The political — and historical — context of Trump’s D.C. crackdown: From the Politics Desk

Welcome to the online version of From the Politics Desk, an evening newsletter that brings you the NBC News Politics team’s latest reporting and analysis from the White House, Capitol Hill and the campaign trail.

In today’s edition, Jonathan Allen breaks down President Donald Trump’s move to put the D.C. police under federal control. Plus, Bridget Bowman speaks with a New Yorker who voted for Trump and Zohran Mamdani.

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— Adam Wollner

The political — and historical — context of Trump’s D.C. crackdown

Analysis by Jonathan Allen

Donald Trump isn’t the first president to deploy troops and federal agents in the name of safeguarding the nation’s capital, but he has been particularly selective about what represents a threat to the peace. And this time, he may capitalize on it politically.

In the summer of 2020, Trump amassed a heavily armed force in Lafayette Square, steps from the White House, and unleashed it on peaceful protesters demonstrating against unprovoked police violence.

Several months later, he chose not to mobilize the D.C. National Guard or the thousands of federal law enforcement agents under his command to defend the Capitol from his supporters. They assaulted police officers, broke into the Capitol, defaced property and looked for politicians to harm.

In 1968, President Lyndon B. Johnson sent troops to protect the Capitol during the riots following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. But Trump took no such defensive measures against the MAGA mob in 2021.

Now, restored to the presidency and having granted clemency to the Jan. 6 rioters, he says he wants to save Washington from its own residents — using officers from an alphabet soup of federal agencies and the D.C. National Guard to patrol the streets. Trump also federalized the metropolitan police force, which he can do for 30 days without congressional approval.

In appointing himself Washington’s top cop, he promised to clean up a city that he described as having been “overtaken” by “bloodthirsty criminals.” Attorney General Pam Bondi went a step further, vowing that “crime in D.C. is ending today.”

That obviously won’t happen. But two things can be true at once: D.C. residents are the victims of too many violent crimes, and the rate of those violent crimes has dropped noticeably. That should make it easier for Trump to keep this promise — he can just take credit for what was already in motion — than the ones that have fallen short: ending inflation and the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, among others.

For longtime Washingtonians, the idea that the city has become some sort of dystopian criminal nightmare ignores history. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the city was overrun by drug lords — the mayor at the time was arrested after he was caught smoking crack cocaine — and it was known as the murder capital of the world. At the peak in 1991, there were more than 500 homicides in the district, and open-air drug markets thrived.

Perhaps the most important statistic in assessing how residents feel about the city is the steady increase in population over the last 25 years. During that time, the city’s gross domestic product has nearly quadrupled, and neighborhoods that had been left for dead have been revitalized all over Washington.

Those basic trend lines figure to continue, with or without Trump’s deployment of force. In the meantime, he has portrayed himself again as a proponent of “law and order” — so long as it serves his political ends — which could allow him to position himself to take credit for a relatively safe and prosperous city, and leave Democrats to fight over how much crime-fighting is too much.

Meet the voter who backed Trump and Zohran Mamdani

By Bridget Bowman

To better understand how two candidates as ideologically opposed as President Donald Trump and New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani could rise to prominence, just ask Ray. He voted for both of them.

“They are not afraid of shying away from who they are as a person,” said the 34-year-old New Yorker who works in finance. (Ray declined to share his last name out of concern that he could face backlash for his political views.)

I first spoke with Ray in January when we reached out to some of the swing voters who propelled Trump to victory last year. I called him back recently to ask how he thought the Trump administration was doing so far. Ray is not happy, but he acknowledged that he was expecting Trump to shake things up. That’s when he mentioned that he had also voted for Mamdani in this year’s Democratic primary for New York City mayor.

“Like Trump, I don’t agree with all his views,” Ray said of Mamdani, a self-described democratic socialist. “But he makes the effort to go out and talk to people and reach out to people and try to actually do things that are better for the working class.”

The son of Asian immigrants, Ray has not always been tuned into politics. He registered as a Democrat to have a say in the deep blue city’s politics and because the party supported policies he benefitted from as a kid, like public education, school lunches and afterschool programs.

Ray voted for Joe Biden in 2020, looking for a return to normalcy amid the Covid pandemic. After Biden’s election, Ray’s politics started to shift as he helped his mom, a landlord, navigate pandemic-era policies on evictions and rent freezes, including pursuing a restraining order against a tenant who pulled a knife on her when she tried to collect rent. Ray also recalled a pivotal moment during a trip to Washington, D.C., when protesters hurled a racial slur at him and his now-wife.

“When I was voting for Biden, it was the expectation that things will go back to normal,” Ray said, later adding, “The problem is we never really got the normalcy.”

So he cast his ballot for Trump in 2024, the first time he had ever supported a Republican.

Fast forward to June of this year, and Ray saw a video on social media of Mamdani slamming former Gov. Andrew Cuomo during a mayoral primary debate. Mamdani pointed to Cuomo’s resignation as governor in 2021 amid allegations of sexual harassment, which Cuomo has denied.

”Mamdani, really, he had no shame in talking about it. He had no shame in who he was. And he had no shame on his own policies and his own thoughts and what would be best for the city,” Ray said.

“It’s not about Republicans or Democrats in my mind,” Ray said, adding that he is drawn to a candidate “who is honest, who’s authentic, and someone who has the benefits of the little person in the back of their mind.”

“I think having that’s important, and I think that’s what’s missing in the politics these days,” he said.

That’s all From the Politics Desk for now. Today’s newsletter was compiled by Adam Wollner and Bridget Bowman.

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