Trump’s D.C. Takeover Uses Classic Strongman Tactics
Source: Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Lucid Substack

Multiple favored strongman tactics are being deployed in President Donald Trump’s current authoritarian assault on Washington D.C. They include inventing a crisis to justify the expansion of executive power and using cities as laboratories of state repression. I also see his assault on D.C. government and law enforcement as payback for his failed coup. On Jan. 6, 2021, the Capitol Police resisted his thugs valiantly. That, to a vengeful autocrat, must not go unpunished.
It’s important to understand these tactics because they are crucial to the “forever war” Trump is waging on America to “liberate” it from democracy. What’s happening now in D.C. is part of a larger process that is making use of time-tested autocratic measures.
Crisis Time: the Favorite Time of Autocrats
“We should pay careful attention to the rhetoric around states of emergency right now, since such situations have always been prominent at critical junctures of strongman history,” I warned in February, sensing that Trump would initiate a crackdown as the toll of his chaos and corruption became clear to many.
Now, with his popularity plummeting, outrage continuing at the coverup of his ties to pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, and rising disaffection and protest at a declining economy and Fascistic ICE abductions, Trump rolls out his version of the tyrant’s favorite activity: creating a crisis that resolves with an expansion of his power and a flex of his repressive capacities.
“Our capital city has been overtaken by violent gangs and bloodthirsty criminals, roving mobs of wild youth, drugged-out maniacs and homeless people,” Trump claimed at an August 11 press conference announcing a 30-day federal takeover of D.C. Police and a mobilization of the National Guard.
Let’s be clear: There is no crime emergency. Violent crime in Washington D.C. fell in 2024 and 2025 and is now at a 30-year low. There is no justification for Trump declaring what amounts to a “state of exception” with respect to the customary deployment of law enforcement and security forces in the capital.
For authoritarians, the truth is just another thing to be manipulated to justify extraordinary measures that often become normalized, “no longer the exception but the rule,” as the philosopher Walter Benjamin observed after living through the Nazi version.
Disinformation has always been key to the manufacture of “crisis time,” when nations and cities are supposedly imperiled by imminent Communist takeovers, impending insurgencies by racial and religious minorities, accelerated population changes leading to White annihilation, or societal collapses in the making due to gangs and crime.
The history of authoritarianism teaches that the emergency must never be over, the adversary never defeated, and the number of enemies always expanding.
And so, the crisis moves from Los Angeles to Washington D.C. and the targets broaden from protesters and immigrants to include the homeless, the poor, the mentally ill, and non-White youth.
Cities as Laboratories of Repression
Many strongmen got their start and established their authoritarian credentials by making the cities they governed into laboratories of repression, corruption, and other tools of illiberal rule. Think of Vladimir Putin as Mayor of St. Petersburg, or Narendra Modi as Chief Minister of Gujurat. Rodrigo Duterte first hired thugs to do his dirty work and converted the police into a vigilante force when he was Mayor of Davao between 1988 and 2016. The “death-squad mayor,” as he became known, then nationalized those practices as President of the Philippines.
In America, where Trump started his political career “at the top,” things are unfolding differently. The administration is asserting its power over municipal and state authorities and making Democratic-led cities into showcases of authoritarian repression. The aim is to habituate Americans to see militarized cities and crackdowns against public dissent in cities as normal and justified.
The deployment in Los Angeles in June of a battalion of Marines previously engaged abroad in the “War on Terror,” along with the National Guard, was part of this testing. So was Department of Homeland Security Kristi Noem’s use of the language of regime change.
“We are staying here to liberate the city from the socialists and the burdensome leadership that this governor and that this mayor have placed on this country and what they have tried to insert into the city.”
Removing elected officials from office for political reasons, after declaring a crisis due to terrorism, corruption, or crime, is a common practice in authoritarian states such as Turkey, Russia, and El Salvador.
In Washington D.C., federal control of the Metro Police is designed to make the capital a showcase of authoritarian aggression. In his August 11 press conference, Trump warned that cops will be allowed to do “whatever the hell they want.” Trump is using his D.C. takeover to let bad actors in and out of law enforcement know that violence will not be punished —because solving the “crisis” demands law and order, no matter at what cost.
Expect this “temporary” takeover of Washington D.C. to be extended, and a possible purge of D.C. security forces to produce the compliant and violent law enforcement corps Trump needs for any future authoritarian action that involves the capital. The goal, if this is scaled up to other cities, will be to disempower and delegitimize all Democratic municipal and state authorities, and normalize the extension of executive power.