Using the pretext of one mugging of one of his cronies, Donald Trump is sending 800 National Guard troops to take over Washington DC. This is a gross overreaction on his part, but it’s his first impulse: let’s use unnecessary force in inappropriate ways to punish a blue city. It’s disgusting, it’s undemocratic, it’s un-American, it’s tinpot tyranny.
The defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, who was among officials joining Trump on the podium, said 800 national guard troops would take to the streets of Washington over the coming week. “They will be strong, they will be tough and they will stand with their law enforcement partners,” he said.
Trump, who lost the presidential election in DC to Democrat Kamala Harris by 86 percentage points, added that he may send in the military “if needed”.
By invoking section 740 of the District of Columbia Home Rule Act, the president is federalising DC’s Metropolitan police department for the first time in its history. He said he was declaring a public safety emergency and putting the police under the control of the attorney general, Pam Bondi.
Trump vowed to allow police to “do whatever the hell they want” in the face of provocations. “That’s the only language they [alleged criminals] understand. They like to spit in the face of the police. You spit, and we hit, and they get hit real hard.”
No, you cannot allow the police to do whatever they want. The police are required to be bound by the rule of law. Sending in the military is a criminal act by a lawless, corrupt president.
Washington DC is just his test case. If he is allowed to get away with this, you’re next.
The road to authoritarianism is littered with people telling you you’re overreacting.
Tim Walz knows Trump is itching to send the army in to crush all those cities that voted Democratic — you can bet Minneapolis and Seattle and Portland are also high on his hit list.
This is a fascist takeover. React appropriately.
Trump believes he is above the law. He now controls all the institiuutions -SCOTUS, Congress etc..and is a <ide facto dictator. A Fascist one. Already expelling people and building concentration camps.
It is horrendous.
Peoiple were warned before the last election. It was already clear what Trump was and wanted. Therewas a good epsiode of Aussie ABC’s Four Corners on Trump vs the laws and the DOJ last night wehich I hope dwould be on youtube butcan’t seem to find it right now.
PZM: “React appropriately”
Like what? They have guns, teargas, water cannons and a private prison and concentration camp system in which to disappear you in. And there is no sign of anyone involved refusing to follow these orders.
I know a few people from Bluesky who have left the US, but that’s not an option for most folks. Biden had 4 years to fix this, and his whole “trust the system” schtick got the US to where it is now.
Next up is Trump selling out Ukraine to Putin on Friday. And bam, nobody is talking about the Epstein files anymore.
It will take a generation or two to fix US democracy, if it can ever be fixed at all.
@PZ – I agree with you here, except that this is un-American. I’m afraid it is very, very American. The US are built on racism and violence. This is just the next step on a road that precedes Trump by decades, preparing the country for this moment. He didn’t just appear out of thin air. I fear what the next step is going to be.
rorshach, #2
I disagree 100%. How is Biden responsible for any of this? What are you proposing he should’ve fixed? This is all on Trump, nobody else.
Does that include arresting an adjudicated rapist and tax cheat? Ah, who am I kidding, of course not. It’d be hilarious if they did.
@4,
“How is Biden responsible for any of this?”
Remember the insurrection? The one Trump incited? On live TV? That should have been the end of it, instead Merrick Garland dragged his feet for 4 years and Biden and the Dems did fuckall. And then the insurrectionist was allowed to run for POTUS again at the next election , as if nothing happened. That’s how Biden is responsible.
“You spit and they hit.”
Trump speaks as if that were the sequence of events. I spit because police regularly commit assault, murder, and rape. They get away with it, and spitting to demoralize these appointed criminals is a legitimate tactic. All this tells me is that it’s Trump and his cronies who understand nothing but violence.
It is obvious Trump is playing this to his base. Many MAGAts will cheer lustily as pesky homeless are harassed and arrested and the encampments are eliminated. It really doesn’t need to bring down an already lower crime rate. But this doesn’t deal with real crime problems in America. Identity theft, and shop lifting. I suspect we will see a Trump led program to build more federal prisons in a big get tough on crime play in the next few years.
If Trump was not in a position of power he would be recognized as a sad and increasingly demented old man. He has little connection to reality, and is full of anger, fear, and disappointment. (He may or may not be physiologically demented, but his analysis of his own mind and his experiences is so messed up and unconnected to reality that he may as well be physiologically demented.)
What is also highly important about his latest press conference is that it shows that Trump is showing very obvious signs of cognitive decline.
It is obvious that he is heading into dementia.
