Which is out of control, crime or Donald trump? It all depends on your point of view.
At 3 a.m., Sunday, August 3, in the 1400 block of Swann Street NW, near Logan Circle in Washington, D.C., an upscale neighborhood, something awful happened.
A tall, good-looking nineteen year old, a former staffer for Elon Musk’s DOGE, and his girlfriend were standing by their car talking when they were surrounded by ten black teenagers. The mob threatened to steal the car.
Edward Coristine, the blue-eyed, DOGE veteran whose nickname was Big Balls, shoved his girlfriend into the car and turned around to face the gang. The kids beat Coristine, broke his nose, gave him a concussion, a black eye and, for good measure, stole his iPhone 16. But guess what?
There were Washington Metropolitan Police patrolling nearby. They rushed to the scene, stopped the beating, and arrested two of the teenagers, two fifteen year olds. In other words, Washington’s police force was on the job where and when it mattered.
But that’s not how Coristine’s former boss, Elon Musk, perceived it. He saw a grisly photo of Coristine shirtless, slumped on the sidewalk with his back against the car and blood dripping down his face, his chest, and his left arm. And Musk said, “It is time to federalize DC.”
Musk wasn’t the only person with that reaction. Donald Trump saw the same picture and said on Truth Social, “crime in Washington DC is totally out of control.” What’s more, President Trump apparently agreed with Musk that it was time to federalize Washington.
So on Monday, August 11, the president declared a public safety emergency, seized power from Washington’s elected mayor, Democrat Muriel Bowser, federalized Washington’s Metropolitan Police Department, made it answer to Pam Bondi, and ordered 800 National Guard troops plus members of the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms and ICE into the streets of Washington.
In the first two nights, these Trump troopers made 66 arrests, 41% fewer than the Washington police normally make in two nights. The Federal forces also cleared seventy homeless encampments, leaving the homeless with no place to go. Washington’s shelters only had a handful of available beds. The intention was apparently to drive the homeless out of the city.
How did Washingtonians feel about this? Fox News Digital reported that “Most residents in Washington, D.C.” said “that President Donald Trump should not federalize the nation’s capital.” Yes, not. One infuriated Washington citizen told Fox News, “Privatizing security is a terrible idea, and I think anything that Trump does is garbage.” But one of the few in favor told Fox News, “We need all the protection that we can get in the city, because the city is really getting dangerous.”
Pointed out Mayor Bowser in a private meeting with constituents, “We are not 700,000 scumbags and punks but rather proud Americans who call D.C. home.” She also revealed that the city’s crime rate had dipped to its lowest level in thirty years.
Nonetheless, President Trump declared that he does not just want to keep Washington under his control for the 30 days the emergency law allows. “You can’t have 30 days,” he said during a news conference at the Kennedy Center on Wednesday afternoon, August 13th. “We’re going to want extensions. I don’t want to call a national emergency, but if I have to, I will.”
What’s more, President Trump wants to use Washington as what he calls a “positive example” and roll out similar takeovers, similar “liberations,” to other cities whose elected officials are Democrats. And in the early days of the federalization, Trump also showed off his seizure of two major cultural institutions— the eight museums of the Smithsonian, and the Kennedy Center Awards, whose annual televised ceremony he will emcee.
Topping it all off, with his mobilization of the National Guard, the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms and ICE Trump has cobbled together a personal army, a Trump army, complete with his very own storm troopers.
These are the facts of the Washington takeover. But more important than the facts are the implications. To many Democrats, this looks like the death of democracy and the dawn of dictatorship. President Trump’s loyalists, on the other hand, see something different. To Project 2025 architects like Russell Vought at the Office of Management and Budget, this may seem like the glorious dawn of something they’ve longed for, a “unitary Executive Presidency.” And it may seem like one more step forward in the defeat of the deep state.
But Donald Trump’s dictatorial moves may mean that his summit with Vladimir Putin in Alaska on Friday August 15th will be more of a coronation than a negotiation. President Trump’s chokehold on Washington may give him the opportunity to show Putin that he’s now one of the boys. That he, too, has a dictatorship, just like the others he admires in the autocratic club—Xi Jinping in China, Kim Jung Un in North Korea, Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey, and Viktor Orbán in Hungary. Trump may use his moves on Washington and his similar moves on LA in June to show off the fact that he is now a strongman, an authoritarian. An authoritarian with rapidly increasing control.
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About the author: Howard Bloom of the Howard Bloom Institute has been called the Einstein, Newton, Darwin, and Freud of the 21st century by Britain’s Channel 4 TV. Bloom’s new book is The Case of the Sexual Cosmos: Everything You Know About Nature is Wrong. Says Harvard’s Ellen Langer of The Case of the Sexual Cosmos, Bloom “argues that we are not savaging the earth as some would have it, but instead are growing the cosmos. A fascinating read.” One of Bloom’s seven previous books–Global Brain—was the subject of a symposium thrown by the Office of the Secretary of Defense including representatives from the State Department, the Energy Department, DARPA, IBM, and MIT. Bloom’s work has been published in The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Wired, Psychology Today, and the Scientific American. Not to mention in scientific journals like Biosystems, New Ideas in Psychology, and PhysicaPlus. Says Joseph Chilton Pearce, author of Evolution’s End and The Crack in the Cosmic Egg, “I have finished Howard Bloom’s [first two] books, The Lucifer Principle and Global Brain, in that order, and am seriously awed, near overwhelmed by the magnitude of what he has done. I never expected to see, in any form, from any sector, such an accomplishment. I doubt there is a stronger intellect than Bloom’s on the planet.” For more, see http://howardbloom.net or http://howardbloom.institute
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References:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/aug/13/mayor-dc-trump-national-guard
https://elpais.com/opinion/2025-08-13/washington-dc-militarizado.html
https://apnews.com/article/39388597bad7e70085079888fe7fb57b
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/08/12/black-cities-mayors-trump-dc-takeover-00505773
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/trump-dictator-d-c-takeover-123003725.html
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2024/11/20/russ-vought-trump-white-house-budget-post/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2025/08/05/trump-doge-worker-washington-dc-crime
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2025/08/14/russia-putin-trump-global-order/
https://abcnews.go.com/US/19-year-former-doge-worker-assaulted-dc-carjacking/story
https://newrepublic.com/post/198846/doge-big-balls-beaten-up-attack-musk-lie
https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-says-hes-calling-musks-big-balls-after-bloody-attack
https://www.thedailybeast.com/musks-big-balls-revealed-as-bloodied-young-man-in-trump-post
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