L.A. Ruling Complicates Trump’s Threats to Send Troops to More Cities – The New York Times

news analysis

L.A. Ruling Complicates Trump’s Threats to Send Troops to More Cities

As Democratic cities brace for possible military deployments, Democratic governors see in a lower-court ruling the potential for legal protections.

Listen to this article · 7:42 min Learn more Members of the California National Guard outside the Edward R. Roybal Federal Building in Los Angeles in June.Credit…Philip Cheung for The New York Times

By Charlie Savage, Reporting from Washington, D.C., Sept. 2, 2025Updated 4:16 p.m. ET

A federal judge’s ruling that President Trump has been using troops illegally to perform law enforcement functions in Los Angeles will — if it stands — pose impediments to any plans Mr. Trump may have for sending the military into the streets of other cities, like Chicago.

Mr. Trump has made those threats in the context of his anti-crime operation in Washington, D.C., which has involved both civilian federal agents and National Guard troops under federal control. But because the District of Columbia is not a state, the federal government has greater latitude to use the Guard there.

The Posse Comitatus Act, enacted in 1878, makes it illegal to use federal troops for domestic policing under normal circumstances. So to keep from running afoul of that law, Mr. Trump would need a legal rationale for deploying troops to cities like Chicago.

One potential model for Mr. Trump might be the reasoning his administration offered for sending troops to Los Angeles over the summer, ostensibly to protect federal agents and facilities. But on Tuesday, Judge Charles Breyer of the Federal District Court in San Francisco held that the administration has been using those troops too expansively.

The judge barred the federal government from using troops anywhere in California to engage in “arrests, apprehensions, searches, seizures, security patrols, traffic control, crowd control, riot control, evidence collection, interrogation, or acting as informants.”

Speaking to reporters later on Tuesday, Mr. Trump called Judge Breyer a “radical left judge.” The judge’s order is scheduled to take effect Sept. 12, giving the Trump administration time to appeal.

There are reasons for caution at this stage. An appeals court has already overturned an earlier decision by Judge Breyer, in which he tried to strike down Mr. Trump’s assertion of federal control of California National Guard troops over the objections of the state’s governor, Gavin Newsom.

But if other courts adopt Judge Breyer’s reasoning, it would limit Mr. Trump’s ability to use the operation in Los Angeles as a precedent to justify deploying federal troops into other cities to fight crime.

Democratic governors far from California said on Tuesday that the judge’s ruling was a victory for them as well.

“This ruling confirms what the American people already knew — this deployment was never about public safety,” said Gov. Maura Healey of Massachusetts, who has spoken out against Mr. Trump’s domestic use of the military. “It was yet another political stunt from President Trump intended to intimidate and punish anyone who disagrees with him.”

Continue/Read Original Article Here: L.A. Ruling Complicates Trump’s Threats to Send Troops to More Cities – The New York Times

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Data shows crime is down in US cities but Trump suggests more Guard deployments – AP News

U.S. News

Trump suggests more US cities need National Guard but crime stats tell a different story

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President Donald Trump has threatened to dispatch the National Guard to Chicago and other big cities. But data shows most U.S. violent crime has been in a steady decline in recent years (AP video: Mike Householder)

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Members of the Louisiana National Guard patrol at Union Station, Tuesday, Aug. 26, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)

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National Guard troops patrol the grounds of the Washington Monument with the Capitol seen in the distance as part of President Donald Trump’s order to impose federal law enforcement in the nation’s capital, in Washington, Thursday, Aug. 28, 2025. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

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Members of the West Virginia National Guard near the Washington Monument in Washington, Wednesday, Aug. 27, 2025. (AP Photo/Mariam Zuhaib)

By  ED WHITE and CHRISTOPHER L. KELLER Updated 8:07 AM PDT, August 29, 2025

President Donald Trump has threatened to deploy the National Guard to Chicago, New York, Seattle, Baltimore, San Francisco and Portland, Oregon, to fight what he says is runaway crime. Yet data shows most violent crime in those places and around the country has declined in recent years.

Homicides through the first six months of 2025 were down significantly compared to the same period in 2024, continuing a post-pandemic trend across the U.S.

Trump, who has already taken federal control of police in Washington, D.C., has maligned the six Democratic-run cities that all are in states that opposed him in 2024. But he hasn’t threatened sending in the Guard to any major cities in Republican-leaning states.