Trump also said twice that he was meeting Putin in Russia.
He is in fact, going to meet Putin in Alaska.
He has already forgotten where his next meeting is going to be held.
Trump isn’t going to be around that much longer except as a meat puppet for his handlers.
Trump’s speech reminds me exactly of my grandmother, when Alzheimer’s had mostly taken over. It was only about two years before we put her in a home because my grandfather could no longer take care of her (or rather, he was managing to keep her going but was killing himself to do so).
We all know that Trump sent 4,000 National Guard army soldiers to Los Angeles along with 700 marines.
They were unnecessary and did almost nothing.
Most of the National Guard never left their base and just sat around and did nothing. They had far more soldiers than they needed anyway.
The National Guard detained one American citizen who turned out to not be a protester but someone with an appointment in a Federal building.
It will be the same in Washington DC.
All those Federal agents and National Guard troops will end up wasting their time and doing nothing.
Washington DC like all American cities and probably all cities everywhere has complex social problems like homelessness and various crimes.
The National Guard isn’t trained to solve them in a few weeks.
This is my best explanation for what Trump is doing.
“Trump is ultra-rich, powerful, invulnerable, and sick and dying.
He has nothing to lose…”
Xpost from Mano Singham’s blog August 03, 2025
The best explanation I’ve heard for Trump’s demented and malevolent actions is simple.
The has nothing to lose and just doesn’t care any more.
He has been impeached twice, lost the 2020 election, tried to reverse it and failed on January 06, and then won the recent election.
He is 79, a very rich billionaire, in poor health, and his mind is clearly far gone into senile dementia. He will die soon, at least mentally if not also physically.
Nobody can do anything to him now that he is president, the GOP is 100% behind him, and the US Supreme court has become totally controlled by right wing extremists. .
Trump is ultra-rich, powerful, invulnerable, and sick and dying.
He has nothing to lose so he is ruling by whims and whatever passes through his mind, put out in Executive Orders.
Prediction: Someone connected to the Trump regime, perhaps one of the DOGE lackies, will be arrested and roughed up by ICE when they try to detain him(because it’s 99 percent likely it will be a him) and he pulls the “Don’t you know who I am?” routine. Because of course they won’t have a clue that he’s one of Musk’s wunderkind. Bonus points if instead it’s Kash Patel.
I’m sure San Francisco is on their list, although he’ll also need troops in Oakland and probably Berkeley.
Trump’s mental decline may be irrelevant. It’s an oligarchy. There are a handful of people orchestrating this destruction of American democracy, some in actual elected positions, some appointed positions, some on the sidelines. When the time comes, they’ll move Taco out of the way. His replacement is right beside him, and there want be any difference.
I learned yesterday that Bill Barr’s father, Donald Barr, was the head of Dalton School who hired Jeffrey Epstein to teach there despite the fact Epstein had no credentials. During World War II, Donald Barr had served in the OSS. He also wrote a novel late in life called Space Relations (1973) which is described in Wikipedia as “science fiction novel about a planet ruled by oligarchs who engage in child sex slavery. It has been noted that the plot of the novel anticipates the crimes of Epstein and his accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell.” Now isn’t that curious.
OT but a fun example of how bigots fall out with each other. If American bigots are like this, they will be inefficient. And when the orange slug is gone the “movement” will fall apart to the sound of bickering.
“Far-right kook Nigel Farage Blasted for Being Woke by JK Rowling”
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=wwu5JQXLe7A
There are already big demonstrations in DC.
800 National Guard, eh? That’s the size of a Houston high school graduation class.
All they can do is Kent State the city. Are we prepared for that?
Not to mention that by the Posse Comitatus law, the army isn’t allowed to act as a civilian police force anyway.
They aren’t expected to do much of anything.
That isn’t the only force Trump called up.
He also reassigned the FBI, the DEA, and ICE to patrol the streets of Washington DC.
Which is a huge diversion of Federal employees.
FBI agents have their own jobs or did anyway.
They aren’t even trained to be rookie police patrol officers.
None of this has been thought out or makes any sense.
raven @ #19 — “none of this has been thought out” You didn’t expect any throught-ing out, did you? I’m afraid that America is as senile and cognitively impaired as Taco. I suspect it isn’t even supposed to make sense. It’s just more drama. It’s a distraction. It’s taking over cities which are generally Democratic to finally suppress the evil liberals and establish the Christian Nation that the framers intended (not). The anarchy that we’re poised to see is just what the thugs ordered…which is one reason I’m always suspicious of those even here who advocate for anarchism as some step toward a final solution.
