Trump Planned D.C. Takeover Because He Hated Route to His Golf Course

President Trump’s takeover of Washington, D.C., was directly inspired by the homeless people he saw from his motorcade window on the way to his golf course.

“We’re having a News Conference tomorrow in the White House. I’m going to make our Capital safer and more beautiful than it ever was before. The Homeless have to move out, IMMEDIATELY. We will give you places to stay, but FAR from the Capital,” Trump wrote Sunday on Truth Social, attaching four pictures to his post.

Two of the photos showed a total of about 10 tents on the side of the road near a highway ramp The Guardian identified as about a mile from the White House. One picture showed a person sleeping on the steps of the American Institute of Pharmacy Building on Constitution Avenue. And another was a picture of some trash in the E Street Expressway by the Kennedy Center.

This is the route the president takes to his frequent outings to his Trump National Golf Club in Virginia.

On Monday, Trump unfortunately made good on his threat, announcing that he plans to send the National Guard into Washington, D.C., and invoke Section 740 of the D.C. Home Rule Act of 1973, a rare move granting 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.”

While Trump spent much of the press conference focusing on what he thinks is a crime epidemic, he also emphasized his plans for D.C.’s “beautification.”

“We’re going to be removing homeless encampments from all over our parks, our beautiful, beautiful parks, which now a lot of people can’t walk on. They’ve been very, very dirty, very, a lot of problems, but we’ve already started that. We’re moving the encampments away, trying to take care of people, some of those people, we don’t know how they even got there, some of those people from different countries, different parts of the world,” Trump opined. “Nobody knows who they are. They have no idea. But they’re there getting rid of the people from underpasses and public spaces from all over the city.”

While every city in America could be cleaner, Trump’s version of “beautification” is forcibly removing homeless people so he doesn’t have to see them on his way to go play golf.

Donald Trump on Monday seemed to forget the location of his upcoming summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin—once again raising concerns about the cognitive ability of the 79-year-old president.

The president had announced the summit, which will take place in Alaska, in a Truth Social post Friday. “The highly anticipated meeting between myself, as President of the United States of America, and President Vladimir Putin, of Russia, will take place next Friday, August 15, 2025, in the Great State of Alaska,” Trump wrote.

But on Monday, the president, twice, erroneously claimed the summit would take place in Russia. The mistake came during a press conference where Trump discussed a nonexistent crime wave in Washington, D.C. The fictitious scourge, he said, harms America’s reputation on the world stage.

“It’s embarrassing for me to be up here, you know,” the president said. “I’m going to see Putin. I’m going to Russia,” he continued, putting particular emphasis, amid otherwise soft-spoken and listless remarks, on the name of the incorrect country.

Trump repeated the error later, suggesting it wasn’t just a misstatement but a memory lapse. “It’s going to be a big thing,” the president said. “We’re going to Russia. It’s going to be a big deal.”

As Trump has grown older, he’s shown an increasing propensity for such gaffes, be that forgetting names of people, forgetting where is, or, recently, forgetting actions he took during his first term, such as appointing Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell or signing a 2020 trade deal.

When Trump first announced his meeting with Putin in Alaska, critics spoke out against the choice of location, with some observing that hardline Russian nationalists have long called for Russia to retake Alaska, which the U.S. purchased in 1867.

Criticizing Trump last week for his perceived tendency to cave to Putin, commentator David Frum wrote on X, “Let’s all hope that Putin doesn’t ask to take Alaska home with him as a souvenir, or Trump might give that away too.” With Trump’s Monday slip-up, many on social media were quick to joke that the president had, in a way, accidentally done just that.

The Trump administration is deploying the National Guard to Washington over a supposed “public safety emergency”—but it can’t seem to iron out its reason for doing so.

Mere moments after the president claimed Monday that federalization of Washington’s law enforcement was warranted on the basis that the city was a crime-riddled hellscape, FBI Director Kash Patel said that wasn’t the case.

Instead, Patel boasted that the country’s homicide rate had hit an all-time low, effectively unraveling the administration’s rationale for forcing the Metropolitan Police Department and the D.C. National Guard to take over the nation’s capital.

“The murder rates are plummeting,” Patel said. “We are now able to report that the murder rate is on track to be the lowest in U.S. history.”

Violent crime has been on the decline in D.C. since 2023, funneling into a nationwide crime drop the following year that saw homicide rates plummet across the country, reported The Washington Post. In 2024, crime in the capital was down 35 percent, according to data from the Metropolitan Police Department.

But instead of relying on that data to inform whether to strip Washington of its autonomy, Trump referred Monday to outdated 2023 statistics, claiming that the city was crime-riddled and needed to be under the thumb of Attorney General Pam Bondi.

“If our capital is dirty our whole country is dirty, and they don’t respect us,” Trump said.

Trump also suggested that the same fate could befall other cities around the country, though he only specified liberal hubs.

“We have other cities also that are bad. Very bad. You look at Chicago, how bad it is. You look at Los Angeles, how bad it is. We have other cities that are very bad. New York has a problem. And then, of course, you have Baltimore and Oakland. You don’t even mention them anymore, they’re so far gone,” Trump said, before promising that Washington would be cleaned up “very quick.”

Later, when asked explicitly if other cities were next on his list, Trump said, “We’re just going to see what happens. We’re going to have tremendous success with what we’re doing.”

But what is happening in Washington should serve as a dire warning to the rest of the country that the administration will advance its agenda with or without legitimate, fact-founded reason.

“Other cities are hopefully watching this … and maybe they’ll self-clean up and maybe they’ll self-do this and get rid of the cashless bail thing and all the things that caused the problem,” Trump said.

Donald Trump’s usurpation of law enforcement in the nation’s capital carried a warning for America’s liberal bastions.

Speaking at a White House press briefing Monday morning, Trump declared a “public safety emergency,” emphasizing Washington’s supposedly startling rise in crime while citing statistics from 2023 instead of 2025.

In reaction to the outdated numbers, he announced that his administration would deploy the Metropolitan Police Department and the D.C. National Guard, handing control of police over to Attorney General Pam Bondi and leveraging the D.C. Home Rule Act to federalize the district’s law enforcement.

“We will deploy officers across the district with an overwhelming presence, and you will have more police. And you will be so happy,” Trump said. “We will bring in the military if it’s needed, by the way.”

But Trump also suggested that cities far beyond Washington’s region could experience the same fate.

“We have other cities also that are bad. Very bad. You look at Chicago, how bad it is. You look at Los Angeles, how bad it is. We have other cities that are very bad. New York has a problem. And then, of course, you have Baltimore and Oakland. You don’t even mention them anymore, they’re so far gone,” Trump said, before promising that Washington would be cleaned up “very quick.”

Later, when asked explicitly if other cities were next on his list, Trump said, “We’re just going to see what happens. We’re going to have tremendous success with what we’re doing.

“Other cities are hopefully watching this … and maybe they’ll self-clean up and maybe they’ll self-do this and get rid of the cashless bail thing and all the things that caused the problem,” he continued.

“We’re going to look at New York in a little while. Let’s do this together.”

Of course, this isn’t the first time that Trump has stepped on states’ rights while deploying the National Guard. In June, while Los Angelenos protested the administration’s ICE raids, Trump ushered in 4,000 National Guard members, ignoring myriad objections by the state and local government.

The trial to determine whether the Trump administration violated the Posse Comitatus Act, a federal law dating back to 1878 that forbids the government from using the military for law enforcement purposes, and the Tenth Amendment is scheduled to kick off Monday in a California courtroom.

This story has been updated.

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.