Trump Orders National Guard to Washington and Takeover of Capital’s Police

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2025/08/11/us/trump-news

by Tadpole9181 • 12 months ago

451 528 12 months ago

John23832• 12 months ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posse_Comitatus_Act

Though I guess the loop hole here is that the National Guard would in this case be acting under "state authority" given that typically state-like actions for DC are deferred to Congress. The open question being whether the Executive branch could act independently, or whether they still need explicit authorization from Congress.

baggy_trough• 12 months ago

"One set of troops, the District of Columbia National Guard, has historically operated as the equivalent of a state militia (under Title 32 of the United States Code) not subject to Posse Comitatus Act restrictions, even though it is a federal entity under the command of the President and the Secretary of the Army."

normalaccess2• 12 months ago

From the Wiki Page:

"The Act does not prevent the Army National Guard or the Air National Guard under state authority from acting in a law enforcement capacity within its home state or in an adjacent state if invited by that state's governor. The United States Coast Guard (under the Department of Homeland Security) is not covered by the Act either, primarily because although it is an armed service, it also has a maritime law enforcement mission."

It's confusing because DC does not have a governor so it looks like an edge case that has not been tested before.

ratelimitsteve• 12 months ago

the DC national guard is under the direct command of the president. The law may use the words "state" and "governor" but I'd take the other side of any bet that says that will be interpreted to mean that the president doesn't have the authority to deploy the DC guard in DC because of the posse comitatus act.

pcaharrier• 12 months ago

Suffice to say that before this morning I had only a vague idea about how legally complicated this could get. For instance, there's an opinion from the Department of Justice (albeit an old one) that concluded that the President can use the DC National Guard for law enforcement purposes (in that case, drug interdiction) without running afoul of the Posse Comitatus Act.

Source: https://www.justice.gov/olc/opinion/use-national-guard-suppo...

chiffre01• 12 months ago

Can't wait for the to have no impact on crime in Southeast.

susiecambria2• 12 months ago

Southeast only or east of the river? I'd say the latter.

nickpinkston• 12 months ago

Almost a "Trump crossing the Potomac" (Caesar / Rubicon) moment, where the Army enters the Pomerium [1] of democracy.

Let's hope it doesn't have the same effect (ie the eventual fall of the republic)

[1] No military weapons were allowed inside this boundary of ancient Rome. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pomerium

cowpig• 12 months ago

If crime is at a 30-year low, what is the purpose of this? Is it to bring media attention away from the Epstein controversy?

jacquesm27• 12 months ago

It's a threat. What surprises me is that these people are all still following orders. They know there is no emergency - yet.

jjk1662• 12 months ago

For anyone who disobeys the order, it's the end of their career; and every person with a conscience who leaves now will be replaced by someone who will gleefully follow much worse orders in due time. Everyone at the top levels whose job is to actually take a stand against these acts, to serve as a rallying point for others to know when the time to resist has come, have abdicated their duty. If the authoritarians are smart, they will never create a situation where we are backed into a corner, where the time to fight is obvious; we will be convinced that our best course of action is to continue in lockstep with the system in the hopes of fixing it, right up until the slaughter.

penguin202• 12 months ago

They're not at 30 year lows

They've been cooking the books on it.

https://www.nbcwashington.com/news/local/dc-police-commander...

wffurr2• 12 months ago

Pretty sure I saw that episode of The Wire.

Aside, this is a pretty useful comment, unlike your other one on this thread. More of this and less of that, please.

drivingmenuts2• 12 months ago

It doesn't matter. What Trump believes (in his broken little mind) is all that matters. That and Plan 2025 or whatever it is.

rchaud3• 12 months ago

To continue the pattern of throwing the military into regions of the country that don't vote for the regime.

susiecambria2• 12 months ago

Don't forget the prez plans on getting rid of people experiencing homelessness.

gottorf27• 12 months ago

The "30-year low in violent crime" still puts DC ahead of every state in homicide rate. If DC were a country, it would rank somewhere around the top 20 most murderous. Venezuela, a literal failed state, has a lower homicide rate. Russia, the dysfunctional kleptocracy that it is, is less than a third as murderous as DC.

Might not the people of DC deserve better? Is it possible that problems exist in real life outside of "media attention"?

drozycki• 12 months ago

DC is a city, not a state. You seem to be aware of this distinction in this comment [1] and yet you conflate the two here..

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44871583

furyofantares• 12 months ago

DC isn't a state or a country. How's it compare to other cities in the US?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities...

Sorting by Total here looks like #25 in violent crime and #29 in property crime.

SalmoShalazar• 12 months ago

Stop spamming the thread with this nonsense. The correct comparison is to other cities, because it’s a city. Not a state or a country.

jacquesm27• 12 months ago

One way to now a chess match is about to begin is to see people place pieces on a chessboard. There is no thread of our possible history that is colored 'good' for the next couple of years that starts off with deploying the NG in Washington, D.C. As a pre-emptive move it is an overt threat and as a response to something that is actually happening it is complete overkill. Either way, trouble is brewing.

pohl• 12 months ago

A staged "carjacking" that the police got lucky enough to "stumble upon" — the "victim" of which just so happened to be the DOGE employee known as "Big Balls" — isn't enough justification for the presence of the National Guard for you?

cookiengineer• 12 months ago

[flagged]

AnimalMuppet2• 12 months ago

I'd like to see your evidence that it was staged. So far I have not seen anything that indicated that it was.

skinnymuch• 12 months ago

[flagged]

khazhoux2• 12 months ago

The “staged” part is speculation and not necessary. Even without that, we have federalization of a regional PD because one Republican was assaulted.

nullc2• 12 months ago

So what you're saying is that the attack was just "crisis actors"?

scarface_746• 12 months ago

This has happened before - a staged arrest in DC as propaganda

https://whyy.org/articles/30-years-ago-george-hw-bush-held-u...

kotaKat• 12 months ago

Nah, it's not justification at all that some kid was trying to buy ket and got his ass beat on a bad drug deal that we need to deploy the whole NG for this.

tacticalturtle• 12 months ago

Not a fan of the national guard deployment, but I don’t see why they would bother staging a carjacking when they can reference the very real murder of a congressional intern last month.

In fact that’s actually what they’re doing:

https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/boston/news/president-trump-wash...

rdl• 12 months ago

If the NG (or ideally another federal LE agency) demonstrably reduces crime in DC, without engaging in particularly political actions, will raise some interesting questions about why things have been so bad for for long.

Aside from street protests and rallies (which NG should scrupulously facilitate for 1A reasons; DC itself has been fairly bad about this in the past, too), I don't think most local policing is highly political. Yes, DC residents are losing some democratic control over their local policing, which is bad, but DC has also done a bad job with local policing for a long time.

(I'm broadly in favor of shrinking DC to the federal areas themselves; the parts where people live generally should be returned to the States.)

toomuchtodo3• 12 months ago

If the NG (or ideally another federal LE agency) demonstrably reduces crime in DC, without engaging in particularly political actions, will raise some interesting questions about why things have been so bad for for long.

