The authoritarians' war on cities is a war on all of us

Capitol Hill neighborhood, Washington, January 2018

Strongman rule is a fantasy.  Essential to it is the idea that a strongman will be your strongman.  He won't.  In a democracy, elected representatives listen to constituents.  We take this for granted, and imagine that a dictator would owe us something. But the vote you cast for him affirms your irrelevance.  The whole point is that the strongman owes us nothing.  We get abused and we get used to it.--TIMOTHY SNYDER (2025), quoted in Richardson (2025)

I'm taking the Trump administration's military occupation of Washington, D.C., a lot more personally than I took the occupation of Los Angeles earlier this year, or of Portland, Oregon in his first term. This is only because I lived there for a few months in 2018, not because it's more important. If James Madison (1785) was correct to write "It is proper to take alarm at the first experiment on our liberties," we should be fully alarmed by now at any of these displays of hostile force. It's certainly gone beyond the "experiment" stage.

Trump and his coadjutors like U.S. Attorney Jeannine Pirro have presented a false picture of violent crime in Washington (Qiu 2025). Like most of America, really, Washington has seen dramatic declines in violent crime since a spike in the latter half of the pandemic years (Lopez and Boxerman 2025, Altheimer Douglas and Contreras 2025). The U.S. as a whole is mostly back to the long-term nationwide decline in violent crime that began about 1990. The capital city is far from pacific, though, as Washington Post columnist Megan McArdle (2025) notes: "The problem isn’t as big as it was a few years ago, but with crime, as with cancer, 'somewhat less of a problem than it was' is not really very good news." Shadi Hamid (2025) adds:

Homelessness is worse today than before the pandemic. We don’t need data to tell us that. The encampments are impossible not to notice. And though they might not be the end of the world, they make D.C. feel more dystopian than it actually is, creating the sense of a governance vacuum. No one wants to feel that way about their city, least of all when their city happens to be the capital of the richest, most powerful nation in the world.

Still, the homicide rate in June 2025 was lower than that of St. Louis, Missouri; Richmond, Virginia; Memphis, Tennessee; Little Rock, Arkansas; and Atlanta, Georgia, some of whose governors have opportunistically sent National Guard troops to assist the occupation. (Pete Saunders (2025b) links to this Wikipedia page on which Chicago is 92nd in violent crime though as high as 22nd in homicides.) In 2024 Washington was less violent than Cleveland, Ohio, or New Orleans, Louisiana, two more states with governors who are sending guardsmen to Washington while not deigning to attempt similar tactics at home. I call bullshit. 

Entering downtown Providence:
Mayor Brett Smiley says "I know my colleagues around the country
are very concerned [occupation] could happen to our cities" (Bendavid 2025)

So, what's the emergency? If crime in Washington is an improving though ongoing serious problem, what's left to justify the occupation? Is the real emergency that Trump's public approval is flagging (Pew Center 2025)? Or that people won't stop talking about Trump's association with sex criminal Jeffrey Epstein?

And now he's got Chicago in his sights (Saunders 2025b, Lamothe 2025). 

Two Shades Cafe in Chicago's Little Italy:
Cities have coffeeshops. We like cities.

If we've learned nothing else ten years into Donald Trump's political career, we've learned that:

1. He has no policy commitments whatsoever, making him unique among American presidents in my lifetime. This lack of interest extends to criminal justice (Green 2025).
2. He has no vision for America, or if he does it's rooted in gauzy nostalgia for the post-World War II years. He does make exceptions for stuff like meme coins, the sales of which have gotten him richer through an appalling pay-for-access scheme (Sigalos and Collier 2025)
3. His principal objectives seem to be attention and praise, material wealth, and sexual gratification (though maybe the latter has declined in importance over the years)
4. His hatred for anyone who obstructs his access to any of those objectives is deep and enduring (cf. Stein Jacobs Goba and Roebuck 2025)
5. He relies on drama and display as means of gaining attention, and is adept at using the power of his office for the purpose of creating spectacle
6. Losing face is to be avoided at all costs. This leads to false statements on a regular basis, sometimes on the most trivial matters, retribution against anyone who questions him, and the appalling injustices being visited on the accidentally-deported Kilmar Abrego Garcia.