John Roman, a data expert who directs the Center on Public Safety & Justice at the University of Chicago, acknowledged violence in some urban neighborhoods has persisted for generations. But he said there’s no U.S. city where there “is really a crisis.”

“We’re at a remarkable moment in crime in the United States,” he said.

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Public sees things differently

Trump might be tapping somewhat into public perception when he describes cities such as Chicago as a “killing field.” The vast majority of Americans, 81%, see crime as a “major problem” in large cities, according to a survey released this week by The AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, though there is much less support, 32%, for federal control of police.

The public was reminded this week that shootings remain a frequent event in the U.S. In Minneapolis, which has seen homicides and most other crime fall, a shooter killed two children attending a Catholic school Mass Wednesday and wounded 17 a day after three people died in separate shootings elsewhere in the city.

Still, over time, the picture is encouraging, according to numbers from AH Datalytics, which tracks crimes across the country using law enforcement data for its Real-Time Crime Index.

Aggravated assaults — which includes nonfatal shootings — through June were down in Chicago, Portland, Seattle, Baltimore and San Francisco and were virtually unchanged in New York. Reports of rape were up in New York and Chicago during the first half of the year, but down in the other cities, including a 51% drop in San Francisco.

The crime index also showed that property crimes, such as theft, burglary and motor vehicle theft, were mostly down in those six cities in the first six months of 2025. Theft crimes rose from 2020 to 2024 in four of the six cities analyzed by AP.

Continue/Read Original Article: https://apnews.com/article/trump-national-guard-crime-stats-92ee575c0d445320aa633f6abe2a26b9

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Letters from an American – August 25, 2025 – Heather Cox Richardson

Letters from an American, August 25, 2025, By Heather Cox Richardson

This morning, President Donald J. Trump talked to reporters as he signed several executive orders in the Oval Office. Trump sat behind the Resolute Desk as he has been doing lately, seeming to put its bulk between him and the reporters. Also as he has been doing lately, he kept his left hand over the right, seemingly to hide a large bruise.

Trump was there to announce an executive order charging Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth with creating “specialized units” in the National Guard that will be “specifically trained and equipped to deal with public order issues,” apparently setting them up to take on domestic law enforcement as part of Trump’s attempt to take control of Democratic-run cities.

At the press opportunity, Trump claimed that he saved Washington, D.C.—where crime was at a 30-year low before he took control of the Metropolitan Police Department and mobilized the National Guard—from such rampant crime that no one dared to wear jewelry or carry purses. “People,” he said, “are free for the first time ever.”

Although in 1989 the Supreme Court ruled that burning a flag is a form of speech protected by the First Amendment, Trump ordered the Department of Justice to prosecute anyone who burns a flag, claiming they would automatically go to prison for a year (he has no authority to make such an order). After seven European leaders rushed to the White House to stabilize the U.S. approach to Russia after Trump’s disastrous meeting with Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, in Alaska on August 15, Trump claimed that the seven leaders actually represented 38 countries and that they refer to Trump as “the president of Europe.”

Calling Chicago, Illinois, a “a disaster” and “a killing field,” Trump referred to Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker as “a slob.” Trump complained that Pritzker had said Trump was infringing on American freedom and called Trump a dictator. Trump went on: “A lot of people are saying maybe we like a dictator. I don’t like a dictator. I’m not a dictator. I’m a man with great common sense and a smart person. And when I see what’s happening to our cities, and then you send in troops instead of being praised, they’re saying you’re trying to take over the Republic. These people are sick.”

This afternoon, standing flanked by leaders from business, law enforcement, faith communities, education, local communities, and politics at the Chicago waterfront near the Trump Tower there, Governor Pritzker responded to the news that Trump is planning to send troops to Chicago.

He began by saying: “I want to speak plainly about the moment that we are in and the actual crisis, not the manufactured one, that we are facing in the city and as a state and as a country. If it sounds to you like I am alarmist, that is because I am ringing an alarm, one that I hope every person listening will heed, both here in Illinois and across the country.”

He acknowledged that “[o]ver the weekend, we learned from the media that Donald Trump has been planning for quite a while now to deploy armed military personnel to the streets of Chicago. This is exactly the type of overreach that our country’s founders warned against. And it’s the reason that they established a federal system with a separation of powers built on checks and balances. What President Trump is doing is unprecedented and unwarranted. It is illegal, it is unconstitutional. It is un-American.”