Trump says crime in D.C. is out of control. Here’s what the data shows. - https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2025/08/10/trump-cri... - August 10th, 2025

Violent Crime in D.C. Hits 30 Year Low - https://www.justice.gov/usao-dc/pr/violent-crime-dc-hits-30-... - January 3rd, 2025 (My note: Published by this admin's DoJ in January of this year)

DC Metro Police 2025 Year-to-Date Crime Comparison - https://mpdc.dc.gov/page/district-crime-data-glance

burkaman• 12 months ago

If the NG (or ideally another federal LE agency) demonstrably reduces crime in DC

I don't know how you could measure this, since DC saw a very significant reduction in crime last year without any interference from the National Guard. If there are further reductions this year, that would be a continuation of a trend, not a new phenomenon.

jacquesm27• 12 months ago

For me it doesn't really raise any interesting questions at all: things are statistically not 'bad' per se, besides, you could trade your democracy for an autocracy or a dictatorship and end up 'safe' from small crime but meanwhile have your whole country looted.

Maybe some people prefer that but I would rather have garden variety criminals and a trustworthy government fighting them than some kind of re-invention of the USSR, which didn't really bother with collecting crime statistics, and where crime was - so they claimed - very low (this really wasn't the case, especially not if you consider the behavior of lots of highly placed individuals, who could get away with just about anything, except of course stealing from their bosses).

nozzlegear2• 12 months ago

(I'm broadly in favor of shrinking DC to the federal areas themselves; the parts where people live generally should be returned to the States.)

Alternatively, we could just make DC a state, which I'm broadly in favor of.

NikolaNovak• 12 months ago

Oh, you just have to look around the world to see how effectively a dictator's deployment of national armed force reduces the official crime statistics. There's absolutely positively zero doubt in mind that will be a reported outcome :-)

KennyBlanken2• 12 months ago

"So bad"? They're nineteenth in terms of highest murder rate among US cities. The rate had been falling for over a decade, save a brief spike in 2023.

tootie4• 12 months ago

For one I would not accept that trade off at all. But secondly it's exceedingly unlikely. Policing has barely any impact on crime rate. The governor of NYC deployed national guard to the subways and they stand around doing nothing. Police also routinely stand around doing nothing. Crime spiked from the pandemic and dropped when it ended. No public policy has made more than a marginal impact. Crime rate is dictated by economics.

What are 10000 federal agents and soldiers going to do? Walk around looking for crime to stop? DC has the most police per capita of any city in America. How much crime do they stop by standing around? At best they respond to 911 calls and federal agents aren't plugged in to 911. What the hell are they going to do about crime that isn't in the streets? And are they going to do traffic enforcement because that's probably 99% of the unenforced crime in any city.

Weigh that against Pam Bondi stating in no uncertain terms that DC will be completely crime free in short order. This is pure theater.

throwaway173738• 12 months ago

I hope you don’t find yourself in one of the out groups in the fascist state you seem so eager for. There’s a reason you don’t turn the military on the citizenry. They’re for fighting the enemies of the nation and the police are for maintaining order. When the military become the police, the citizenry become the enemy of the nation.

ajross3• 12 months ago

[...] raise some interesting questions about why things have been so bad for for long.

Counter-argument: things have not been bad. In DC or elsewhere. It's a meme. In fact DC crime statistics, like national ones, have been trending steadily downward for decades. They burp with immediate inputs, like spiking over the pandemic when formerly-employed folks found time to get in more trouble, but... they aren't bad.

DC is safe, historically. Chicago is safe. Seattle is safe. Portland is safe. NYC is extremely safe. All these places partisan media likes to paint as urban hellscapes are in fact historically safe cities in which to live and do business.

The answer to "why things have been so bad for so long" is inside your television, basically. It's not on the streets of DC.

treyd2• 12 months ago

The crime rates in DC have been dramatically falling over the last couple years, just as they have been falling across most cities in the country for the last couple decades.

jMyles• 12 months ago

If the NG (or ideally another federal LE agency) demonstrably reduces crime in DC, without engaging in particularly political actions

Every action taken by a police organization is per se a political action. That's why "police" are called that.

insane_dreamer5• 12 months ago

If the NG (or ideally another federal LE agency) demonstrably reduces crime in DC

Beijing is the safest city I've ever lived in. A heavily policed city with an authoritarian government will give you all the safety and low crime rates you desire.

It comes at a cost. Get on the wrong side of the authorities for any reason (or no reason), and you're in jail with the criminals.

Arainach4• 12 months ago

will raise some interesting questions about why things have been so bad for for long.

Crime in DC is near a 30 year low. If you think they've been "so bad for so long" then go spend some time in the city instead of watching TV.

Here, from the feds themselves (wonder how much longer this site will be live): https://www.justice.gov/usao-dc/pr/violent-crime-dc-hits-30-...

Total violent crime for 2024 in the District of Columbia is down 35% from 2023 and is the lowest it has been in over 30 years, according to data collected by the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD)

grafmax3• 12 months ago

Poverty is the underlying driver of most crime. Poverty, in turn, is the result of wealth hoarding by the ruling class.

Authoritarian intervention can lower crime at the expense of democratic rights. (Let’s not kid ourselves, the NG will not be used to “facilitate” protest in DC.). Effectively, an authoritarian response to crime further consolidates the power of the ruling class.

Trump has steadily encroached on constitutional rights throughout his term. He is indifferent to the root causes of crime. He is really only interested in crime insofar as it allows him to identify more people he doesn’t like as criminals, and to use harsher measures against them.

more_corn2• 12 months ago

Not sure what trump’s preferred game is, but pretty sure it’s not chess.

davidw• 12 months ago

Snacking on the chess pieces.

Sadly, some of the malignant people around him are more cunning.

rayiner16• 12 months ago

There is no thread of our possible history that is colored 'good' for the next couple of years that starts off with deploying the NG in Washington, D.C.

What if it helps clean up the homeless encampments and crime like Gavin Newsom did in San Francisco when Xi visited recently? That would be good!

D.C. is a dump and has been my entire life. There's been a drop in homicides since the peak in 2023, but last year was still 15% higher than in 2019: https://www.axios.com/local/washington-dc/2025/01/02/homicid.... In 2023, the homicide rate in D.C. was 39 per 100k people. This is only a little better than the civilian death rate in Iraq when it peaked in 2014 during ISIS (that was around 50 per 100k).

This is not a "guns" issue, it's a policing issue. Idaho has among the most guns of any state in the union, and Boise is as safe as a western European city, with 1/30th the homicide rate of D.C. Even several large U.S. cities, like Austin, El Paso, and Virginia Beach, have homicide rates 1/10th or less of D.C.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b....

D.C. is a rich city surrounded by wealthy suburbs. There's no reason for it to be as unsafe as decaying post-industrial cities like Philadelphia or Baltimore.

johnbellone6• 12 months ago

A big part of the reason why DC has these problems is because they do not control much of their own budgeting due to the nature of how the federal government manages the territory.

