Good morning! It took thirty-five minutes, a sweltering, overcrowded room, and the collective willpower of dozens of reporters to not faint from heatstroke before Donald Trump finally emerged for his grand D.C. “crime and homelessness” announcement, a spectacle that looked less like a policy rollout and more like a Fox News Christmas card.
Flanked by Pam Bondi (double-necklaced, with a gold cross positioned like a moral permission slip), Pete Hegseth, Kash Patel, and Jeannine Pirro, each nodding in synchronized approval like animatronics at a MAGA theme park, Trump declared that Washington, D.C. was no longer under local control. Invoking Section 740 of the Home Rule Act, he announced he was placing the Metropolitan Police Department under federal command and handing operational oversight to none other than Bondi, whose résumé already includes purging the DOJ of inconvenient prosecutors. The National Guard, 800 troops to start, will be deployed on “night patrols” alongside FBI agents to “re-establish law and order.”
And in case you thought this was about actual crime rates, Mayor Muriel Bowser was quick to remind everyone that violent crime in the capital is at a thirty-year low. But facts don’t photograph well, so Trump came armed with charts stripped of context and a scattershot of dog whistles: promises to “eliminate slums,” scrap sanctuary cities, and remove the homeless from underpasses and “relocate them far from the capital”, a phrase that manages to be both vague and ominous.
Then came the campaign-ready one-liner: “You spit, we hit, and they get hit real ....
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