Ugh. Everything is depressing. I can barely read posts on Pharyngula or Scientific American.
Don’t worry, I’m sure the resistance libs have their pink pussy hats ready!
You always have to go one bigger, don’t you? We have our Oswald Muesli arresting peaceful protesters with cardboard signs in London, your one puts soldiers on the streets of Washington.
He’s already employing all of these agencies plus the US Postal Service and the IRS to arrest brown people who he considers to be “illegals.”
I strongly suspect that there will be very little patrolling by the National Guard on K Street. Upper- and upper-middle-class white male lobbyists are not much of a threat to order in DC.
Just everywhere else.
I do, however, suspect they’ll be patrolling the halls of Congress to encourage members to vote correctly.
The Daily Show nailed this more than a decade ago, with a distressingly accurate piece by John Oliver and Jessica Williams regarding NYC’s “stop and frisk” policies — and to whom they should be applied.
So emperor magat is ‘shrinking the government’? The billions in tariffs, the 15% by tech corporations, universities providing hundreds of miillions to benefit his demands and so much more are fattening the federal government financially. The only things he is shrinking are the number of honest, career employees in government jobs, the functioning of the essential government services and the hopes of the populace for a decent, honest country they can afford to live in.
Two tiny examples:
1) https://mockpaperscissors.com/2025/08/11/moisten-my-beak/
UNPRECEDENTED ‘The U.S. government will take a 15% fee on some of Nvidia’s and AMD’s chip sales to China as a condition of granting them export licenses to sell in the country, a Trump administration official confirmed to Axios’ Ben Berkowitz.’ These tech companies are agreeing to being extorted by emperor magat, just like the main slime news media and the universities.
2)Even though Wash. D.C. violent crime is at a 30 year low:
https://mockpaperscissors.com/2025/08/12/donald-does-dc/
What Trump told Congress: In order to maintain control of D.C.’s police for more than 48 hours: special conditions of an emergency nature exist that require the use of the Metropolitan Police Department … for Federal purposes.
So,
A) emperor magat keeps endlessly appealing all his legal defeats as a way of ignoring the courts and what is left of the legal system.
B) He claims phony emergencies so he can use the military to take over the cities.
C) He invents dozens of absurd distractions from his crimes
D) there are billions of dollars in crypto fraud going to emperor magat
THERE IS NO RULE OF LAW IN THIS COUNTRY. Enjoy the ride down the death spiral.
Oh, and I am presuming PZ using the phrase ‘Dictator Trump is mad’ intentionally implies insane, instead of ‘angry’ which is a lot different. I AM ANGRY, BUT I AM NOT MAD. At least, not in the clinical sense.
@rorschach
The Democratic hubris was infuriating. If Hillary had taken the threat of Trump more seriously, she could have won. If Biden would have taken the threat of Trump more seriously, they would started the court cases earlier. As I have written many times before, an incompetent stupid and unpopular candidate winning is an indication of the incompetence of the opposition. Trump has broken two records on being the most unpopular person elected to the office; it is impossible to achieve that feat without help.
Isn’t hegseth the one who just posted that women (to quote the old ugly phrase) should be ‘barefoot, pregnant and in the kitchen. I hope he doesn’t find any ‘uppity’ females in the national guard.
DC is resisting. See Resistance from Sea to Shining Sea. If you are in the DC area and want to do something about this, see Free DC calendar
@13 raven wrote: Trump is ultra-rich, powerful, invulnerable, and sick and dying.
He has nothing to lose…
I reply: I must agree. And, that means he thinks he is untethered (nasty crypto pun intended) in many ways. He probably thinks he no longer can be constrained by any authority, so, he is free to do whatever his demented little mushroom brain wants. And, he is doing as much damage as he can, while he can.
@4 John Watts:
Biden could have and should have appointed a more competent and energetic attorney general than Merrick Garland. If prosecution of Trump and his supporters had been given proper priority Trump might not have been successful in running out the clock.
There is a huge increase in crime in D.C. I advise the National Guard to concentrate their forces around 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, as that seems to be the source of the crime wave.
Meanwhile, in Texas:
Ken Paxton asks judge to jail Beto O’Rourke for fundraising Texas Dems’ walkout
Since the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that money is political speech, keeping someone from fundraising seems like suppressing their freedom of speech.
