Donald Trump’s latest plan to “clean up” Washington, D.C. has ignited fierce backlash and renewed calls for impeachment.
On Monday, the president announced a sweeping crackdown on crime in the capital, pledging there would be no “Mr Nice Guy” approach. Among the measures: ordering the homeless to “move out IMMEDIATELY” and deploying the National Guard for a 30-day federal takeover of the city’s Metropolitan Police Department.
“Before the tents, squalor, filth, and Crime, it was the most beautiful Capital in the World. It will soon be that again,” Trump posted on Truth Social.
Framing D.C. as a “sanctuary for illegal alien criminals” plagued by “lawlessness,” Trump claimed the city’s homicide rates outpace Bogotá and Mexico City, despite official data showing violent crime at a 30-year low. He invoked Section 740 of the District of Columbia Home Rule Act to justify the federal intervention, with 800 National Guard troops now patrolling the streets, per Politico.
Perhaps most controversially, Trump declared that officers can “do whatever the hell they want” when met with hostility.
“That’s the only language they understand,” he told reporters. “You spit, and we hit, and they can hit real hard.”
‘Unsettling and unprecedented’
D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser called the move “unsettling and unprecedented,” though “not totally surprising” given Trump’s past rhetoric.
Online, critics labeled the move authoritarian. “The Trump police state is upon us,” one Reddit user wrote. Others called the remarks “evil” and “a road map” to increased police violence, warning it normalizes the idea that law enforcement needs “special permission to break skulls.”
Legal questions linger over LA crackdown
The D.C. takeover comes as Trump faces a legal challenge over his use of the National Guard during immigration protests in Los Angeles in June, an unprecedented federal deployment without a governor’s consent.
California officials argue it violated the foundational principle that states control their own National Guard units, calling it “a clear violation of the most fundamental principles of our Nation’s founding.” The administration maintains the move was legal under existing statutes.
For Trump, the message is clear: “This is liberation day in D.C., and we’re going to take our capital back.”