Calling it a "dump" is interesting, especially compared to some other cities that have much larger populations, budget, and representation. I've been in the DMV for nearly twenty years and much prefer living here than other metro areas because it is simply a lot cleaner and safer. Baltimore and Philadelphia are both cities that are much worse than living in DC proper.

apical_dendrite4• 12 months ago

Do you live in DC or travel there frequently? It's very much not a dump. There are great museums, great parks, a vibrant food and nightlife scene, and many beautiful neighborhoods. There is a lot of poverty (not very visible to tourists), and there is some homelessness (which is visible), but it remains a great city to visit and to live in.

jacquesm27• 12 months ago

s/now/know/

lenkite10• 12 months ago

In March 2024, Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York, a Democrat, announced that she would deploy 750 members of the National Guard to New York’s subway system.

Troops in military uniforms patrolled the subway with rifles.

Nobody raised an eye and nobody in this thread apparently even remembers.

National Guard has deployed to Washington DC dozens of times already - many times to combat crime and disturbances. (Technically hundreds of times if you count inaugurations).

xg15• 12 months ago

National guard is one thing, effectively private police forces another. The previous examples of that are not good.

jacquesm27• 12 months ago

The reason why nobody raised an eye then is because the people doing that weren't making all of the pre-requisite moves to set up a dictatorship. It was - of course - still misguided and it didn't work. Trump is using DC either simply 'because he can' (absent any actual reason), or as a trial ground to normalize such deployment to other cities in the future (he tried that once and failed). It also serves as a distraction from his Epstein files woes.

March 2024 was a different world than the one we live in today, and if you haven't been following the news for the last 6 months then you are of course excused but if you have been following the news you know that already.

pjc505• 12 months ago

I think a lot of people were also angry about that, and I think it may be a contributing factor to the success of Mamdani. As part of the feud between state-level and city-level politics, which is pretty intense despite being both nominally "D" because American politics doesn't have enough parties.

AtlasBarfed• 12 months ago

Did she do Nazi salutes?

hypeatei• 12 months ago

Did Governor Hochul:

1) Threaten to lockup "homegrowns" in a foreign prison?

2) Arrest people for criticizing the war in Gaza?

3) Use the justice department to further a political agenda? (see Eric Adams case)

4) Revoke security clearances of law firms representing her opponents?

Yeah, keep pretending that these two actions are similar and this is just Democrats being hyperbolic again. Trump is using this as revenge against his political opponents since most in DC don't support him. The fact we're still pretending these two parties are the same is unbelievable.

cherry_tree• 11 months ago

HN discussion of Hochuls actions at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39629397

damnesian• 11 months ago

The question now is which crimes, which disturbances, or if this is just a gesture of power.

refurb5• 12 months ago

So when the military was deployed to LA due to ICE riots, then they left without incident is a warning sign too? Or maybe that was just just a test?

pjc505• 12 months ago

Definitely a warning sign, even if the warning light went out again. It may even have had a slightly positive effect in waking up the Democrat governor.

dragonwriter8• 12 months ago

So when the military was deployed to LA due to ICE riots

ICE was the entity acting lawlessly, and tht were sent to support it.

then they left without incident

They did not “leave withot incident”. Except in the sense that no additional incident was caused by their departure.

But, yes, the LA deployment was both a test and a warning sign (and, like the DC one, also a deliberate distraction from other things the Administration wanted to take a less prominent place in the national discussion at the time.)

zeristor• 12 months ago

I am curious what the people in the National Guard think about this, do they all think this is a good idea.

By my reckoning next stop would be an “accidental fire” in the House of Representatives.

jkestner• 11 months ago

“I said no immediately because it’s like signing up for the Gestapo,” the Guard source said.

https://www.kenklippenstein.com/p/leak-trumps-dc-deployment-...

wffurr2• 12 months ago

Washington DC should either be made a state or given to Maryland except for a small federal district. What a load of crap.

GlenTheMachine• 12 months ago

We don't want it.

jihadjihad• 12 months ago

We’re only ~1/7 of the way through this administration. There is so much more time left on the clock for shenanigans.

It’s hard to imagine three summers from now being anything other than a hellscape. I hope to God I’m wrong.

toomuchtodo3• 12 months ago

Hope for the best, plan for the worst.

penguin_booze• 12 months ago

https://www.project2025.observer/en

dpkirchner• 12 months ago

I remember when people here on HN were telling us Trump had no relation to Project 2025.

duxup2• 12 months ago

Meanwhile SCOTUS has opted out of doing their job allowing the executive branch to do what it likes (as long as it’s their guy…)

softwaredoug5• 12 months ago

It’s really the administration of whatever SCOTUS lets him get away with. Trump - by pressure testing the law - lets SCOTUS reimagine the constitutional order.

xeornet2• 12 months ago

This was the same doomsday message in the last Trump term. Nothing happened.

dragonwriter8• 12 months ago

The old guard of nonfascist Republicans wasn't purged until late in the last Trump term and into the period between Trump terms, and was particularly strong in the first half of the last term, the second half of last term, the Democrats controlled the House, limiting. There was not a trifecta under a fully Trump-aligned Republican Party until the current term. That makes a difference in outcomes, and has already made obvious differences in outcomes in exactly the direction discussed.

pjc505• 12 months ago

Apart from January 6th. Which was dissipated once a Capitol guard decided he finally had enough cause to shoot someone.

jacquesm27• 12 months ago

Well, you can round down everything short of outright civil war to 'zero' but then you might miss important signals that you could act on. That doomsday message so far seems to be largely on the money, and in some ways has already been exceeded. That doesn't mean it can't get much worse.

const_cast4• 12 months ago

... except for all the stuff that happened. You know, an attempted coup, Covid and the half a million Americans it left dead.

tstrimple• 11 months ago

Too much of the focus is on Trump and not nearly enough on the people who are willing to vote for such an obviously corrupt conman. Trump will be dead within a decade, but these voters who actually want a dictator as long as he hurts the people they think should be hurt will be voting for generations.

Trump is a symptom of the cancer of conservatism. He’s the inevitable result of conservative politics and positioning over the last 40+ years. The GOP wanted to make an environment where their guy could never be punished for watergate levels of blatant criminal offense and they fucking succeeded.

drivingmenuts2• 12 months ago

Is being homeless now a violation of federal law?

Tadpole91817• 12 months ago

Trump created an executive order on that too, so they're trying: https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/07/endi...

It directs the executive agencies to seek to loosen any restrictions on non-consentual admission to psychiatric facilities and to force homeless (and people with mental illness) into them.

It also aims to end drug abuse recovery programs and says that not having physical space for patients shouldn't stop them, IIRC.

dragonwriter8• 12 months ago

Law as something distinct from the immediate whim of the executive backed by military force is under (both figurative and literal) attack in the US right now.

protocolture• 12 months ago

Whats under attack is the idea that this was ever not the case. Laws are arbitrary, temporary and not at all related to justice.

justin664• 12 months ago

Thank goodness somebody flagged this. All this commentary on the collapse of our democracy was really harshing my mellow.

rchaud3• 12 months ago

plus it might divert eyeballs from all the truly critical news about which AI startup got how much in funding to do something 100 other companies are doing.

ta12432• 12 months ago

This is literally a news site for startup funding

LexiMax• 12 months ago

I have been promoting the use of the active front page to my tech-minded friends and acquaintances that use this site.

https://news.ycombinator.com/active

morkalork• 12 months ago

Been using it ever since another user mentioned it, the difference has been stark.

duxup2• 12 months ago

Oh very nice thank you.

udkl• 12 months ago

Can someone explain what 'active' stories are? It isn't described in the FAQ

93po• 12 months ago

or just use https://hckrnews.com/

insane_dreamer5• 12 months ago

I have this as my bookmark. Haven't visited the front page for months.

baubino• 12 months ago

Thank you for this. I had no idea. It’s like a completely different (i.e., better) hackernews.

uncircle• 12 months ago

Ah, there’s where all the anti-AI posts went! I thought everybody on this site had drunk the kool aid, but it’s just any criticism doesn’t make the front page any more. Thanks, much appreciated.

