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      Republican doesn’t wear seatbelt in DC ‘because of carjacking’ despite data showing decline

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      A Republican senator said that he doesn’t wear a seatbelt when he’s driving in Washington DC so he can act more swiftly if he gets carjacked, adding further fuel to repeated rhetoric by the Trump administration that crime is on the rise in the US – despite statistics indicating otherwise.Markwayne Mullin told Fox News on Wednesday that he avoids buckling up, violating local traffic ordinances, so he can “exit in a hurry”.“I’m not joking when I say this. I drive around in Washington DC in my Jeep and, yes, I do drive myself. And I don’t buckle up. And the reason why I don’t buckle up, and people can say whatever they want to, they can raise their eyebrows at me, again, is because of carjacking,” he said.While praising Donald Trump’s controversial deployment of national guard troops to the US capital and a federal takeover of the Metropolitan police department, Mullin said he wouldn’t wear a seatbelt in other cities controlled by Democrats. But he said he did wear a seatbelt in other jurisdictions.“If you look at car theft only, if Washington DC was a state, Washington DC would be three times higher than any other state,” Mullin said. “And we’re talking about a city. And we’re comparing it to full states.”Mullin’s comments come as a war of words over Washington DC’s crime rate continues between supporters and opponents of Trump’s order, which he casts as an effort to combat record-breaking levels of violent crime.“Murders in 2023 reached the highest rate probably ever,” Trump said on Monday. “They say 25 years, but they don’t know what that means because it just goes back 25 years.”Trump also said: “The murder rate in Washington today is higher than that of Bogotá, Colombia; Mexico City; or some of the places that you hear about as being the worst places on Earth. It’s much higher.”Those stats align with a White House-provided graph unpacking 2024 homicides, revealing a homicide rate of 27.5 per 100,000 inhabitants in Washington – which puts the capital above cities like Bogotá, Colombia (15); Panama City, Panama (15); San José, Costa Rica (13); Mexico City, Mexico (10); Lima, Peru (7.7); and Brasília, Brazil (6.8).But official statistics tell a different story. Homicides dropped to 187 in 2024 from 274 a year earlier – the highest number since 1997. This year, there have been 100 homicides to 12 August, according to the New York Times, a slight decline from 112 at the same date last year.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionCompared with other capitals around the world, as also noted by the New York Times, Washington’s homicide rate is much lower, including in places such as Port-au-Prince, Haiti, with a rate of 67.2 per 100,000 people; Cape Town, South Africa, with 66.8; and Kingston, Jamaica, with 64.2. All have higher homicide rates, according to data compiled by the Igarapé Institute, a Brazilian thinktank, in 2023.Trump has claimed that “the number of car thefts has doubled over the past five years, and the number of carjackings has more than tripled”. The city’s dashboard shows carjackings rose for three years, from 2020, before declining in 2024.This year, through 9 August, there were 188 carjackings, compared with 299 during the same time period in 2024, and compared with 607 in 2023, a police spokesperson told PolitiFact. Car theft also dropped 25% from 2023 to 2024.An analysis by the Washington Metropolitan police department, as reported by CNN, has also shown that overall crime in Washington has also decreased in 2025 – in line with the decline seen in other major US cities, such as New York, Los Angeles and Chicago. More

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      Trump’s DC takeover harkens back to a dark incident 33 years ago – when crime was far worse

