In D.C., An Authoritarian Dress Rehearsal

The spectacle of Trump’s Washington takeover may be fascist pageantry, but it’s also something more.

On August 11, President Donald Trump signed an executive order declaring a “crime emergency” in Washington, D.C., and mandating a 30-day federal takeover of its Metropolitan Police Department. He ordered Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to mobilize the District of Columbia National Guard to patrol the city’s streets, alongside other federal law enforcement agencies, and promised the capital’s “Liberation Day” was coming, as the combined federal force would free D.C. from “the cesspool of crime and homelessness that it has become after decades of unilateral Democrat leadership.”

Or, as Trump declared on Truth Social, “Washington, D.C. will be LIBERATED today! Crime, Savagery, Filth, and Scum will DISAPPEAR. I will, MAKE OUR CAPITAL GREAT AGAIN!”

Americans may be forgiven for feeling freedom fatigue; they’ve endured at least two “Liberation Days” already. Days before the 2024 election, Trump posted that, “The United States is now an OCCUPIED COUNTRY,” but Election Day would mark “LIBERATION DAY in America!” On April 2, Trump declared another “Liberation Day” to mark the signing of his sweeping worldwide tariffs, justified by claims of a “national emergency” (one of nine Trump has declared since his inauguration).

national guard troops in front of the us capitol

Each “liberation” Trump declares follows a similar pattern: by claiming emergency powers, the president can wield the full legal might of the state to deal with enemies foreign and domestic and renew U.S. primacy. In different ways, all are based on lies and distortions: that the country has been invaded and occupied by migrants; that the United States is the victim of the global economic order; that D.C. is undergoing an unprecedented crime epidemic, when in fact crime rates are at historic lows. And all these ills can be laid at Democrats’ door: for flooding the nation with undocumented workers, letting America be swindled by international trading partners, allowing the capital to collapse into disorder. As Trump advisor Stephen Miller claimed: “Democrats are trying to unravel civilization. Pres Trump will save it.”

Declarations of emergencies, demands for “law and order” and deploying concentrated state violence against poor and marginalized communities have long been primary tactics of authoritarianism in advanced capitalist societies. Under President Richard Nixon, as abolitionist scholar Ruth Wilson Gilmore observes, the “ascendant Right used the fact of [urban] disorder to persuade voters that [Democratic] incumbents failed to govern.” In the United Kingdom in the 1970s, as cultural theorist Stuart Hall explains, Margaret Thatcher’s neoliberalism rose on the back of racist narratives that scapegoated migrants of color and young Black men for widespread social complaints.

In both cases, hard turns to the Right relied on moral panics: episodes when real public anxieties are projected onto events and groups singled out as threats to social stability. In this way, moral panics provide what Hall calls a “vocabulary of discontent” that fosters popular legitimacy, and a mass base, for increasing authoritarianism.

While Trump’s declaration of an emergency in D.C. resembles previous moral panics around urban crime — including his own notorious intervention into the Central Park jogger case, when he clamored for innocent Black and Latino youths to receive the death penalty — his current campaign against disorder in major cities is more transparently manufactured than its precursors.