Tadpole91817• 12 months ago

Out of curiosity, is there a way we can request a mod to manually unflag this? I see comments in this thread have been killed, so I'm not sure why this is still flagged 3 hours later when it seems clearly relevant to HN?

A military deploying to the capital of the richest country on earth where most tech giants reside is important for tech.

Jtsummers• 12 months ago

Email them via the contact link at the bottom of the page. They're pretty responsive, though for political topics they're reluctant to unflag them because the discussions are often fruitless (just a bunch of people shouting at each other).

ath3nd3• 12 months ago

It's flagged for the same reason that posts describing the genocide Israel is doing in Palestine get flagged: the absolute intolerance of those in power to any dissenting opinions.

tomhow3• 12 months ago

We've unflagged it now.

PieTime• 12 months ago

Meanwhile palantir is training AI models that assassinate journalist. Ethics are a major part of tech, we can make decisions that distribute billions in relief or execute millions.

tastyface5• 12 months ago

Therac-25 feels downright quaint these days.

Tadpole91817• 12 months ago

For transparency: NYTimes live stories have dynamic headlines. I've updated the title to match the current headline as of ~12pm.

mitchbob• 12 months ago

https://archive.ph/2025.08.11-145539/https://www.nytimes.com...

josefritzishere• 12 months ago

Reminds me of the Gleiwitz incident.

doom2• 12 months ago

Why is the current level of crime in DC worthy of deploying the National Guard, but January 6 wasn't?

tastyface5• 12 months ago

"For my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law."

throw0101c4• 12 months ago

"For my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law."

AFAICT, from Peru's General Óscar Benavides:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Óscar_R._Benavides

AuryGlenz• 12 months ago

Trump pushed to have the National Guard there to keep the peace on January 6th:

https://cha.house.gov/2024/9/transcripts-show-president-trum...

tastyface5• 12 months ago

"Pence took lead as Trump initially resisted sending National Guard to Capitol" (https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/06/politics/pence-national-guard)

gottorf27• 12 months ago

In case this isn't a rhetorical question, the homicide rate in DC is such that it beats out all 50 states by a considerable amount[0]. (The most murderous state, Louisiana, is roughly half as murderous as DC.)

There were over 5000 auto thefts reported last year[1] in an area that has about 350k registered cars. Statistically speaking, more than one in a hundred cars were stolen in one year!

Similarly, there were roughly 26k cases of property crime reported for an overall rate of property crime victimization of 3-4% of the population.

If I lived in DC, my day-to-day life would be affected a whole lot more by this level of disorder than a political event that took place on one day in one building. Of course, you're free to value things differently, but it's an indictment of how much antisocial behavior some Americans are willing to tolerate that people are shocked by the statement that "crime in DC is bad".

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_intenti...

[1] https://mpdc.dc.gov/dailycrime

bagels• 12 months ago

Okay, now do cities. DC is not a state.

refurb5• 12 months ago

Oh do I have a story to share with you!

https://cha.house.gov/2024/9/transcripts-show-president-trum...

JohnTHaller• 11 months ago

Overall crime is down in DC. And they just stripped more funding from the DC govt.

Herring• 12 months ago

To be fair, he's right. In a well-functioning judicial system, he'd be in a tiny jail cell right now.

AnimalMuppet2• 12 months ago

That is not wise. (I'm ignoring the question of whether it's legal or constitutional or justified. Those are important questions. They matter. But for this comment, I'm ignoring them.)

Trump just made himself owner of the crime rate in DC. Every crime that occurs there is now Trump's failure. That is not something that he's going to want.

Tadpole91817• 12 months ago

As if that matters. He never takes responsibility for literally anything. Blames other people for his appointees and laws. All negative consequences are always someone else's fault.

And his base gobbles it up.

Heck, even it did get attributed to him - it doesn't matter. 47% of conservatives said they'd still support Trump even if he raped children with Epstein: https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/fact-check-47-republican...

croes2• 12 months ago

And you will see how no crime will be reported.

Do you really think he will let out numbers that make him look bad

llm_nerd2• 12 months ago

He can, of course, almost completely stop crime in Washington D.C. Simply ignore all rights -- something this admin is getting really eager to do -- and then dump enormous, completely irrational amounts of resources into it. Boom, big win and look at how crime-free the empty streets are, aside from the dozen police on every corner, snipers on every roof.

Is there anything to learn from that? Of course not. Aside from the liberty for security trade, should every town increase the police budget by 50x? Is that actually a solution for anyone?

yupitsme123• 12 months ago

Existing big-city police forces already have the resources to stop crime in their respective cities. They just choose not to do it. If you want to see how capable they are of stopping crimes that are of interest to them, try setting up an illegal food stand or parking without paying the meter. You'll be busted within hours.

They have budgets in the Billions of dollars, tons of surveillance equipment, military grade weapons, and a monopoly on force. But they still can't deal with street thugs, belligerent crazy people, or jerks on the subway like cities in other countries manage to do?

I don't know what Trump's game is in all of this, but we should stop pretending that blue cities aren't already playing their own games and they clearly don't involve stopping or solving crime.

gottorf27• 12 months ago

Simply ignore all rights -- something this admin is getting really eager to do -- and then dump enormous, completely irrational amounts of resources into it.

Criminology studies have shown that you in fact do not need a hyper-resourced police state to achieve this. The Pareto rule applies very strongly in criminality; the majority of violent crime is committed by a tiny fraction of the population[0]. About 90% of prisoners have been arrested more than three times[1].

You do not understand the difficulty in obtaining a criminal conviction in this country (a result of the common law tradition coming down from Blackstone) and the degree to which local policy in places like DC outright favors the rights of the criminals over the rights of the innocents that must live near them. There's a lot of room to improve the lives of the law-abiding before there are "snipers on every roof".

should every town increase the police budget by 50x? Is that actually a solution for anyone?

DC isn't just any town; it has such a high homicide rate that were it a country, it would rank in the top 20 most murderous. In 2024 alone, it had over 5000 cars stolen in a place that only has 350k cars. That's more than one in a hundred.

Perhaps every town whose crime rate is at this level should increase the police budget by 50x, or try some other radical thing? Because this isn't working out.

[0] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3969807/

[1] https://bjs.ojp.gov/library/publications/arrest-history-pers...

jmclnx• 12 months ago

DC out of control crime ?? He should look at Mobile AL, but we all know facts mean nothing to him.

normalaccess2• 12 months ago

He would have to get permission of the governor. I think there is a loop hole for DC because it has no governor.