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      Donald Trump’s takeover of Washington DC’s police department and decision to deploy the national guard was sparked by the assault of a former Doge staffer who nicknamed himself “Big Balls”. Thirty-three years ago, a fatal attack on a congressional staffer also provoked an effort by the federal government to impose law and order on the nation’s capital – but in that case, it came from Capitol Hill.On Monday, Trump said he was taking “a historic action to rescue our nation’s capital from crime, bloodshed, bedlam, and squalor and worse. This is liberation day in DC and we’re going to take our capital back.”In 1992, it was the death of 25-year-old Tom Barnes, a staffer for Senator Richard Shelby, a Democrat of Alabama, that prompted the senator to introduce legislation to legalize the death penalty in the district. Shelby, a conservative Democrat who would become a Republican two years later, acknowledged that many DC community leaders had historically been opposed to the death penalty, but argued that the tide had changed – using similar dystopian language as Trump.“The terror that comes with living in a war zone has prompted many residents to reconsider the appropriateness, ethically and legally, of a death penalty,” Shelby wrote in a March 1992 Washington Post op-ed. “… People are using guns to settle arguments about clothes and girlfriends. They are ‘smoking’ others because they feel like it. They will even ‘bust a cap in you’ if they don’t like the way you look at them.”In announcing the police takeover on Monday, Trump cited the attack on Edward Coristine, whom he said was “savagely beaten by a band of roaming thugs” and was “left dripping in blood”. He also referenced the June slaying of Eric Tarpinian-Jachym, an intern for the Republican representative Ron Estes, of Kansas, who was killed by crossfire in a drive-by shooting. Last week, his mother, Tamara Tarpinian-Jachym, told ABC News that she supported Trump’s idea of a federal takeover, which he had threatened in a social media post.There was one key difference between then and now: Trump is painting an exaggerated picture of crime in DC, where violent crime is at a 30-year low. But back in January 1992, Washington really was a crime-plagued city. It was coming off a year that saw 482 murders in 1991, earning it the ignoble title of the murder capital of the US. By contrast, there were 187 homicides last year and the city is on pace for a lower number this year.According to the book Dream City: Race, Power, and the Decline of Washington DC by Harry Jaffe and Tom Sherwood, Barnes, the Shelby staffer, left his home on a Saturday night in January 1992 to go to the corner store to get coffee grounds for the next morning. A group of teenagers approached him and demanded his money or they’d “put a cap” in him. “Leave me alone,” Barnes replied, and turned up the street. One of them shot him in the head, landing him in a coma. He died four days later, marking the 22nd homicide of the new year.A Capitol Outrage, ran the headline on a Tuscaloosa News editorial two days later. “Beset by drug-related violence,” the newspaper declared, “Washington has become a national disgrace, an American embarrassment.”“Tom’s death was the catalyst for my involvement in trying to find solutions to the violent crime that plagues our city,” said Shelby, who had known Barnes since he was a toddler.His bill to impose the death penalty on DC failed, but he did get Congress to vote to force the city to hold a referendum on that fall’s ballot asking Washingtonians to authorize capital punishment. “The criminal justice system is out of control in this city and Congress is not going to turn its back on this issue,” Shelby said. Even some home-rule champions on the Hill voted with Shelby, such as Leon Panetta, a Democratic representative from California.“I really think the District of Columbia ought to handle its own affairs,” said Panetta, who would go on to serve as chief of staff to Bill Clinton, CIA director and defense secretary. “But crime continues to be a very serious problem in the district. Part of it is the urban crisis that is part of every city’s social and economic problems. But I don’t get the sense that the district has a strong commitment to confront this issue.”The DC council had repealed the death penalty in 1981, but the last execution in Washington took place in 1957, years before the city won home rule in 1973.This week, Washington leaders bristled at Trump’s takeover of the police. Eleanor Holmes Norton, a non-voting delegate representing DC in the House of Representatives, called it “an historic assault on DC home rule”, while the mayor, Muriel E Bowser, described it as “unsettling and unprecedented”.There was a similarly visceral reaction to Shelby’s death penalty referendum.“There is something approaching rage among the voters of the district about their disempowerment, about Congress forcing this on us,” said Norton, who was in her first term in Congress at the time. “When you mandate a death penalty vote, you engage that issue directly.”Leading up to the referendum, dozens of ministers denounced it at Sunday sermons, the Washington Post reported.On 3 November 1992 – the same day Democrat Bill Clinton won his first presidential election – Washingtonians rejected the death penalty referendum by a 2-1 margin.“Today the voters sent a powerful message to every member of the US Congress that we are citizens of this country,” the then mayor, Sharon Pratt Kelly, said after the vote, while Norton said the vote showed the city “will not tolerate this interference from the outside”.But the climate of fear around crime had won some support for capital punishment.“In neighborhoods across the city, among rich and poor, black and white, some residents have argued that violence has become so random and brutal that convicted killers should be punished with the ultimate act of retribution, regardless of whether it serves as a deterrent,” the Post reported. But others cited concerns that it would be used unfairly against Black defendants, or didn’t like Congress interfering in the city’s affairs, in their votes against it.Even the city council chair, John Wilson, who supported the death penalty, urged a no vote as a signifier of DC’s independence. (Today, the city hall is named for him.)“It’s not that they didn’t favor the death penalty,” Jaffe and Sherwood wrote of DC voters. “Many black Washingtonians are quite conservative, law-and-order advocates … They just resented a white senator from Alabama telling them that they needed a death penalty to make their streets safe.”Today, there is definitely some resentment at a white president from New York who says he wants to clean up the city streets. And Bowser is using it as a way to rally support for the long-held goal of DC statehood.“My message to residents is this: we know that access to our democracy is tenuous,” she said at a news conference after Trump’s takeover. “That is why you have heard me and many, many Washingtonians before me advocate for full statehood for the District of Columbia. We are American citizens. Our families go to war. We pay taxes, and we uphold the responsibilities of citizenship.”