I note some of this is a scare tactic NOT to the other “blue” cities…but to the suburbs, the REAL “battleground” at the ballot box. Terrorizing a city is not going to change its elections (unless, of course, they don’t have one anymore).
But it WILL be used to scare people into not voting Democrats in the battlefield suburban counties that have decided the elections the last 2 decades. Loudoun, VA. Cobb, GA. Bucks, PA. Just to name 3 but there are dozens more, counties that have turned or are turning blue and changing the representational shape of the states as a result.
Sometimes (NC, and trying in Texas) they can break up the suburbs and diffusse it. But these three states aren’t so easily changed, nor are other blue or purple states with borderline / battleground suburbs.
So there’s the scare: either scare them by pointing out how much Democratic policy doesn’t “work” (because it has been sabotaged) or point out how violent it will all become.
But this is not just a dictatorial stunt against DC as some example to the other cities. It is also a campaign strategy for ’26 (and in Virginia, our state and local races in less than 3 months), to scare the suburbs.
I wish I could say it isn’t going to work…but I gave up on predicting the gullibility of the electorate ages ago.
cartomancer @22:
Hadn’t heard that before. Brilliant!
It’s all a vain attempt to distract people from the Epstein/Maxwell affair, which will ultimately end in failure for Stupid Idiot.
This is also a good day to call your Democratic senators in support for statehood for DC.
Well this is surprising… it’s looking like a straight-up prelude to a coup, which I never would have thought Alzheimer Don had the balls for. Or the inclination, as he’s famously work-shy (to be read lazy as fuck).
This looks more like something concocted by one of his handlers, NaziMiller probably – he’s the most straight-up dictatorial prick of the bunch.
Moreover, the God Emperor is getting more and more incoherent by the minute, so I doubt he’s much longer for any kind of planning. For example, one of his latest:
“But when I look at Chicago and I look at LA, if we didn’t go to LA three months ago, LA would be burning like the part that didn’t burn. If you would’ve allowed the water to come down, which I told them about in my first term, I said, ‘You’re going to have problems, let it come down’. We actually sent in our military to have the water come down into LA. They still didn’t want it to come down after the fires. But that was it, we have it coming down. But hopefully LA is watching. That mayor also, the city is burning, they lost like 25,000 homes. I went there the day after the fire, you were there, and I saw people standing in front of a burned-down home. Their homes were incinerated, they weren’t like, even the steel, literally it was all warped, literally disintegrated because of the winds and the flames like a blow torch. They were standing on this beautiful day, maybe a couple of days after, we gave it a little time because of what they had suffered. Almost 25,000 homes. And you see what’s happening now, they didn’t give their permits. I went to a town hall meeting I said we’re going to get you the federal permit, which are much harder”.
(from USA today)
I would like to say that everyone’s makeup was in pretty good shape.
The thing that struck me was the stage right whips-and-chains-face-of-evil princess and the ever less menace of stupid on the opposite side.
@9. profpedant : “If Trump was not in a position of power he would be recognized as a sad and increasingly demented old man.”
If Trump were not in power he would be in jail where he deserves to be for the rest of his miserable life but no doubt never will be now.
Had Americans done the right thing and voted Kamala Harris into office as POTUS (& hey, maybe they did?). the convicted felon and known rapist would be behind bars since he was facing proper sentencing on many counts – and more trials including over his Attempted Coup of Jan 6th.
Had Americans – notably their Congress critters done the right thing then Merrick Garland would have been on SCOTUS since Obama appoointed him, there’d thus be a different AG and so much else would be so very, very different. We really do live in a horror timeline.
Last nights 4Corners can be seen on iView here :
https://iview.abc.net.au/video/NC2503H028S00
For Aussies at least and others may have ways of getting it to work elsewhere?
^ The one I mentioned in #1 & titled ‘Trump versus the Law.’ Those episodes are often on youtube afterwards but this one doesn’t seem to be there yet still.
@SteveR (#42):
You mean this one?
Trump vs the Law
Speaking entirely personally, I have good news and bad news:
1. Good news: Santa Cruz, my home, voted Harris over Trump by more than 3 to 1. I know no one who voted for the brute.
2. Bad news: Santa Cruz, my home, voted Harris over Trump by more than 3 to 1. Ratgeber Miller grew up in Santa Monica and you bet your bippy (remember that?) he is not thrilled. Come the next earthquake, fire, tsunami or other calamity, we’re in trouble.
Actually, come the next few hundred sunrises we are all in trouble.
@43. Usernames! : Yup – that’s the the one.