"The Act (Posse Comitatus Act) does not prevent the Army National Guard or the Air National Guard under state authority from acting in a law enforcement capacity within its home state or in an adjacent state if invited by that state's governor."

  Wiki Page on the Posse Comitatus Act
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posse_Comitatus_Act

Tadpole91817• 12 months ago

Like he got permission from California's governor? Trump has abdicated any pretense of following the law at this point, it's approaching offensive to use "following the law" as a defense now.

goatlover2• 12 months ago

Gavin Newsom sued Trump over nationalizing the California NG against his wishes and those of the LA mayor.

zug_zug2• 12 months ago

He'll do anything to distract from epstein.

kcplate4• 12 months ago

Um…Is any one of note in public still talking about that? Way way out of the news cycle now.

zug_zug2• 12 months ago

Really? I saw news about it just today.

It's never dropped of my news, from him moving Maxwell to a minimum security prison, to questions about whether he'll pardon her, to the signed letter with illustrations he wrote for Epstein's birthday.

I don't think the world will ever forget, certainly my social circles and social media are still buzzing with it.

In many ways it's more damning than watergate, though people are debating whether to call it Epsteingate or Pedogate.

beeflet5• 12 months ago

Yes. Based on talking to people like you IRL, I don't think democrats understand how big the epstein situation is.

Revealing the epstein docs/list was a major selling point for the q-anon/conspiracy voters during the election. This is the first major controversy that puts trump against a sizable majority of his supporters, which are becoming disillusioned.

We are reaching a nixon-esque turning point where the cover up is worse than the crime.

khazhoux2• 12 months ago

I don’t like this narrative. I think he would still be overreaching federal powers even without Epstein.

senectus1• 12 months ago

it can easily be and quite likely is both at the same time.

owlninja• 12 months ago

I'm with you, it's almost like that has become another distraction where they know in the end, it won't matter. Meanwhile I can barely keep up with the wild executive orders based on outdated laws. Someone is just pulling the strings.

beeflet5• 12 months ago

Trump's voting base don't care about overreaching federal powers, they care about epstein. You are not going to turn any new demographic to your side with this nuanced civil liberties narrative, which has been cried many times before.

"Epstein didn't kill himself" is the perfect meme to destroy confidence in trump.

jacquesm27• 12 months ago

It is both. Use a thing you wanted to do anyway to distract from a crisis. It's just an optimization, really: if you are going to have to do something as a distraction it may as well be something that you intended for all along rather than something that you don't want to do because it is a more effective distraction. If it weren't it would be easier to see that it was in fact a distraction and now you have one more thing you wanted anyway.

jmuguy• 12 months ago

I have this theory that one easy way to curry favor with Trump is tell him about some previously esoteric/unused power the executive has. So much of what he does seems to just be because he can do it, and not because it actually has a real goal or purpose. Like a kid playing with toys. I realize he says that tariffs are meant to bring in revenue or increase domestic manufacturing or [pick random reason]. Or that he's doing this due to DC apparently turning into Fallujah but looking back over his first term and now this one, its the same pattern.

edot• 12 months ago

That’s an interesting observation. I’ve wondered how he can be so “creative” if you can call it that, but I guess if you have lots of assistants who can read all of the “well, technically you can do XYZ” sections buried deep in odd legal texts, and you enjoy doing stuff just to get more limelight, these actions are inherently attention grabbing because they are so novel.

tastyface5• 12 months ago

Yes. The really dangerous people are Miller, Vought, and their Project 2025 allies. I’m quite sure they’re constantly workshopping new and exciting ways to expand dictatorial power.

noisy_boy• 12 months ago

I think it is not only limelight. He is a conman/hustler type of personality based on all the things he has done in the past so he probably likes loopholes and shortcuts that can be exploited. Doing things fairly and correctly are slow and for losers in his book.

cosmicgadget2• 12 months ago

They need to fully test their boundaries before midterms. It probably helps that SCOTUS is overturning injunctions now while things are kind of mellow.

beeflet5• 12 months ago

I choose to believe that trump's whole campaign is motivated out of spite for getting ribbed after the birther movement. Everything he does, he does it to flabbergast the democrats "because he can"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zeGpLg0b3DE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wC1NGWM8gP8

IAmGraydon4• 11 months ago

I think he wants revenge not only on democrats, but on the entire nation.

softwaredoug5• 11 months ago

The main motivation is narcissistic supply. He knows people will be angry. He sops up the attention.

For him at least I don’t think there’s anything deeper other than he found this way to get people to either adore him or hate him. In either case he’s the center of attention.

Once the toy he stops generating attention, he will get bored and he will find a new toy.

ElijahLynn• 12 months ago

Someone is testing something out...

Gigachad• 12 months ago

Preparing for when the Epstein list leaks.

dragonwriter8• 12 months ago

That's not even speculation, he explicitly stated plans to do the same in cities beyond the capital, and even named some likely targets.

This is, fairly overtly, a step (not the first step, but another step) towards a nationwide militarized police state.

throw0101c4• 12 months ago

IIRC, the Guard was not called out on January 6, 2021:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_6_United_States_Capito...

Kapura• 12 months ago

yeah, well, those guys believed (or found it convenient to believe) the lie that trump actually won the election. why would he call the guard on them?

lantry• 12 months ago

a lot of people defended Trump after jan 6 by saying he offered the national guard but was turned down by the mayor. Now he is suddenly able to deploy the national guard regardless of the mayor's input.

novia• 12 months ago

It was. I was there. The National Guard was delayed until like 6 pm but they were definitely there locking down the ENTIRE city. They stayed for days afterwards. It even says so in the link you provided.

https://www.cnn.com/2021/03/03/politics/us-capitol-riot-hear...

https://archive.is/ZfKzG

throw0101c4• 12 months ago

IIRC, the Guard was not called out on January 6, 2021:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_6_United_States_Capito...

tootie4• 12 months ago

Trump repeatedly said he didn't have the authority to call them.

more_corn2• 12 months ago

Why would he call the guard on people he sent there?

kjsingh• 11 months ago

People's president :)

IAmGraydon4• 11 months ago

You keep spreading this, but it's simply untrue. The National Guard was there on January 6, though they were delayed several hours.

throwawayqqq114• 11 months ago

Oh, i only read about injured local police officers on jan.6.

Where was the NG when they were needed the most? And why?

throw0101c4• 11 months ago

The National Guard was there on January 6, though they were delayed several hours.

They were? I didn't see them keeping the mob at bay, or protecting the Capital from being stormed, in the footage I saw. Do you have a link to said footage that you can provide?

neonate• 12 months ago

https://archive.md/cLI2c

zmmmmm2• 12 months ago

I'm curious how it plays out if Trump simply refuses to allow electors from non-republican states physical access to attend congress after the next election. My understanding is, they have to be physically present to cast their votes. It would seem, he could literally just deploy the NG and physically prevent them and that would be sufficient to swing the election.

cosmicgadget2• 12 months ago

I am not sure he needs to be that overt.

delfinom2• 12 months ago

Doesn't make sense because they would still need a majority electoral votes. If the election goes gop, then keeping the Dems out does nothing. If the election goes dem, then keeping Dems out also pushed the process nowhere.