      Frederic J Frommer, a writer and sports and politics historian, has written for the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Atlantic, History.com and other national publications More

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      Trump news at a glance: president eyes ‘long-term’ DC police takeover; warns Putin of consequences if no ceasefire reached

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      After deploying the national guard to the streets of the American capital, Donald Trump is now eyeing longer-term powers over authorities, saying on Wednesday that he is seeking to extend his temporary powers over Washington DC’s police department.Trump earlier this week invoked a never-before-used clause of the law that sets out the federal district’s governance structure to take temporary control of the police department, but will need Congress’s permission to extend it beyond the 30 days allowed under the statute.“We’re going to need a crime bill that we’re going to be putting in, and it’s going to pertain initially to DC,” Trump said. He alluded to other options for extending control of the police department, saying “if it’s a national emergency, we can do it without Congress”.Here are the key stories at a glance:Trump suggests other Democratic-led cities follow suit on crime legislationDonald Trump said on Wednesday he would ask Congress for “long-term” control of Washington DC’s police department and signaled he expected other Democratic-led cities to change their laws in response to his deployment of national guard troops and federal agents into the capital.The president’s comments came as the White House took credit for dozens of arrests overnight in Washington as part of Trump’s campaign to fight a “crime crisis”, which its leaders say does not exist.Read the full storyTrump: Putin to face ‘severe consequences’ if he doesn’t agree ceasefireVladimir Putin will face “very severe consequences” if he does not agree a ceasefire in the war in Ukraine at his summit with Donald Trump in Alaska, the US president said on Wednesday.Speaking after a call with Volodymyr Zelenskyy and other European leaders, including Britain’s Keir Starmer, Trump also suggested he would push for a second summit if his meeting with Putin goes well – this time including his Ukrainian counterpart.Read the full storyTrump says he will host Kennedy Center awardsDonald Trump announced on Wednesday that he will host the Kennedy Center honors this year and said he had been heavily involved in choosing who to nominate, rejecting people he thought were too liberal.Read the full storyTrump official led thinktank that promoted lies about Tren de AraguaA senior official appointed to the defense department led a thinktank that promoted fake news about the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua (TdA) gang, according to InSight Crime, a non-profit analyzing organized crime.Read the full storyHealth professionals call for RFK Jr to be removedA grassroots organization of health professionals has released a report outlining major health challenges in the US and calling for the removal of Robert F Kennedy Jr from the US Department of Health and Human Services.Read the full storyTrump revokes signature Biden order promoting economic competitionDonald Trump on Wednesday revoked a 2021 executive order on promoting competition in the US economy issued by Joe Biden, the White House said.Biden signed a sweeping executive order in July 2021 to promote more competition in the US economy as part of a broad push to rein in what his administration described as a pattern of corporate abuses, ranging from excessive airline fees to large mergers that raised costs for consumers.Read the full storyWhat else happened today:

      A US judge ordered the Trump administration to restore a part of the federal grant funding that it recently suspended for the University of California, Los Angeles.

