Don't be fooled: Trump's D.C. takeover is about race

Black people have been Trump’s target for his entire adult life.

By Shalise Manza Young

Bloodthirsty gangs.

Getting rid of the slums where they live.

Savagery, filth and scum.

Thugs.

Roving mobs of wild youth.

Chicago, Baltimore, Oakland.

If you pulled out your Anti-Black Bingo card on Monday before President Donald Trump’s news conference announcing that the federal government will be taking over Washington, D.C., law enforcement, he and his blindingly white henchmen surrounding him at the podium made sure to fill every square.

Winner, winner, rancid dinner.

Under the false pretext that crime is out of control in the nation’s capital, Trump has invoked the Home Rule Act, which allows the federal government to push the mayor of D.C. aside and have the U.S. attorney general take control of the district’s police force. The law can be used for the city’s police to help when the federal government needs it—in a situation such as, perhaps, thousands of goons in red hats, some toting weapons, rioting outside the Capitol and hundreds more forcing their way inside, beating law enforcement officers, breaking into congressional offices, and calling for the vice president to be killed—but does not seem to be intended for the federal government to occupy the city.

He is also siccing hundreds of National Guard troops, FBI agents, and officers from other departments on the city. By law, federal control can last 30 days – or until the emergency ends (if approved by Congress), and there’s a not-small chance he will say his conjured emergency will not be over any time soon.

But please listen when I tell you: Black residents are their target. Especially Black teenagers and young men.

It’s right there in Trump’s language and behavior.

His belief that D.C. is rife with “roving bands of wild youth” is nearly verbatim what he wrote in 1989 when he called for the death penalty for the since-exonerated members of Central Park 5, Black and Latino teenagers who had been falsely accused of raping a white woman.

When he said tourists deserve to be safe when visiting, he said tourists from Iowa and Indiana, i.e. white people.

During the D.C. protests for racial justice in 2020, he allegedly wanted to have protestors shot; tear gas and non-lethal bullets were used to disperse crowds instead.

He did not mobilize the National Guard or resort to any such tactics in the city on Jan. 6, 2021, when his supporters engaged in an insurrection; instead, he turned a blind eye to the violence against Capitol officers.

And, days after being sworn in this year, he pardoned two white D.C. officers who had been convicted for their roles in the murder of a 20-year-old Black man and a related cover-up.

Black people have been Trump’s target for his entire adult life. This is a man whose first appearance in the New York Times was for denying apartments to Black applicants. But his racial animus makes him very much a product of the country he was born in; the historical rule, not an exception.

D.C. was lovingly dubbed “Chocolate City” in the early 1970s, when the population of Black people was around 71%; thanks to gentrification and an increasing cost of living, that number is down to 43%. But perhaps more offensive to Trump is that D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser and police chief Pamela Smith are Black women. Los Angeles, the first city he tried to occupy, also has a Black woman, Karen Bass, as its top executive.

It feels necessary to make it clear: Trump is lying, and has done an about-face. Major crime in Washington has fallen drastically over the past 18 months, something he himself touted three months ago. Justice Department data published a couple of weeks before Trump’s inauguration showed there was a 35% reduction in violent crime in the city in 2024 relative to 2023, and Metro Police reported on Monday that number has gone down 26% compared with this time last year.

Could it be better? Of course. No one would say otherwise.

But Trump isn’t doing this to make things better, he’s doing it because he can. As per usual, there were no clear plans from the felon in chief and his sycophantic accomplices, no concrete steps that will be taken, just declarations that crime will end immediately and the unhoused will be shuttled, uh, somewhere.

Though the sentiment on social media and on news shows is that Trump’s doing this as a distraction from his ever-present Epstein situation, best believe that a trio of Black high schoolers walking home from track practice only to be detained and frisked for the third straight day because one of them “fits the profile” or the mother of a 26-year-old Black man gets a call that her son is in intensive care after being shot by an officer because he didn’t instantly comply with vague instructions won’t give a shit about those files.

He’s also doing it as a trial balloon.

It was easy to miss as he babbled on about D.C.’s murder rate being higher than Bogotá, Colombia, (not true) or gleefully giving law enforcement carte blanche to get as physical as they want with citizens, but in mentioning Chicago, Baltimore, and Oakland, Calif., Trump indicated that Washington might be the first heavily Black city he occupies and terrorizes, but it won’t be the last.

“This will go further,” he said.

Shalise Manza Young was most recently a columnist at Yahoo Sports, focusing on the intersection of race, gender and culture in sports. The Associated Press Sports Editors named her one of the 10 best columnists in the country in 2020. She has also written for the Boston Globe and Providence Journal. Find her on Bluesky @shalisemyoung.

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