First past the post yo.

evan_• 12 months ago

if they delay the vote long enough they can say there’s no clear winner and the house effectively gets to appoint the president.That’s what they were trying to do on January 6.

This time it has the neat side effect of letting them cleanly appoint Trump for a third term without him being elected twice, which (it will be claimed) does not violate the 22nd amendment.

“No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice”

nobody99998• 12 months ago

I'm curious how it plays out if Trump simply refuses to allow electors from non-republican states physical access to attend congress after the next election. My understanding is, they have to be physically present to cast their votes.

Your understanding is incredibly confused. Yes, electors need to meet within each state to cast their ballots at a location specified by each state.

Those ballots are certified by (a) state official(s) (on or before December 12th) and those ballots are then forwarded to DC (IIRC, to the National Archives) and those certified ballots are conveyed to the capital for counting on January 6th.

So, no. The electors needn't go to Washington DC to "cast their ballots." In fact, if they did so on the appointed day for them to cast their ballot, they'd be unable to do so, as that process would be proceeding without them in the state which designated them as an elector.

I really hope you're not an American citizen.

zmmmmm2• 12 months ago

Thank you - you're correct, I'm horribly mistaken about how it all works! Thank you for correcting me.

nobody99998• 12 months ago

The U.S. Constitution, Article II, Section I, Clause 3[0][1] states (in part):

The Electors shall meet in their respective States, and vote by Ballot for two Persons, of whom one at least shall not be an Inhabitant of the same State with themselves. And they shall make a List of all the Persons voted for, and of the Number of Votes for each; which List they shall sign and certify, and transmit sealed to the Seat of the Government of the United States, directed to the President of the Senate. The President of the Senate shall, in the Presence of the Senate and House of Representatives, open all the Certificates, and the Votes shall then be counted."

[0] https://constitutioncenter.org/the-constitution/full-text

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_Two_of_the_United_Stat...

thrance2• 11 months ago

The constitution is irrelevant. Trump does not care about it, and SCOTUS will let him do whatever he wants.

1024core2• 12 months ago

He just wants to make sure something like January 6 does not happen; i.e., there's no possibility of a reverse Uno when he actually _does_ try to steal the election this November. He knows fully well that he's going to lose the House, and possibly the Senate this November. And MF hates to lose, he's got such an ego.

aaronbrethorst• 12 months ago

US midterms are in 2026.

1024core2• 12 months ago

This goes deeper than I thought ....

;-)

yalogin• 12 months ago

My first thought is, I don’t know how bad his involvement with Epstein is that he has to go to these extents to distract people.

But this time around he has a playbook of “inching towards autocracy” very well defined and milestoned. He is executing on it very well too

jmward01• 12 months ago

I was in a very negative space earlier this year due to the current direction the US is heading. Mostly because I am someone that doesn't want to hear problems without a call to action I can actually engage with. The things that are happening at the national level are very hard to do anything about but I did realize that I could engage at my local level so I decided to just start showing up. I now regularly attend my local city counsel meetings. I don't go and make a bunch of remarks but I have, on a few occasions, added to the public comments and, I think, I was listened to. If you want to effect change my recommendation is to show up. At a minimum you will get far more informed but you may just find that you can actually make a change too.

nutribueno• 12 months ago

If you want to effect change my recommendation is to show up.

I have reservations about this line of thought.

For one, the people at the local city counsel have been showing up for a long time, all over the country in fact. If the actions they took have brought them here, of what use were the actions?

And second, I would like to see some hard evidence that you have in fact effected/enacted change by showing up beyond just being more informed and participating in what can otherwise be (from personal experience) either a snooze-fest or an echo chamber.

cj• 12 months ago

Why discourage people from attending their local city meetings?

Sure, it might be a "snooze-fest", but you're not there for excitement.

ranyume• 12 months ago

Keeping local communities habitable is each individual's responsibility towards the community. This much should be ingrained in everyone. If you treat yourself and act as an individual you will never accomplish anything.

I don't intent this comment to be a "you're wrong" comment. I'm only saying that OP's POV runs on an assumption that can be damaging.

vel0city• 12 months ago

For one, the people at the local city counsel have been showing up for a long time, all over the country in fact.

Yeah, and they're a big part of the reason why housing is a messed up as it is.

pj_mukh• 12 months ago

I say this as an immigrant: But if you're not an immigrant, a medicare recipient or maybe in the military, your state and municipal governments have significantly more influence on your life than your federal government and most people rarely pay attention to this level of politics.

This lets the people who do pay attention have complete capture. You know your rent is high? Yea that's mostly your state and municipal government doing the bidding of landlords and landed gentry.

scarface_746• 12 months ago

The smaller the unit of government, the more it transcends politics and becomes about good governance and getting things done.

At least I thought that when living in GA and saw most of the modern governors both Democratic and Republican weren’t bat shit crazy.

Kemp (Republican) is still sort of trying to hold the line against the GA MAGA wing of the Republican Party.

But then I moved to Florida…

tomlockwood• 12 months ago

I absolutely applaud this. I doorknocked a thousand doors for my local state election and came out of the experience more optimistic than ever. Real people, listen. Real people want to make the world better. Getting out there is the antidote to doomerism.

xyst• 12 months ago

This is quite awful. Courts are doing nothing. Balance of powers, checks and balances have been weakened through attrition and external forces — wealthy businessmen/lobbyists.

IAmGraydon4• 11 months ago

What he did is not illegal. What are the courts going to do? All he has to do is name any random thing he considers to be an emergency, and calling up the National Guard in DC is completely within his rights.

softwaredoug5• 12 months ago

In practice - so far - the facts on the ground don’t seem to look like a takeover. More like “more resources for local cops from feds”.

Which I’m not saying is good, but we should separate the bluster from the reality.

From this article

https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2025/08/11/trump-dc-...

On national guard, 200 people at a time focused on administrative work:

U.S. Army spokesman Col. Dave Butler said that most National Guard troops live locally and that the idea is to deploy them in shifts of 200 soldiers each to provide a round-the-clock presence.
The troops for now will be focused on providing logistical and administrative support to free up D.C. police officers, similar to their support role at the southern U.S. border.

And they basically don’t want to actually run the police dept:

Trump named Terry Cole, the head of the DEA, as interim commissioner of the D.C. police. Cole told Police Chief Pamela A. Smith on Monday evening that the federal team is hoping for the Metropolitan Police Department to lead the effort,
Cole described Trump’s takeover of the department as more of a collaboration, and he stressed that officials would meet and work together to figure out where to deploy resources, the official said.

Basically they’re putting bodies out there so DC can put more local cops in the streets. And they really don’t know how to run anything when it comes to policing DC. How would they? They need the local cops to actually understand the issues.

Not saying any of this is good. But wanted to add this context.

justin664• 12 months ago

It's entirely ridiculous that you're taking the federal government's words about its intentions at face value.

softwaredoug5• 12 months ago

I’ll change my mind when there’s news beyond what I’ve stated. I feel confident in what I’ve stated because all parties (DC and Feds) are saying similar things.

But to take the opposite maximalist “Trump is a maniacal dictator” position ignores the pattern of bluster and back down from Trump.