If the occupation of D.C. were a serious crime reduction effort, we would have seen some planning that included city officials; a mix of enforcement and prevention methods (Hohmann, McArdle and Mangual 2025); and attention to areas like the Southeast where crime is concentrated. Instead we see prominent appearances in tourist areas like the National Mall, and assaults on food delivery workers (Schulze 2025). Everyday life for residents has been complicated if not outright scary (cf. Lerner 2025). Fox News has some dramatic video for its followers to devour (Wiggins 2025), while normal people doing normal things get pushed around by masked secret police who make no pretense of their political mission (Kabas 2025), and homeless people just get pushed around to different streets (Wild 2025).

It should be noted that National Guard troops are in D.C. to make a show of force, not to actually reduce crime. It’s not an effort to help residents of Southeast D.C., for example, who live with higher rates of violent crime than I, or most readers of this, do. It’s an effort to let people who are fearful of the crime over there that someone’s doing something about it. (Saunders 2025a)

Nevertheless, Trump's has retained considerable political support, and the Republicans who control Congress and the Supreme Court find it prudent to support his actions and personal aspirations regardless of merit or practical consequences. As I suggested when he was reelected, his sizable public support is likely a mix of opportunism (how else do we get to conservative policy outcomes?), fantasy (he is a great leader making America strong), and hatred (he wants to hurt X Group and so do I). It's disturbing that there's so much of these attitudes out there, but it's hard to account for the Trump phenomenon otherwise. As of today he's still at 44 percent in the New York Times polling average.

Not blood-soaked: Community garden, South Ada Street, Chicago

So am I just complaining? My candidate didn't win the last election, boo hoo. My Cubs haven't won a single measly postseason game since 2017. And I have a nagging feeling I personally could be more popular.

Am I just whinging? Does any of this matter?

The Cubs and my popularity, no. But Trump's fondness for what blogger Jennifer Schulze calls "made for TV authoritarianism," and indeed his whole approach to the Presidency, matter deeply and dangerously.

1. Authoritarian approaches represent the failure of the American project. The U.S. Constitution was written over 200 years ago, by imperfect people in a very different world. Its tenuous balancing act between governmental capacity and individual liberties was rooted in a system of checks and balances, which was mostly rooted in a Biblical conception of universal human sinfulness. Unchecked power is antithetical to the whole fabric, and will only end in tears.
2. He appeals strongly to hatred of cities. It's not about where you would rather live; it's about defending access to vibrant urbanism for all. Urban areas generate the vast portion of American gross domestic product, and are where people go for economic and social opportunity. When Trump claims "the cities are rotting, and they are indeed cesspools of blood," full of "roving mobs of wild youth, drugged-out maniacs, and homeless people," the truth is not in him. He is speaking to a decades-old stereotype, that to be frank was largely fueled by federal and corporate policies. In the words of Kansas City mayor Quinton Lucas, "They are looking to exploit issues for political gain, not to solve them" (all quotes from Bendavid 2025). You can't find common humanity in people you never see, which is why...
3. Cities are fundamentally about association with others. Pete Saunders recently pointed to an interview with anthropologist Anand Pandian, who has a new book about American society that looks interesting. In his travels Pandian noted the walls Americans keep building around themselves: The US is a vast country, and things look very different in various parts. Yet there are certain patterns in how everyday life is changing that I document in the book: the rise of fortress-like homes, patterns of neighbourhood isolation and segregation, new developments in American automotive and roadway culture that reflect a more defensive orientation concerning others, body cultures that lead people to think of their bodies as needing armouring and protection, and what I call walls of the mind, separating people into different information ecosystems, into completely different realities (Radhakrishna 2025). The more we bury ourselves in fortresses, whether physical or social, the scarier cities seem.
4. We need cities in order to solve our most serious problems. In a world full of seemingly intractable problems--climate change, housing, immigration and refugee flows, the costs of health care and education, and the future of employment, to name a few--we need cities. It's precisely the rollicking diversity of cities that make them places where problems get solved. Freedom, and conversation across differences, lead to innovation. Encounters across social differences make progress possible. Urban living arrangements are more environmentally and financially sustainable, not to mention better for public health. 

Whether you live on a noisy street downtown or by yourself in the woods, the quality of life you enjoy depends on cities. Trump's attack on them is an attack on all of us.

Poster, National Public Housing Museum:
Hating on cities is a way to ignore the legitimate demands of their residents

SEE ALSO: "Portland: Authoritarianism, or Nothing to See Here?" 24 July 2020

VIDEO: Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker responded to Trump's threats to occupy Chicago in a magnificent speech August 25 (14:59):