Pritzker noted that neither his office nor that of Chicago’s mayor had received any communications from the White House. “We found out what Donald Trump was planning the same way that all of you did. We read a story in the Washington Post. If this was really about fighting crime and making the streets safe, what possible justification could the White House have for planning such an exceptional action without any conversations or consultations with the governor, the mayor or the police?”

Continue/Read Original Article Here: August 25, 2025 – by Heather Cox Richardson

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Trump Is Taking Over D.C. Police Because He’s a Racist Thug | The New Republic

Melissa Gira Grant/

August 12, 2025

Trump Is Taking Over D.C. Police Because He’s a Racist Thug

Trump doesn’t care about “crime.” He cares about the right white people being in charge.

Yasin Ozturk / Anadolu/Getty Images Flanked by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Attorney General Pam Bondi, Donald Trump delivers a speech during a press conference at the White House, on August 11.

It’s still possible, despite my daily exposure to horrific announcements from the Trump administration, for a White House press conference to make me sick with dread. On August 11, the president announced that he was taking federal control of the police force in Washington, D.C., and deploying the National Guard to its streets. As has become routine, Trump attempted to give legitimacy to his entirely gratuitous actions with executive orders, one declaring a nonexistent “crime emergency” in Washington, the other “restoring law and order” by directing Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to activate the D.C. National Guard. As Trump’s press conference meandered on, various Cabinet members peppered their remarks with praise—that Trump is “saving” the city, etc. Some blocks away, at Lafayette Square, residents of our nation’s capital protested the coming occupation of the district. “While this action today is unsettling and unprecedented,” said D.C. Mayor Murial Bowser, “I can’t say that given some of the rhetoric of the past … we’re totally surprised.”

Continue/Read Original Article Here: Trump Is Taking Over D.C. Police Because He’s a Racist Thug | The New Republic

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Opinion | How the Military Became Another Instrument of Trump’s Power – The New York Times

Credit…Brendan Smialowski/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images Opinion

Guest Essay

How the Military Became Another Instrument of Trump’s Power

Aug. 13, 2025, 5:01 a.m. ET, Listen to this article · 7:30 min Learn more

By Steven Simon and Jonathan Stevenson

Mr. Simon held senior positions in the State Department and at the National Security Council. Mr. Stevenson served on the National Security Council staff during the Obama administration.

By ordering 800 National Guard troops to Washington, on the pretext of an illusory crime wave, President Trump has further dragged the U.S. military into domestic law enforcement, in a move credibly perceived as an ominous “test case.” This continues what the administration started in California in June as part of the its deportation efforts.

Unfortunately, though we (and others) had hoped that the military would only respond to calls to action in American cities and states kicking and screaming, we no longer expect resistance from that institution. Once, perhaps, traditionalist officers might have leaned on protocol and refused to heed a lawless order, taking inspiration from the generals — Mark Milley and James Mattis — who resisted the uprooting of established military standards in the first Trump term.

Continue/Read Original Article Here: Opinion | How the Military Became Another Instrument of Trump’s Power – The New York Times

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Don’t federalize and militarize DC’s local police – GovTrack.us

News From Us

The White House

Don’t federalize and militarize DC’s local police

Aug. 11, 2025 · by Joshua Tauberer

When I walk my toddler home from daycare every evening, it is safe. That’s here in Washington, D.C., where I have lived since I moved to work on government accountability 15 years ago.

For perhaps the next 30 days, or longer, District of Columbia residents will be policed by federalized civilian and military officers, per an executive order and presidential memorandum this morning. The executive order directs the police to be federalized to protect “national monuments” (which are in the safest parts of D.C. thanks to the existing park police) and other federal properties, but the memorandum directs the DC National Guard to address crime throughout the capital.

There is no crime emergency here. I live here. I have seen things get better, not worse, with my own eyes. Violent crime is the lowest it has been in 30 years. Overall crime is down this year already. According to 2019 data, crime is worse in Houston and Indianapolis than here in D.C. Like all places, we have crime. I have seen that too. But not more than most.

D.C. is not just the capital district. It is one of the largest cities in the country. It’s a great city. I love living here. 700,000 people live in D.C. — that’s more than two whole states, Vermont and Wyoming. District residents paid $45 billion in federal taxes in 2024 — that’s more than North Dakota, West Virginia, Wyoming, Alaska, and Vermont combined (and more than 21 other states individually).

