the report.

Washington, DC, is a great stage for beta-testing how willing the rest of the US is to go to achieve Trump’s dream of autocratic rule. DC remains a majority-minority city, with Black Washingtonians making up a plurality (43 percent) of the population, despite 30 years of middle-class (mostly white) gentrification – white Washingtonians make up 39 percent of DC’s population.

So, it is not that surprising Trump would attempt such heavy-handed tactics in a soft occupation of DC, particularly in a city that was once famously nicknamed “Chocolate City”. In a capital where more than 90 percent of voters chose former Vice President Kamala Harris over Trump in the 2024 presidential election, Trump is also sending the unvarnished and racist message that Black folk, and especially Black youth, are criminals.

Imposing a heightened police presence and hundreds of National Guard soldiers on a multiracial city is nothing but a wannabe strongman’s attempt to appear strong to his anti-Black supporters.

DC is also known as a place that holds significance for Queer Americans. One out of every seven adults in the nation’s capital identifies as LGBTQIA+, roughly 80,000 Washingtonians in all. Northwest DC, particularly communities like Dupont Circle, Logan Circle, Adams Morgan, and parts of Shaw and Columbia Heights, became a relatively safe space in the 1960s and 1970s for Queer culture and businesses to thrive. The inaugural National March for Lesbian and Gay Rights began in DC in 1979.

It should not shock anyone that an anti-Queer Trump administration would also target DC’s Queer and migrant spaces. The federalised police presence in DC has been especially noticeable along the 14th Street and U Street corridors, including the installation of not-so-random checkpoints over the past couple of weeks. Inevitably – between the National Guard, federal law enforcement and anti-immigrant agencies like Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), in conjunction with the MPD – they have made dozens of arrests, and smothered nightlife and business traffic in these communities.

Trump, in his own ham-fisted way, is also attempting to erase DC’s history as one of protest and resistance. As the US evolved into a superpower, and DC transformed into the international community’s superpower city during and after World War II, the city also became a place for protest, particularly for racial justice and civil rights. Examples include the March on Washington on August 28, 1963, as well as a series of antiwar protests against Vietnam between 1965 and 1971. Marches and protests for the Equal Rights Amendment, for a Gay Rights Bill, for Chicano rights, Indigenous rights, and migrant and refugee rights came alongside civil rights marches and protests throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Massive protests like the 2017 Women’s March, the George Floyd protests in 2020 and the Free Palestine protests last year have made DC a target ripe for government overreach.

But what Trump is doing to DC in 2025 is not quite unprecedented – not for him, and not for the federal government. In 2018, during Trump’s first term as president, the US National Park Service (NPS) sought to shrink the available sidewalk space around the White House for protests “by 80 percent”, and to charge demonstrators permit fees “to allow the NPS to recover some of the costs” of public safety provisions. On June 1, 2020, the National Guard and the US Park Police tear-gassed, lobbed concussion grenades and violently arrested George Floyd protesters at Lafayette Square, across the street from the White House – all so that Trump could do a photo-op nearby on the steps of St John’s Church, calling himself “your president of law and order” along the way.

Trump has followed in the footsteps of another “law and order” president, Richard Nixon. In May 1971, Nixon unleashed the National Guard and local police against thousands of antiwar demonstrators in DC, in what became known as the Mayday protests, leading to more than 12,000 arrests over a three-day period.

In 1932, President Herbert Hoover authorised the use of military force against a ragtag group of 20,000 unemployed and unhoused World War I veterans known as the Bonus Army. At the height of the Great Depression and looking for the bonus money Congress owed them, the military responded with gas grenades, bayonets, flamethrowers and tanks, destroying their shantytowns along the National Mall and Anacostia River. Two veterans died, while the Army injured thousands of others. The resulting tear gas cloud over the city also led to the death of an infant.

Trump and his small army of occupiers are trying to make an example out of the nation’s capital, to destroy the DC of the past century, its vibrancy and resistance. The irony, of course, is that one of Trump’s first acts in his second term was to pardon more than 1,500 insurrectionists who had been part of the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol, a deadly and treasonous event.

Now, Trump wants to cower Washingtonians into accepting autocracy.

DC’s legacy as the national seat of power, as an international city, and as the centre of the so-called Free World, is in peril. But its most vulnerable and marginalised residents continue to resist, despite the dangers of Trump as a despot.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

For years we’ve read stories about antidemocratic countries abroad — supreme leaders acting with impunity, masked agents rounding up residents, troops in the streets, crackdowns on peaceful protests, intimidation and arrests of opposition figures, show-of-force military parades and political assassinations.