Save your mental sanity. His goal is your outrage. He doesn’t have a plan.

jacquesm27• 12 months ago

The military is a blunt instrument. It is good at destruction and killing, not so good at construction and subtle care. Neither is the police, but they are at least a little bit better at it. You call in the military as a means of last resort when you are in a war. To call in the military to fight crime is about as useful as to bring a chain saw into an operating theater.

aeon_ai5• 12 months ago

DC often serves as America's protest stage. Controlling its police means controlling what kinds of dissent are permissible at the symbolic heart of democracy.

Controlling the physical space around Congress, the Supreme Court, the federal bureaucracy means that every legislator, judge, and federal worker sees the Guard on their commute.

The message is environmental and atmospheric. Propaganda for the governing class. Power made visible to those for whom there is intent to intimidate.

Extending that, DC notoriously exists as an anomaly violating the foundation that the US was founded on. It is a city that isn't a city, a population with little representation in the federal apparatus that controls it.

DC's legal vulnerability makes it perfect for testing. What works there can be threatened elsewhere. "We did it in Washington" becomes the precedent.

The 30-day limit isn't a constraint. It's a demonstration period.

dvt• 12 months ago

Have you ever been to DC? National Guard is literally constantly all over the city. The headlines are a bit sensationalized and even DC's mayor on MSNBC earlier today was cautiously optimistic about more law enforcement on the streets.

"We did it in Washington" becomes the precedent.

The fact that Trump mobilized troops in LA to help with ICE raids was way more worrying, but they were withdrawn a week and a half ago by the Pentagon without much hullabaloo.

dvogel• 12 months ago

I lived in DC for 5 years. From 2011 to 2014 and 2019 to 2020. I saw _a lot_ of cops, of nearly every jurisdiction, but never a national guard member.

a-posteriori• 12 months ago

This reads a little bit like AI. Particularly the sentence flow of the final few lines.

random32• 12 months ago

Because that’s what it is.

rayiner16• 12 months ago

DC often serves as America's protest stage.

DC is also the capital of the country and a major tourist destination, and makes a terrible impression being covered with homeless encampments.

Democrats, more than anyone else, should want Trump to flood D.C. with police and turn it into Disney Land. When tourists from Wisconsin or Idaho come to visit the nation's capital, you want them to have a positive impression of what the federal government can build!

ajross3• 12 months ago

makes a terrible impression being covered with homeless encampments.

I salute your honesty about what it is you think (and I agree!) this is actually about.

Obviously deploying literal military force against the homeless is batshit crazy. But that is where we are.

aeon_ai5• 12 months ago

Your proposal is that the military response is primarily to combat homeless encampments in DC, that this is appropriate, and that this won’t happen elsewhere because this problem is unique to DC?

I’m not a democrat. Help me steel-man your point.

insane_dreamer5• 12 months ago

I don't know where the homeless encampments are, but I've been going to DC for work every 6 months for the past 3 years and have not seen any homeless. Last time there I took a very long evening walk from the Lincoln Memorial to Congress and then back to through the Penn Quarter all the way to Kennedy Center, late in the evening, all prime tourist areas, and didn't see a single homeless person.

I'm sure they exist somewhere -- but downtown DC is definitely not "covered" with homeless encampments.

Tyrubias3• 12 months ago

The solution to homelessness is not to bring in the military and “send the homeless far away” (to paraphrase what Trump said). The solution to homelessness is to provide housing and support.

The U.S. government has been broken for years (under both parties). We can’t sweep our problems under the rug by making D.C. look good. Also, I’m pretty sure the majority of people from Wisconsin or Idaho who vote for Republicans don’t do it because they went on a trip to D.C. and thought it was terrible.

jacquesm27• 12 months ago

You take care of the homeless (and not the homeless 'problem') by accessible mental healthcare, by having good social programs and by ensuring that healthcare costs are equally distributed across society rather than used to bankrupt individuals who then become one of many feedlines into homelessness. Of course that would never happen to you so you see a homeless problem where there are instead many other problems.

For a large swath of the USA homelessness is a real possibility and whether or not they will end up in that situation is mostly a game of chance.

kashunstva2• 12 months ago

makes a terrible impression being covered with homeless encampments.

If only there were ways of working with unhoused people rather than have the NG disappear them…

Democrats, more than anyone else, should want Trump to flood D.C. with police and turn it into Disney Land.

Do Democrats have a special affinity for theme parks that their Republican counterparts do not?

Were I to travel to D.C. for leisure, I would expect to see unhoused people because it’s a city. But I’d be exceedingly put-off by military personnel patrolling the streets.

acdha7• 12 months ago

makes a terrible impression being covered with homeless encampments.

As a DC resident, this would be comically wrong if the stakes weren’t so high. Even if you’re only talking about the downtown areas where tourists go, you have to go looking for a handful of places where homeless people hang out. The city has had problems providing housing capacity after the pandemic but that spike has been ebbing and it’s not something the National Guard can help with unless they’re deploying field housing and a kitchen.

AlecSchueler• 12 months ago

Why not just build some streets especially for the tourists and other guests? You could call it the Potemkin Quarter.

UncleMeat3• 12 months ago

Homeless people are people too. The government owes them its support just like it owes support to the finance guy who goes to work in a suit. "Use guns to make sure that wealthy people never have to see a poor person" is horrifying to me.

thrance2• 11 months ago

And what's the national guard supposed to do with the homeless? Beat them senseless on the sidewalk? Don't you think that would leave a much worse impression on hypothetical tourists? Jesus fucking Christ.

Bizarrely, tourism is way down since they've started arresting foreigners at the border for no reason, so maybe start there if you care about that? But you probably only care about issues that are convenient to your talking points.

muzani5• 12 months ago

I've often asked what the point of constitutional monarchies were, but this seems like a good one. The king has nearly no power. He's a figurehead. He's just there to press the "STOP" button when things have gotten out of hand. But whenever a king abuses this power, the lawmakers cut it from him. So he just sits there in a palace, living luxuriously from tax money. In good times, we ask why he's allowed to do this (but not out loud, that would be illegal).

Kings have control over the military. The prime minister has control over the police. In absolute monarchies like Saudi Arabia, there's no separation between the police and the army; soldiers are out there enforcing the law. In constitutional monarchies, you can't elect someone into Commander-in-Chief; the prime minister has to convince the king that it's something worthy of military action. As the king is well fed, it's difficult to bribe or blackmail kings into acting against the state.

I'm not saying it's a better system by any means - the US of A has seen plenty of wars and maybe it's best to have an elected Commander-in-Chief. But just some thought from a systems design standpoint.

gottorf27• 12 months ago

I've often asked what the point of constitutional monarchies were, but this seems like a good one.

Bagehot divided the dignified and the efficient. I've long thought that one glaring downside of the American presidential system is that it tries to combine the two roles in one office.

dragonwriter8• 12 months ago

Non-monarchic parliamentary democracies often separate the head of government (prime minister) and chief of state (president); it’s not exclusively a thing done by Constitutional monarchies. Instead, lacking the separation is, among representative democracies, a distinguishing (mis)feature of Presidential systems.

pjc505• 12 months ago

They've managed to achieve both undignified and inefficient.

preommr• 12 months ago

the prime minister has to convince the king that it's something worthy of military action. As the king is well fed, it's difficult to bribe or blackmail kings into acting against the state.