How many votes do we have in Congress? None. We don’t have any say in the federal laws that bind us. But that’s not all. Arrests are already prosecuted by federal lawyers, not lawyers that work for the elected DC Attorney General. They enforce local laws that the District’s Council has been blocked by Congress from updating.

There is a lot of taxation here and not a lot of representation.

Instead, politicians from far away cities with crime worse than ours use us for their own gain.

It’s not enough that federal police officers already police many of the parks here (many of which are national parks), the area around the Capitol (which has its own federal police force), and White House grounds (which has the Secret Service). Now it might be our neighborhoods too. It will not make our communities safer, and it defies the American spirit of a government accountable to its people.

Continue/Read Original Article Here: Don’t federalize and militarize DC’s local police – GovTrack.us

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Civil Discourse – When The President Becomes The Police – Joyce Vance

By Joyce Vance, Aug 11, 2025

The Posse Comitatus Act reserves the police power to the states, prohibiting the federal government from using the military for domestic law enforcement absent truly compelling circumstances. This principle can be extended to the National Guard when a president federalizes a state’s troops. That’s the very issue that Judge Charles Breyer is considering in Newsom v. Trump this week: whether Trump’s deployment of the National Guard in Los Angeles crossed the line into domestic law enforcement.

But when Donald Trump declared a public safety emergency in Washington, D.C. this morning, taking control of the Metropolitan Police and announcing his intent to bring the National Guard in to help, the rules that apply everywhere else were not in play. The situation in Washington is unique, and it’s important for us to understand what it is and what it isn’t.

It’s deeply concerning that Trump’s predication for seizing control in the District—allegedly out of control crime—are a lie. I shared the statistics with you last night, which show that crime is actually decreasing in the District of Columbia. But because the D.C. Home Rule Act allows the president to take control of the Metropolitan Police Department for 30 days in an emergency, and because the law doesn’t carefully define what qualifies as an emergency, Trump will likely get his 30 days. That conclusion was reinforced during D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser’s press conference, where she called Trump’s federal takeover of the D.C. police department “unsettling and unprecedented,” but did not threaten to sue. City officials have likely looked at the law and concluded Trump has enough room under the vague rule to get away with using false pretenses to take over the police.

From article…

Time and again, Trump shows his willingness to grab and abuse power, and each instance makes the next more likely. But if he wants to seize control of law enforcement in other cities, he will have to use different legal authorities, such as the Insurrection Act, which, so far, has apparently been too politically fraught. Existing rules made it easier for Trump to act in Washington than in other cities, and this playbook cannot be readily duplicated elsewhere. In other words, as bad as this is, there’s a silver lining.

Here’s the legal landscape that permits Trump to control the police and the Guard:

Police: § 1-207.40 of the Code of the District of Columbia allows a president to take control of the Metropolitan Police Force for federal purposes in an emergency. To keep control for more than 48 hours, he must notify the chair and the ranking member of the Committees on the District of Columbia in Congress. Trump has already done this. That means he can hold onto control for 30 days, but no longer, unless Congress authorizes it. If you tuned into

Steve Vladeck’s and my Substack Live conversation tonight, you know that we both believe congressional Democrats could filibuster to prevent that from happening.

So why do it if it’s only for 30 days? Perhaps Trump is indeed looking to push the boundaries of presidential power even further than he has before. Or perhaps he’s hoping 30 days will be enough to distract the public from his Jeffrey Epstein problem. Either way, Attorney General Pam Bondi is running the police for 30 days, and we’ll be watching.

D.C. National Guard: Unlike state national guards, the D.C. Guard falls under the president’s purview, so he has no need to federalize it like he did in California to deploy troops for federal purposes. DOJ has historically taken the position that the D.C. National Guard’s unique status means it is “non-federal,” and is not subject to the Posse Comitatus Act, which leaves Trump free to use it for direct law enforcement purposes inside of the city. The Guard in D.C. is relatively small compared to state forces. In California, Trump ultimately federalized about 4,000 troops. In all of D.C., there are fewer than 2500 soldiers and airmen in total.

Continue/Read Original Article Here: When The President Becomes The Police

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Letters from an American – August 11, 2025 – Heather Cox Richardson

Heather Cox Richardson

Aug 11, 2025

President Donald J. Trump’s big announcement today at his press conference—to which he showed up late—was that he is assuming control over the Washington, D.C., Metropolitan Police Department and deploying more than 100 agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and about 40 from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, along with officers from the Secret Service and the U.S. Marshals Service and members of the District of Columbia National Guard, “to rescue our nation’s capital from crime, bloodshed, bedlam and squalor, and worse.” He reiterated that officers would clear homeless encampments from the city.

