Washington, D.C. — President Donald Trump announced today that he will place the Washington, D.C., Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) under federal control and deploy the National Guard in the nation’s capital. In response, Neera Tanden, president and CEO of the Center for American Progress, issued the following statement:
Trump’s use of the National Guard to subjugate local policing in Washington, D.C., comes straight out of a dictator’s playbook. Trump is preying upon people’s fears to mask another authoritarian power grab.
Crime in D.C. is at its lowest in 30 years, lower than many other cities in red and purple states, including Dallas, Texas—but Trump isn’t sending troops there. Instead, Trump is mobilizing national guardsmen to carry out his political agenda. Sending troops unnecessarily into an American city is a dangerous attack on the concept of local policing and distracts from the fact that his tariffs are hamstringing our economy and that his Justice Department is refusing to release the Epstein files as he’s long promised.
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