Two hours ago, I landed in Sri Lanka for a two week vacation. I wasn’t planning on writing new stuff while I’m away, and I’m still mostly sticking to that plan.
But the first thing I saw when I landed is that Trump is sending National Guard troops into DC and taking control of the police force.
I’m still on vacation and need to go to sleep soon to fight jet lag, so I’m going to try to keep this short. But I think it’s incredibly important, not just because of what it means for DC, but because DC is the canary in the coal mine when it comes to the broader Trumpian project to separate power from accountability.
First, I should acknowledge, yes this is in some way “a distraction,” just as nearly every action is in some way a distraction. But a better way to think about it is as a larger part of the single biggest animating force behind Trumpism - letting the rich, powerful, and well-connected get away with anything they want.
Not releasing the Epstein files. Sending masked ICE agents to throw law-abiding immigrants into unmarked cars. Creating a fake “emergency” so you can take over a police department and terrify an entire city. It’s part of the same big idea. Complete and total unaccountability.
The second thing I’ll say is that DC is a really nice place to live. I complain about it sometimes - everyone does - but I moved there in 2009 for three months and it’s 2025 and I never really left. Those of you who have read It’s Only Drowning know that these days I split my time between there and New Jersey, so DC’s not the only place I call home, but it’s still home.
And it’s a pretty great place.
I can’t speak for all of DC. But speaking for the part of it made up by people who moved there for their jobs, one of my favorite things I’ve ever written was a 2017 Washington Post piece in which I argued that our nation’s capitol is “America’s most hopeful place.”
Of course, DC has some crime, and some policies that different people might disagree about, and lots of overlapping cultures and communities and no one can belong to all of them.
There’s a reason for that: 700,000 people live there.
That’s more people than live in Vermont or Wyoming. It’s about the same number of people who live in Delaware and Alaska.
And DC residents pay federal taxes. Lots and lots of federal taxes. DC residents sent more than $54,000 per person to the federal government last year - that’s more than twice as much as the highest-paying state. The average West Virginian contributed less than $5000.
Despite being one of the least-populous places that pay federal taxes, the government raises more money from DCers than from Nebraskans, Oklahomans, Alaskans, North Dakotans, South Dakotans, or residents of 20 other states.
And how does the government spend DCers tax money? With no representative input whatsoever from the people who were taxed. We have no voting members of Congress. We have no Senators. We get three electoral college members. We also get a mayor and a city council. But even basic matters of local governance - including the budget - are controlled by Congress and, to some extent, the executive branch.
That doesn’t just mean we’re unrepresented when it’s time to vote. It means that DC - and the interests of those who live there - are cut out of the negotiations and deals that drive legislation and federal policy.
For a long time, many people living in DC - even those, like me, who believe in DC statehood - accepted the irony that a country born on the slogan, “No taxation without representation,” would tax the citizens of its capital district without allowing them any representatives.
We put up with it for a few reasons:
It didn’t seem likely to change any time soon.
For white collar professionals, life in D.C. was very nice. It felt strange to identify as part of a disenfranchised group while living a very comfortable life.
For those in D.C. who worked for the federal government in some way (which is not all DCers, I want to make clear), I think there was a sense that advocating for even more influence over national policy was unfair, or that having civil service protections was a type of guaranteed participation in public life in the same way voting would otherwise have been.
None of these things made it okay that people in DC were denied voting rights. But it made it bearable.
What I think many of us suspected, and what is now becoming obvious (and in fairness, was also pretty obvious to the people who founded this country) is that when people lack representation, their place in a country is always on the brink of getting worse. Rulers who mismanage through incompetence and corruption need scapegoats. They need punching bags. They need stones to squeeze blood from. And they’d rather not target people who can in any way threaten their political power. So they target people who can’t vote.
That’s what’s happening now. Trump needs to distract his base from Epstein. He needs to keep the red-blue culture war going by attacking the cities that, by the way, provide more than 91 percent of America’s GDP. He needs to sign executive orders that freak out his opposition and convince more already frightened institutions to bend the knee.
So here we are. This is, obviously, not about strengthening the DC police force. If it were, Republicans in Congress wouldn’t have cut a billion dollars from the district’s budget earlier this year and tried to defund DC’s police. It’s not about crime, because crime is down.
It’s about Trump doing whatever he can get away with, and seizing power wherever he can. And when a population has no way of holding their leaders accountable, there’s a lot you can do, and a lot you can seize.
Which brings me to the broader Trumpian project. MAGA is currently trying to redistrict Texas, Indiana, Ohio, South Carolina, and other states, to create as many non-competitive red districts as possible. Trump has announced he wants to redo the census, almost certainly in order to undercount the number of people in blue states and overcount the number in red states. That would be a pretext for redoing the number of House seats - and electoral college votes - to favor Republicans.
One right-wing strategist boasted that the GOP could pick up 42 House seats in total with these tactics. I think that’s probably a large exaggeration. But think about it for a second: we’ve reached a point where a political party brags about - delights in - the possibility of winning elections by rewriting the rules.
The media tends to report on this as a plan to “pick up seats,” or so forth. But there’s another way of describing it: MAGA’s plan is to make fewer Americans’ votes count. They can’t disenfranchise them completely. But they can make it so they vote in a district gerrymandered to be non-competitive, in a state that gets less voting power in Congress or the electoral college than it ought to, because of a rigged census.
What the next generation of MAGA imagines is an America where blue cities and states are essentially colonies, enriching the regime’s coffers while being permanently governed by people from elsewhere with no say over their own fates.
That’s not just unfair or wrong. It’s completely unsustainable. MAGA seems to believe that America became a superpower despite self-government. A far more likely explanation is that America became a superpower because of self-government.
One day, the anti-MAGA coalition will regain power. When that happens, DC needs to become a state. But that’s not all. We need to see DC as a cautionary tale about what can happen to a community’s broader rights when the right to vote is taken away - or rendered meaningless. We needer a broader renewal of the basic principle that (however imperfectly applied) created this country in the first place.
In America, power doesn’t belong to our leaders. Power belongs to us.
I lived and worked in and near DC for many years, and never felt any fear of being attacked. I worked in NE, a middle class area mostly populated by black folk. I was and remain a white woman. I used to take the Metro in and walk the three blocks from the station to my workplace, free as a bird and as unafraid. There was not a whiff of menace, the streets were clean, the homes well maintained. Trump's actions, ostensibly taken to protect the people of the District are, I firmly believe a test run, like LA, for the deployment of troops against the American people, and the seizure of governmental power from cities and states whose people can't stand him or the takeover by the rich, now decades in the making, that he is a visible part of. Period. Have a great visit in Sri Lanka. Rest well, and come back energized to keep fighting the good fight.
Agree DC should absolutely become a state.
But who will do it? The 'anti-MAGA" coalition didn't do it when BIden had a Democratic trifecta early in his term. Neither did Obama when he had the same..neither did Clinton when he had the same...
From what I can see, every Democratic president going back a century has had a Dem Senate and House for at least part of their terms...but no DC statehood.