In fact, statistics from the Department of Justice show that violent crime in the nation’s capital was at a 30-year low in 2024 and, according to Representative Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-DC), is down 26% this year compared to the same period last year. Former undersecretary of state and editor of Time magazine Richard Stengel noted that Washington is “not even in [the] top 10 dangerous cities in [the] U.S.” Meanwhile, legal analyst Asha Rangappa notes that FBI agents are not trained to patrol the streets, and that every one of them assigned to do that is not investigating foreign spies, foreign and domestic terrorists, or crimes like fraud, murder, corruption, and human trafficking.

If that was Trump’s big announcement, the big story seems to have been something different.

Trump’s performance at the press conference—an event for which his handlers would have made sure he was at the top of his game—made it clear that his mental deterioration is moving rapidly. He let Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, Attorney General Pam Bondi, and FBI director Kash Patel explain the actual plan, taking the microphone himself to describe a fake world in which he plays the role of hero, solving five wars, creating a booming economy, solving the border security others couldn’t, protecting Americans from a hellscape that exists only in his rhetoric.

The administration’s seizure of power is anything but imaginary. As Stengel noted, “Throughout history, autocrats use a false pretext to impose government control over local law enforcement as a prelude to a more national takeover. That’s far more dangerous than the situation he says he is fixing.” While Trump is mobilizing the National Guard under a pretext now, he memorably refused to mobilize it on January 6, 2021, to protect the lawmakers under siege in the U.S. Capitol as his supporters tried to stop the counting of the electoral votes that would make Democrat Joe Biden president.

Some clues to what the administration is attempting showed up today in a court in California, where Governor Gavin Newsom and California Attorney General Rob Bonta are suing the Department of Justice, saying it broke the law by deploying about 4,000 troops from the National Guard and 700 U.S. Marines to Los Angeles in June without authorization. A federal law known as the Posse Comitatus Act prohibits federal troops from acting as law enforcement officers.

Anna Bower of Lawfare Media was following the events in court today. She posted that the government agreed the troops in Los Angeles were subject to the Posse Comitatus Act and that they were put in place simply to guard federal buildings and law enforcement officials. But witnesses said that troops accompanied ICE when they made arrests and one of the documents introduced that related to the massive troop presence in MacArthur Park on July 7 said the purpose of the mission was to “protect the execution of joint federal law enforcement missions…while preserving public safety and demonstrating federal reach and presence.”

The words “demonstrating federal reach and presence” seem to get to the heart of the administration’s object, for it is showing federal troops exercising power over civilians even while telling the court they are not. Making people fear the government is key to the rise of an authoritarian.

This mobilization echoes Trump’s attempt to take over Washington, D.C., in June 2020 when he was angry about the protests over the death of George Floyd, murdered in May 2020 by white police officer Derek Chauvin, who knelt on Floyd’s neck for more than nine minutes. In 2020, members of Trump’s first administration stopped him from using the military against U.S. citizens, and, dramatically, members of the military stepped up to declare their support not for a president but for the United States Constitution.

This time around, Trump has installed loyalist Pete Hegseth at the head of the military. Hegseth made his support for the president’s plan clear today as he stood with Trump at the press conference. Ominously for civil liberties, observers note that no one from the administration is specifying where the administration intends to send people from the homeless encampments, although Trump wrote Sunday, “We will give you places to stay, but FAR from the Capital.”

The administration is also consolidating power over the economy. Greg Ip of the Wall Street Journal noted today that the U.S. is marching toward a form of state capitalism in which Trump looks much like the Chinese Communist Party, exercising political control not just over government agencies but over companies themselves. “A generation ago conventional wisdom held that as China liberalized, its economy would come to resemble America’s,” Ip wrote. “Instead, capitalism in America is starting to look like China.”

Editor’s Note: Read the rest of the story, at the below link.

Continue/Read Original Article Here: https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/august-11-2025

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On Politics: Mayor Trump – The New York Times

Trump’s Washington

How President Trump is changing government, the country and its politics.

Good evening. Tonight, we’re looking at how President Trump’s latest concern is local. We’re also covering the fallout over his decision to assert his authority over Washington D.C. And we have a (very) early report from Iowa. We’ll start with the headlines.