For a time this month, I was abroad. And the antidemocratic country I was reading about was my own.

Tuning out the news on vacation proved impossible. Every day brought another must-read outrage, reflecting the punitive policies and hateful climate that wannabe strongman Donald Trump has fostered in the United States.

From the vantage of an ocean away, even as a visitor in a developing country with problems of its own, I read about events back home with the clarity of the proverbial 38,000-feet view: The news added up to a picture of a proud nation slipping into the authoritarian ways modeled by the kleptocratic dictators that President Trump so admires.

For perspective, I reread President Reagan’s farewell address: Trump has taken America far from the shining “city upon a hill” that Reagan, yesteryear’s Republican icon, evoked. And far from our self-image as a land of immigrants and a bastion of freedom, democracy and the rule of law. Reagan’s city on a hill was “teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace.” If there had to be walls, he said, “the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here.”

That was then.

As I flew off for my break, the U.S. news was dominated by the tawdry breakup of Trump and “first buddy” Elon Musk. But then that sophomoric saga was overshadowed by more serious stuff — starting with military-style raids throughout Los Angeles by thuggish agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, rounding up migrants, including children, for detention and deportation.

It’s a drama that continues from big-city L.A. to small-town Great Barrington, Mass., in heartland hotels, meatpacking plants and restaurants. Descriptions of the shock troops have become too familiar: Many wear face masks and no badges to identify themselves. They often don’t wear recognizable uniforms. They have no warrants but lots of guns. And migrants are disappearing into their unmarked vehicles. To where, families aren’t told; when they find out, it’s often too late to help their loved ones assert their due process rights.

On Day 2 of my vacation, Trump took the all but unprecedented step of federalizing the California National Guard to act against protesters in L.A., over the objections of Gov. Gavin Newsom and Mayor Karen Bass and despite police assurances that local law enforcement could handle even the most confrontational of demonstrators. Next came the Marines.

That only seemed to exacerbate the unrest, as drama king Trump, who governs as if he were still scripting a reality TV show, surely intended. With Los Angeles as a testing ground, he may be seeking a pretext to invoke the 1807 Insurrection Act so he can freely deploy the military nationally against any who oppose him. He toyed with the idea during his first presidency. Back then he was constrained by responsible advisors; now he has surrounded himself with sycophants.

Meanwhile, he’s as unnervingly erratic on his deportation policy as on tariffs. First Trump posted that he’d lighten up on farm, restaurant and hotel raids because those industries complained that they were losing “very good, long time workers.” But days later, he ordered ICE to expand its efforts in L.A. and other big cities where Democrats, he lied, “use Illegal Aliens” to cheat in elections and steal jobs from citizens.

Amid the mayhem, the commander in chief traveled to Fort Bragg, N.C., and disgracefully crossed the line that, since the founding, has kept the military out of politics. He goaded the young troops he addressed — reportedly vetted for their political leanings — to cross it too. He started by boasting about reversing former President Joe Biden’s deletion of Confederate traitors’ names from military bases, and throughout encouraged boos against Biden, Newsom, Bass and Democrats generally, and applause for himself. He wore a MAGA cap. Such merch was on sale.

Days later, he got the military parade he’d long wanted. Or maybe not: It was more historical than martial; instead of goose-stepping through the capital, the troops ambled, smiled and made hand hearts. And it was sparsely attended. The nationwide “No Kings” counterprotests were not.

The toll that Trump’s overreach has taken on America’s reputation, especially in just a few weeks in June, has been heavy. Five Democratic politicians detained or arrested. An uncountable number of workers — not criminals, and many here legally — removed and sometimes disappeared from their families, jobs, communities and even the country. Armed military facing down peaceful protesters and protecting ICE and FBI agents as they snatch people off the street without due process.

On Tuesday, California Sen. Alex Padilla — who five days earlier had been wrestled to the floor and handcuffed by federal agents for interrupting Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem as she claimed Trump’s actions were liberating L.A. from socialists — delivered an emotional speech in the Senate. In U.S. history, he said, “we’ve had tumult. But we’ve never had a tyrant as a commander in chief.”

Until now.

Reagan ended his farewell with a sentiment that was inarguable 36 years ago: America, he said, “is still a beacon, still a magnet for all who must have freedom.” No longer. Even many citizens live in fear for their freedoms; I’ve heard from them. And I’ve felt it myself — no more so than when I was out of the country, looking back from afar.

@Jackiekcalmes @jackiecalmes.bsky.social @jkcalmes