Trump Seizes Power Over D.C. Using Rarely Invoked Rule

President Trump on Monday announced plans to send the National Guard into Washington, D.C., and invoke Section 740 of the D.C. Home Rule Act of 1973, giving him temporary control over the nation’s capital.

“I’m announcing a historic action to rescue our nation’s capital from crime, bloodshed, Bedlam and squalor and worse,” Trump told a packed room of reporters. “This is Liberation Day in D.C., and we’re gonna take our capital back. We’re taking it back. Under the authorities vested in me as the President of the United States, I’m officially invoking Section 740, of the District of Columbia Home Rule Act, you know what that is, and placing the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department under direct federal control, and you’ll be meeting the people that will be directly involved with that.”

This is an unprecedented  decision that may very well lead to even more extreme overreaches of police and executive power on behalf of the Trump administration. As a federal district and not a state, the Home Rule Act gives D.C. the right to elect a mayor, legislate and enforce local police, and approve the city’s budget. Trump’s decision Monday puts the local Metropolitan Police Department under federal control. Rule 740, initially designed to be used in case of an all out violent uprising, allows Trump himself to control the MPD for two days at a time. 

Meanwhile, Trump announced, 800 National Guard troops will also be sent to patrol the district.

This press conference was the culmination of days of statements from the president in which he expressed the kind of far-right takes on crime in D.C. that people tend to develop after watching hours of Fox News every night. From clearing out homeless encampments to trying 14-year-olds as adults, Trump has begun to initiate his authoritarian vision  on the grounds that crime is at an emergency level. 

“You don’t want to get mugged and raped and shot and killed. And you all know people and friends of yours that that happened.... You want to be able to leave your apartment or your house where you live and feel safe and go into a store to buy a newspaper or buy something, and you don’t have that now,” Trump said. “The murder rate in Washington today is higher than that of Bogota, Colombia, Mexico City, some of the places that you hear about as being the worst places on earth. Much higher.” (In reality, violence crime in D.C. has been declining since 2023.) 

Trump also expressed deep, dogwhistle-laden disdain for the city’s Black and Latino youth, who he and his cast of press conference characters all threatened to clamp down on by increasing the level of force police can use and eliminating cashless bail. 

“We have slums here. We’re getting rid of them. I know it’s not politically correct. You’ll say, ‘Oh, so terrible.’ No, we get rid of the slums where they live. Caravans of mass youth rampage through city streets at all times of the day. They’re on ATVs, motorbikes. They travel pretty well,” Trump said. “They fight back, until you knock the hell out of them. Because it’s the only language they understand.”

D.C. residents should expect an increased police presence in popular areas like Dupont Circle and Malcolm X Park, as well as in triangle parks. Homeless people, immigrants, and young people of color, whom the administration sees as “young punks,” may likely face increased harassment.  

“This is just a list of some of the people … that were removed from the D.C. streets this weekend. They were rough, rough and tough. But we’re rougher and tougher,” Trump said, holding up a piece of paper with some unclear pictures on it. “Look at this. People here … they’re not going to be your local school teacher. This guy has killed people numerous times. They’re not going to be an asset. They will never be an asset to society. I don’t care.”

This story has been updated.

The president wants to federalize law enforcement in the nation’s capital—but his favorite mainstream media channel isn’t on board.

Fox News contributor Ted Williams, a criminal and civil trial attorney and former member of the Washington Metropolitan Police Department, issued an acute fact check for Donald Trump Sunday. Williams informed the network that he found Trump’s plan “troubling” because “crime is not out of control in the District of Columbia.”

“Yes there is crime, and there will always be crime,” Williams said, identifying minors as some of the major perpetrators of robberies over the last several years. “In any major metropolitan city you’re going to have, unfortunately, juveniles committing crimes.”

Trump has turned his attention toward Washington’s crime since 19-year-old DOGE staffer Edward Coristine, better known as “Big Balls,” was attacked a week ago by a couple of 15-year-olds who stole his iPhone. On Sunday, Trump said he would force the homeless out of the city “IMMEDIATELY” and that his administration would imprison criminals “very fast.”

“I would like to ask Mr. Trump,” Williams said. “Where were you last month when a three-year-old child, Honesty Cheadle, was shot and killed as the result of crime in the District of Columbia?”

“Don’t use this as a pretext to actually eradicate home rule,” he continued. “And that seemed to be what Mr. Trump is interested in.”

Trump also posted an ominous warning to Washington’s denizens early Monday, claiming that the city would be “liberated” the same day.

“Crime, Savagery, Filth, and Scum will DISAPPEAR,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “I will, MAKE OUR CAPITAL GREAT AGAIN! The days of ruthlessly killing, or hurting, innocent people, are OVER! I quickly fixed the Border (ZERO ILLEGALS in last 3 months!), D.C. is next!!! Thank you for your attention to this matter. President DJT.”

Last month, President Trump announced a bid to unseal grand jury transcripts from the criminal trials of notorious sex criminal Jeffrey Epstein and his convicted associate Ghislaine Maxwell—apparently to quell outrage over his administration’s perceived lack of transparency on Epstein.

