WASHINGTON — In an opinion piece, investigative journalist Radley Balko, who writes the newsletter The Watch, argues that Donald Trump’s federalization of Washington, D.C., is rooted in projecting authoritarian power rather than addressing crime.
In January 2024, the Justice Department reported that violent crime in D.C. had reached its lowest point in 30 years, and so far this year, rates have continued to decline by an additional 26 percent. Balko points out how these statistics undermine the president’s claim that “the nation’s capital is a violent cesspool” requiring “crime-fighting expertise.”
The event that triggered Trump’s crackdown did not relate to the overall crime rate but involved a specific incident. After photos resurfaced of Edward “Big Ball” Coristine, a former member of the Department of Government Efficiency, being severely beaten during an alleged carjacking, Trump and Elon Musk claimed that D.C. was a “crime-infested wasteland,” according to the article.
Following the incident, Trump immediately sent agents from the FBI, Homeland Security Investigations, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement into Washington. He is also deploying many D.C. National Guard troops that report directly to the president. Even though Congress is supposed to act as oversight, it has “essentially dissolved itself into Trump’s agenda,” Balko argues.
Balko notes that legal differences make Trump’s federalization of D.C. less severe than his earlier decision to deploy Marines and National Guard troops to Los Angeles. However, during a press conference, “Trump himself [was] either unaware of that distinction or [didn’t] acknowledge it. He vowed to send troops into Oakland, Baltimore, and New York as well,” Balko adds.
Despite these claims, violent crime in Oakland and Baltimore has dropped, and New York remains one of the safest cities in the United States, according to the article.
Even though Los Angeles faced no real emergencies, the article notes that the administration used incidents of property damage and peaceful protests against immigration raids to portray the city as a “dystopian hellscape.”
Balko uses these examples to illustrate how the federalization of Washington is driven by projecting power rather than actual crime control. “If this were all truly motivated by Trump’s deep commitment to fighting crime, he wouldn’t have cut security funding to D.C. by 44 percent,” Balko says.
The increase in federal intervention in D.C. follows a Pentagon memo written by Phill Hegseth, the defense secretary’s brother, outlining the administration’s plans “to deploy active-duty troops around the country to aid in immigration enforcement,” the article states. The Pentagon has also begun to develop “a ‘reaction force’ of National Guard troops Trump can deploy to any city on a moment’s notice.”
If these policies are enforced, Balko claims they would “end once and for all this country’s centuries-old tradition of keeping the military out of routine domestic law enforcement.” He adds that these policies could also lead to U.S. soldiers attacking American citizens.
The memo authored by Phill Hegseth also seeks to replicate Trump’s approach in Los Angeles by applying it to other cities. It attempts to associate peaceful protests protected by the Constitution with international crime and terrorist organizations such as al-Qaida and ISIS.
Additionally, the memo would “put heavy pressure on the Pentagon to scrap Founding-era principles about the role of a standing army in favor of a military increasingly directed inward, against U.S. residents and citizens, to do the president’s bidding,” according to the article.
Using the military to control protesters and critics is something Trump has long desired, Balko writes. Historically, when politicians have tried to get the military more involved in domestic law enforcement, the Pentagon has acted as the strongest resisting force. The U.S. military has held a firm rule restricting soldiers from being used against its citizens — a boundary described as a “bright red line.”
Though this may have been a strength within American democracy, Balko claims that “the bright red line now appears to be gone” as Trump has replaced the Defense Department’s senior leadership and JAG officers with devoted MAGA supporters. One of these supporters is Pete Hegseth, who wrote that he wanted to “invoke the military in a holy war.”
This change means the responsibility for carrying out “illegal, unconstitutional orders to detain, harm, or even kill immigrants, protesters, or the president’s perceived enemies will fall much lower in the chain of command, at ranks where defying orders won’t mean dismissal from a political position, but a possible court-martial or prison time,” the article states.
For the past 15 years, Balko has given speeches on the rise of police militarization, and although the trends are concerning, he says, “we do not live in a police state” and urges individuals “to speak out about these problems as they happen, because by the time you’re actually in a police state, speaking out is no longer an option.”