This only works on paper, and on paper congress or SCOTUS would've stepped in much sooner.

In practice, the monarch either has a lot of power, or does whatever the real head of government wants. Especially with how Trump can claim that he has the mandate of the people given that he won the election, and it's not like he doesn't wrap his motives behind legitimate claims. It's pretty easy to just claim that he has to do X for the security of the nation.

In reality, if the US had a monarch, they too would've gone along with whatever Trump wanted because to not do so is the nuclear option. It would be the equivalent of states trying to secede or not recognizing the current administration as legitimate and choosing to declare Harris as the real POTUS.

bombcar4• 12 months ago

The mere existence of a king does provide some check, because at the back of the mind of the “real” government is the question - if the king rebelled against us, would we win?

muzani5• 11 months ago

We can't really speculate what the US would be like as a constitutional monarchy, as it's just very culturally anti-monarchic. The Second Amendment and free speech, for example.

In a monarchy, laws often restrict people from insulting the monarch. Not in UK, I believe, but even British culture pays their respects to the king. As a result, the king's words hold a lot of power. A president can "talk down" to congress, but a PM is still a servant of the king.

Let's say someone like Sir Richard Branson decides to do a Trump. If he claimed that he had to do X for the security of the nation, the king would be able to call him out on it. As head of military, the king has access to all the confidential data. The Supreme Court and Congress may be missing data. As the PM has to get the king to rubber stamp military actions, the king still has the right to veto it.

jemmyw2• 12 months ago

Kings have control over the military. The prime minister has control over the police.

That's not true in the case of European constitutional monarchies. The elected government has total power except for some very specific duties around the administration of government, like dissolving parliament. And even then, those are largely ceremonial.

I do think having so much power with one person who cannot easily be replaced at any point is bad for democratic government. In a parliamentary system a poorly performing PM can be gone in an instant.

muzani5• 12 months ago

True, it doesn't apply everywhere. I'm thinking rights get cut when abused. Under the Meiji Constitution (1889-1947), Japan's emperor was Commander-in-Chief, and after the end of WW2, he was not. But even as a figurehead, he was useful in uniting the factions to end the war when multiple parties wanted to keep it going.

"In a parliamentary system a poorly performing PM can be gone in an instant."

Though it feels like what we have now is poorly performing PMs replaced by another poorly performing PM. Often one that promises to do the opposite of what the previous PM did, then forgets the promises or blames them on something else.

pjc505• 12 months ago

A constitutional monarchy is not something which has a "point" in some sort of intelligent design sense. You wouldn't design one that way.

A constitutional monarchy is what you get starting from an absolute monarchy and gradually draining the power out of it and transferring it to democratic institutions. It then satisfies the demand of the public who want the roleplay of an absolute ruler, and are scared of a fully egalitarian system, but without letting them actually do any absolutism.

King Charles does not have operational control of the military. He only has a large amount of personal loyalty, which is not quite the same thing. He holds a number of operational ranks from his service, from which he is retired, and a number of honorary senior titles.

The UK is just as vulnerable to troops-on-the-streets fascism as anywhere else. (Bloody Sunday etc)

actionfromafar2• 11 months ago

It's not only about roleplay - it's also an actual power struggle that was never faught to completion, but instead slowed down, paused, or drained as you said. But because the monarchies were never pushed out, they didn't have much reason to play dirty and use their influence and money to regain hard power, in self defence.

The downside is of course, the monetary and social costs of having such an organ. But perhaps it's useful in the same sense the appendix is. When an illness catches the intestines, the appendix can best case be a reservoir of good and recolonize the intestines. Something like that happened in Spain.

saguntum• 11 months ago

This was actually put into practice during the Spanish transition to democracy. The King gave a televised address denouncing an attempted fascist coup and ordered them to stand down: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1981_Spanish_coup_attempt#Juan...

To this day, bullet holes remain in the ceiling of the Spanish parliament building to remind them of the coup attempt. I can't find it anymore, but there was a good drama movie about these events on Netflix a while ago.

jimt12342• 12 months ago

I'd hate to be a cop in DC. We all saw people get pardoned by Trump who admitted to assaulting law enforcement officers on Jan 6th.

kachapopopow• 12 months ago

I made a concious effort to just stop looking at politics. Uninstalled twitter, stopped reading all news, stopped mentally engaging with friends when they bring up political topics, but holy ** this guy is making it impossible.

1vuio0pswjnm7• 12 months ago

Works when/where archive.md is blocked:

   No Javascript required

   x=https://www.nytimes.com/live/2025/08/11/us/trump-news
   echo url=$x|curl -K- -A "googlebot" >  1.htm
   firefox ./1.htm

Smeevy• 12 months ago

[flagged]

thrown-0825• 12 months ago

There is a simple, direct, and immediate solution to this problem.

buyucu• 12 months ago

Is Trump trying to distract from the fact that he was part of the Epstein thing.

thealecpow• 12 months ago

Setting aside whether federalizing D.C. policing is wise, there’s a simple checkbook question people miss: Guard deployments aren’t free.

    In D.C. 2020, the Guard put the peak daily cost at ~$2.65M for ~5,000 troops, about $530 per Guard/day. That’s a decent order-of-magnitude yardstick for today. Source: Reuters (contemporaneous) – https://www.reuters.com/article/world/what-was-the-cost-for-the-national-guard-to-deploy-in-dc-up-to-26-million-a-idUSKBN23J05Y/

    For a rough scale: 800–1,200 troops = mid–six figures per day, before you add transport/lodging decisions that move the number a lot. A recent LA activation was budgeted $134M for 60 days ($2.2M/day) off DoD testimony, which matches that ballpark.

If you want a plain-English explanation of what drives those day rates (lodging, per diem, lift, command overhead) and how to scale them, this explainer lays out the math: https://www.thepricer.org/how-much-does-national-guard-deplo...

doublerabbit• 12 months ago

Guard deployments aren’t free.

https://www.usdebtclock.org/ is stil ticking along nicely.

zitsarethecure• 12 months ago

A fun game is to replace "Donald Trump" in news stories with "Hillary Clinton" and to imagine the reaction if they were otherwise identical.

metalman• 11 months ago

psssssssst, psssssssssst, hey ,mexico, pssssst, ya over here it's Canada, let's take em now while there distracted, heck they might not mind!

yusege• 11 months ago

It's not my country. However, it's disheartening to see the citizens of the USA view this move as acceptable. It's a populist move taken without any communication or consultation with locals. This is Trump's way to authoritarianism. He can negotiate with his allies about tariffs because he thinks it hurts the USA. But he just chose to bully his allies. But he always backs down from tariffs to dictators. He hasn't talked about the crimes in red states. He talks about the blue states 7/24. He has not been behaving responsibly. You are losing your democracy. I hope you can understand this in the future elections, if it's not too late to understand. And please read about 1914-1939 Germany.

FrustratedMonky• 11 months ago

No mention of Andor?

The send in troops to inflame the local population.

ICE causes conflict that local population eventually fights back against.

Federal Gov needs to roll in the real army to seize control.

Profit?

Trump Orders National Guard to Washington and Takeover of Capital’s Police

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