On Monday, a federal judge in Manhattan denied Trump’s request to unseal such records related to Maxwell. Unsparingly, U.S. District Judge Paul Engelmayer described the administration’s attempt as a ruse, noting that unsealing the materials would reveal nothing new to the public.

The administration’s argument that the material “would bring to light meaningful new information about Epstein’s and Maxwell’s crimes,” Engelmayer wrote, “is demonstrably false.”

Someone “deeply interested and concerned about the Epstein matter” who “reviewed these materials expecting, based on the Government’s representations, to learn new information about Epstein’s and Maxwell’s crimes and the investigation into them, would come away feeling disappointed and misled,” he continued. “There is no ‘there’ there.”

Thus, Trump’s bid is “a far cry from every reported case” in which the court has previously been petitioned to unseal such records due to “special circumstances.”

Engelmawyer noted that he actually did consider unsealing the documents, but only because doing so “would expose as disingenuous” the administration’s explanations for seeking to do so. If the records were unsealed, he wrote, “A member of the public, appreciating that the Maxwell grand jury materials do not contribute anything to public knowledge, might conclude that the Government’s motion for their unsealing was aimed not at ‘transparency’ but at diversion—aimed not at full disclosure but at the illusion of such.”

Moreover, Engelmayer said the administration’s motion was “weakened” by a number of “irregularities.” Curiously, it was filed by Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche alone. Made “under circumstances suggestive of haste rather than reflective deliberation,” it was also brief—all of three-and-a-half pages, with “no purporting materials”—and filed without notifying victims of Epstein and Maxwell in advance.

This is the latest hiccup for Trump as the Epstein fiasco continues to plague his administration. Last month, a federal judge in Florida denied a request to unseal Epstein grand jury materials, in an opinion that observed the government itself had, in its petition, explicitly acknowledged that its argument was insufficient. A request before another Manhattan federal judge to unseal Epstein grand jury transcripts is still pending.

This story has been updated.

Disregarding the Constitution’s export clause, the Trump administration has struck an unprecedented arrangement to take a 15 percent cut of Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices’ chip sales to China.

Under the deal, first reported on Sunday, the companies will pay the U.S. government for sales of chips used for artificial intelligence—Nvidia’s H20 and AMD’s MI308 chips—in China in order to obtain export licenses to the country, despite national security restrictions.

According to the Financial Times, the arrangement is unprecedented, as “no US company has ever agreed to pay a portion of their revenues to obtain export licences.” Several media reports have called it “unusual.”

“Unconstitutional” would evidently work just as well. As Peter Harrell, a former Biden administration official and current fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, as well as many other observers, noted, the move disregards the U.S. Constitution’s prohibition on export taxes. The export clause states: “No Tax or Duty shall be laid on Articles exported from any State.”

The administration can be expected to characterize the arrangement as something other than a tax. It may ultimately be up to the courts, if the move faces legal challenges, to tell this like it is.

Constitutional concerns aside, this development represents the latest in an ongoing saga of Trump flip-flopping on chips, as the administration previously reportedly planned to ban the export of Nvidia’s H20 chips to China, before having a change of heart in April after the company’s CEO paid $1 million to dine with the president at Mar-a-Lago.

On Sunday, Vice President JD Vance and the Trump administration tried and failed to shift the accountability for the Epstein files onto Democrats, only reinvigorating calls for their release. 

“I laugh at the Democrats who are now all of a sudden so interested in the Epstein files. For four years, Joe Biden and the Democrats did nothing about this story,” Vance told Fox News’s Maria Bartiromo. “We know that Jeffrey Epstein had a lot of connections with left-wing politicians and left-wing billionaires, and now President Trump has demanded full transparency from this, and yet somehow the Democrats are attacking him, and not the Biden administration, which did nothing for four years.” 

Vance’s line of argument is willfully obtuse. Epstein killed himself in prison while Trump was president. He had plenty of time to start a “transparent” investigation, and arguably had even more reason to do so then, given the circumstances of Epstein’s death.   

And Trump has been anything but transparent on this. Attorney General Pam Bondi essentially lied to the entire country about the “Epstein list,” initially claiming she had it on her desk and then later stating no such list existed. Trump himself has called the entire process “bullshit,” questioned his biggest supporters for still caring about it, and has had Republicans pussyfoot around the issue in Congress. This is simply not how a transparent inquiry into this–or any issue of this gravity—should look.  

Another thing Vance fails to understand is that to normal Americans outside of the MAGA/Qanon spectrum, the Epstein case is still about the victims he abused, not about playing politics or revealing some liberal cabal. Epstein has been connected to prominent leftists like Fidel Castro and Noam Chomsky, as well as liberals like former President Bill Clinton, and conservatives like Donald Trump. What does it matter?  It isn’t some gotcha if the point here is justice, which it obviously isn’t for Trump and Vance. 

“Fine. Release all the files. With victims and survivors’ names and PII redacted,” conservative Bulwark editor Bill Kriston wrote on X. “But no redactions of clients, enablers, and see-no-evil associates.” 

Pod Save America’s Jon Favreau also chimed in. 

“Donald Trump’s name is in the Epstein files and @JDVance has been plotting with the AG and FBI Director to cover it up. Release the names! Democrats, Republicans, billionaires, or not,” he wrote. “What are you afraid of, @JDVance?”