Mayor Trump

Closely flanked by the defense secretary and the nation’s top law enforcement official, President Trump sought to project an image of raw power on Monday as he announced his plans to send National Guard troops to the nation’s capital and engineer a federal takeover of its police department.

He also sounded a little like he wanted a job other than his own: Mayor.

“We’re going to replace the medians that are falling down all over the road, we’re going to replace the potholes,” Trump said, just after urging the nation’s tourists not to be put off from their trips to see the White House or the Air and Space Museum by the apocalyptic stories of murders and carjackings that he was telling at that very moment, despite the fact that the city’s violent crime rate has fallen.

“Keep coming!” Trump said, briefly assuming another mantle, that of local tourism director. “By the time you get your trip set, it’s going to be safe again.”

While Trump has deployed the National Guard to cities before, including in Los Angeles earlier this year and in Washington in 2020, this is the first time that he has actually moved to take control of a local police force, and to make a city’s crime his problem.

“I actually think it’s easy,” Trump said today. “If you’re competent, it’s easy.”

Some actual mayors, however, would disagree.

What mayors say

Earlier today, I called Mayor Jane Castor of Tampa, a Democrat in a red state who spent decades working as a police officer and then as her city’s police chief before being elected mayor in 2019. I wanted to know what she had to say about reducing crime.

“I’m not sure that President Trump would be interested in my advice,” Castor said. But she offered her perspective anyway.

“Law enforcement can only be successful by earning and keeping the trust of the community,” she said. “Just by putting sheer numbers of individuals out on the community in a law enforcement position, it may bring the city to a halt, but it’s not going to have a long term positive effect on any community.”

Bringing crime down, Castor added, “is painstaking and it can’t be done overnight.”

When I asked Mayor Randall Woodfin of Birmingham, Ala., how his city reduced homicides by 50 percent compared to this time last year, he offered a multipronged and technical answer that touched on things like solving and deterring crimes, and services aimed at stopping juvenile offenders from committing new crimes.

“It is far from easy, it takes a lot of work, but you have to listen to people on the ground and you have to listen to local law enforcement,” Woodfin, a Democrat, said.

A long history of talking crime

In some ways, Trump’s sudden interest in the local crime statistics — even as he ignored the ones that show violent crime in Washington to be at its lowest level in decades — is nothing new. He has, as my colleague Katie Rogers pointed out today, railed against images of urban blight and decay for decades, often calling for a heavy-handed response from law enforcement.

In the late 1980s, as an up-and-coming Manhattan developer, he seized on the rape and beating of a woman in Central Park, taking out ads calling for the death penalty that brought a cascade of media attention his way. (The five men who were accused of the crime were later exonerated.) In his first presidency, Trump also called for an intense police response during the Black Lives Matter protests that erupted in multiple cities, at one point tweeting, “When the looting starts, the shooting starts.”

He has not, however, been uniformly supportive of police. He was silent for hours while rioters angry about his election loss battled police in Washington on Jan. 6, 2021, and later pardoned even those involved who were convicted of crimes against police. Still, he has long seen crime as a political winner, turning to it as an issue on the campaign trail last year (F.B.I. statistics show that violent crimes, including homicides, fell across the country last year). When a member of the Department of Government Efficiency was assaulted last week, he seized on the news.

Still, despite spending days posting on social media about crime in Washington and hyping this morning’s news conference, Trump insisted he would rather do more presidential things than worry about law enforcement for a city of 700,000 people.

“It’s embarrassing for me to be up here. You know, I’m going to see Putin. I’m going to Russia on Friday,” Trump said, although he is actually planning to meet the Russian president in Alaska. “I don’t like being up here talking about how unsafe and how dirty and disgusting this once-beautiful capital was.”

And yet he kept doing so. When reporters tried to change the subject to Russia and Putin, he grew visibly annoyed, demanding that everyone stay focused on Washington.

The actual mayor of Washington, Muriel Bowser, called Trump’s actions “unsettling” in a news conference on Monday, but suggested there was little she could do to stop it. The Home Rule Act of 1973 gives the city the power to elect its own local government, but allows for presidents to declare a state of emergency to assert control over local law enforcement for 30 days at a time.

“It says the mayor shall comply with those requests,” she said.

Editor’s Note: Read the rest of the story, at the below link.

Continue/Read Original Article Here: On Politics: Mayor Trump

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