September 5, 2025
It’s nonetheless unclear—and that’s the issue.
DC Mayor Muriel Bowser speaks the US District Courthouse in Washington, DC, on August 15, 2025.
(Jim Watson / AFP through Getty Pictures)
Washington, DC, Mayor Muriel Bowser has undergone a speedy transformation over the previous three weeks. What started as capitulation to Trump’s ongoing navy occupation of the town has now turn out to be a pivot to one thing confused, unclear, and maybe even ominous. The regime’s criminalization of DC’s residents is now not—as her defenders declare—one thing being imposed on Bowser by racist, sexist Donald Trump. This now seems to be one thing that she is, to cite The Washington Submit, “welcoming.”
Regardless of Bowser’s objections to this framing—earlier this week, she excoriated the Submit at a press convention for utilizing “welcoming” of their headline, a phrase she says she didn’t use—and regardless of her insisting that she was “outraged over the intrusion on our federal autonomy,” her actions communicate louder than her phrases. First, the Democratic mayor credited the surge in federal legislation enforcement for decreasing crime within the metropolis—a deceptive, right-wing narrative that ignores the truth that crime at all times drops with the beginning of the varsity yr and that each pattern line since 2023 has proven crime dropping in the city. Then, on September 2, she issued an order to proceed coordinating with federal legislation enforcement “to the utmost extent allowable by legislation inside the District” even after Trump’s emergency order expires. That doesn’t sound like “outrage.” That feels like consenting to a brand new actuality.
And now, given the possibility to struggle again, Bowser is standing apart. In a press convention after DC Lawyer Common Brian Schwalb—who doesn’t work beneath Bowser—sued the Trump administration to cease the deployment of the Nationwide Guard within the metropolis, Bowser was evasive, refusing to reply to reporters unequivocally as as to whether she helps the lawsuit—which is odd, given her beforehand said “outrage.” Positive sufficient, based on a supply very acquainted with the decision-making course of that went into the lawsuit, it was written and issued independently from Bowser’s workplace. Even after a federal courtroom dominated final week that Trump broke the legislation by sending troops into Los Angeles, Bowser received’t again the AG’s transfer.
So Bowser might insist that she isn’t “welcoming” an indefinite occupation. However let’s have a look at what she has, by way of her actions, already welcomed. She has welcomed the demise of house rule. She has welcomed the crippling of the native economic system, which has misplaced billions as folks select to remain house fairly than take care of checkpoints or a sneering South Carolina Nationwide Guardsman with reside ammo on their solution to dinner. Due to this, we are actually seeing a pointy discount in shifts for servers and cooks and misplaced wages. She has welcomed a youth curfew for our industrial areas that now, with all people staying house, appear to be ghost cities.
Present Situation
Because of all that Bowser is welcoming into the town, dad and mom are afraid to go to work and kids are afraid to go to highschool. The variety of dad and mom protecting their kids out of faculty to keep away from the chance of the state abducting their children is horrifying—and half-empty school rooms are an emblem of this terror. (In fact, the schooling secretary has mentioned nothing about this. If there’s a hell under, Linda McMahon—who thinks AI is a steak sauce—must put money into numerous sunscreen.) One highschool is even canceling an annual Hispanic Heritage parents-and-students picnic and soccer sport as a result of they worry it is going to turn out to be a ripe ICE goal.
That’s not all. Mayor Bowser might rankle on the phrase “welcoming,” however how else do you describe her silence as federal police and ICE are brazenly and systemically engaged in racial profiling? This unconstitutional follow is so pervasive that white resisters have taken to sporting Mexican flag decals on their automobiles as a way to bait ICE into puling them over, which wastes ICE’s time and should save folks from federal abduction and a slave/torture jail in El Salvador or South Sudan. For the authorities, there isn’t a Structure within the streets of DC.
By cooperating with a navy occupation and emboldening the Metropolitan Police Division, Bowser has stoked fear in the US-born Black community as effectively. The MPD, with their long-standing problems with racialized brutality, are actually now off the leash. Trump and his white-supremacist lickspittles, like Nazi prawn Stephen Miller, enjoyment of saying that “the Blacks” now love them as a result of they really feel protected beneath their watch. This isn’t solely a lie; it’s deeply offensive: an argument echoing the philosophy of an 18th-century plantation grasp. It doesn’t make a lick of sense in a metropolis the place, based on The Washington Submit, 80 percent of the folks need them gone.
Bowser’s defenders—and they’re dwindling earlier than our eyes—are actually elevating the specter of some type of blackmail, attempting to guess what Trump may “have on her.” Bullshit. That line of inquiry quantities to drained excuse-mongering for a Mike Bloomberg–skilled centrist mayor who appears to be—as centrists typically do—slouching towards the facet with the weapons. The opposite excuse they declare is that, with out statehood, Bowser has no selection however to take this posture. Additionally bullshit. It’s true that the federal authorities can proclaim a 30-day state of emergency in DC. However Bowser had grounds, as AG Schwalb is displaying, to problem the emergency declaration in courtroom: As a result of violent crime within the metropolis has hit a 30-year low, there isn’t a precise emergency—or at the least there wasn’t one till the Tennessee Nationwide Guard began patrolling the streets with reside ammo.
Bowser might be approaching this in a means that protects her constituents and resists authoritarianism. She might be holding press conferences day-after-day, highlighting the navy occupation’s results on residents and the native economic system. She might be saying that she stands with each the protesters and the Democratic politicians which have proven some backbone, like Baltimoree Mayor Brandon Scott, who’s operating a metropolis the place violent crime has dropped to a 50-year low. Even when Bowser had been overrun within the courts, she may nonetheless have drawn a line within the sand that the federal occupation of cities, absent an actual emergency, is an authoritarian, unconstitutional energy seize, practically unprecedented in US historical past, and should be resisted in any respect prices. As a substitute, when the navy took over Union Station—most likely as a result of when Stephen Miller, JD Vance, and Pete Hegseth wished to gladhand and seize a fascistic picture op with the troopers, they have been heckled mercilessly—there was no phrase from Bowser on the Trump regime’s proclaimed triumph in the battle of Shake Shack.
Traditionally, being the mayor of DC is a dead-end gig. Former populist mayor Adrian Fenty’s ditching the city to relax on yachts with Steve Jobs’s widow, Lauren, might be the most effective any of them have finished climbing the ladder. The hyper-ambitious Bloomberg acolyte Muriel Bowser clearly has higher ambitions, and he or she is prepared to climb over the our bodies of her constituents to get there. (Anti-Zohran speaker on the DNC? Ivanka or Melania’s new “buddy” for public appearances? New VP of the Trump Group?) Within the course of, she is undercutting the folks truly doing the work to make this nightmare finish.
What’s extraordinarily clear is the significance of a broadly constructed Free DC demonstration on Saturday, September 10, at 11 am, in Malcolm X (or Meridian) Park. The stakes are excessive to point out the town and the world that Bowser isn’t the voice—or at the least not the only voice—of DC.
Don’t consider it as a neighborhood protest. Everybody ought to come: As a result of if we don’t struggle again, your metropolis shall be subsequent.
Extra from The Nation
From reactive accountability to proactive reform.
Paramount is reportedly set to pay between $100 million and $200 million for “The Free Press” and can set up Bari Weiss on the prime of CBS Information.
The administration’s choice to deploy navy attorneys as immigration judges is horrible and unlawful, however when has that ever stopped Trump?
Calls to attenuate the brutality of slavery in museum depictions is absurd when our establishments already downplay one among its most horrific options.