      Veteran climate scientists are organizing a coordinated public comment to a US Department of Energy report which cast doubt on the scientific consensus on the climate crisis.
      Catching up? Here’s what happened on 12 August 2025. More

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      Trump revokes Biden order promoting competition in the US economy

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      Donald Trump on Wednesday revoked a 2021 executive order on promoting competition in the US economy issued by Joe Biden, the White House said.The move by the Republican US president further unwinds a signature initiative by his predecessor, a Democrat, to crack down on anti-competitive practices in sectors from agriculture to drugs and labor.The justice department welcomed Trump’s revocation of the order, saying it was pursuing an “America first antitrust” approach focused on free markets instead of what it called the “overly prescriptive and burdensome approach” of the Biden administration.It said it was also making progress on streamlining the Hart-Scott-Rodino Act (HSR) review process of mergers and reinstating more frequent use of targeted and well-crafted consent decrees.Biden signed a sweeping executive order in July 2021 to promote more competition in the US economy as part of a broad push to rein in what his administration described as a pattern of corporate abuses, ranging from excessive airline fees to large mergers that raised costs for consumers.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe initiative, which was very popular with Americans, was championed by top Biden economic officials, many of whom had previously worked for or with the senator Elizabeth Warren, who played a key role in creating the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau under Barack Obama.Trump has attacked that agency since taking office, announcing plans to shrink its workforce by 90%.Those moves have cost Americans at least $18bn in higher fees and lost compensation for consumers allegedly cheated by major companies, according to an analysis released in June by the Student Borrower Protection Center and the Consumer Federation of America.Biden’s order said it aimed to “enforce the antitrust laws to combat the excessive concentration of industry, the abuses of market power, and the harmful effects of monopoly and monopsony”, focused on areas such as labor and healthcare. More

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      Trump to seek extension of DC police takeover past 30-day limit and touts Republican support – live

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      At the Kennedy Center today, Donald Trump announced that he would host this year’s honors himself – scheduled for December. But some of the biggest news came out of the far-reaching press conference he held after announcing this year’s honorees (which include ‘Rocky’ star and fervent Trump supporter Sylvester Stallone).

      Trump promised ‘very severe consequences’ if Vladimir Putin doesn’t agree to ceasefire at their Friday meeting in Alaska. He didn’t, however, elaborate on what those penalties will be. He also floated the idea of a trilateral summit with Volodymyr Zelenskyy “almost immediately” after his individual meeting with Putin.

      The president said that he’s eyeing an extension of the initial 30-day limit for the federal takeover of the DC Metropolitan Police. “I don’t want to call national emergency. If I have to I will. But I think the Republicans in Congress will approve this pretty much unanimously,” Trump said. He added that any discussions about DC statehood are “ridiculous” and “unacceptable”.

      When it comes to the surge of federal law enforcement on DC streets, a White House official said 43 arrests were made on Tuesday night –twice the total of the previous evening. More than 1,450 officers participated, about half of which were from the city’s police department, while only 30 national guard troops were deployed of the roughly 800 that defense officials have said are expected to arrive for the mission.

      The city’s Democratic mayor, Muriel Bowser, has sought a cordial working relationship with the president since his return to the White House, but changed her tone on Tuesday, urging residents and voters during a social media event “to protect our home rule and get to the other side of this guy and make sure we elect a Democratic House so that we have a backstop to this authoritarian push”.

      At his Kennedy Center appearance today, the president continued to disparage Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell. “He’s truly incompetent,” Trump said. He went on to reveal that he’ll be naming the nomination for Powell’s replacement “sometime in the next week”. He’s down to “three of four names,” he added. A reminder that Powell’s term ends in May.

      Additionally, on the foreign diplomacy front, the president took part in a virtual meeting with Zelenskyy and European leaders today which the German chancellor described as “very good” and “constructive”. Zelenskyy confirmed that Trump would call him straight after the Friday meeting with Putin to talk it through details.

      And finally, for now at least, a federal appeals court lifted a lower court’s injunction that required the state department to continue making payments to foreign aid contractors. In a 2-1 decision, the appellate panel effectively granted a Trump victory – allowing the administration to cut billions in congressionally appropriated funding for foreign assistance.
      Donald Trump named David Rosner chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (Ferc), where he has served since June 2024 as a commissioner, the agency announced on Wednesday.The appointment of Rosner, a Democrat whose nomination to the commission was supported by then Senator Joe Manchin, is expected to be temporary. In June, Trump nominated two Republicans to the commission who are awaiting Senate confirmation.Ferc, which has a maximum of five members, regulates the power grid, liquefied natural gas projects and interstate transportation of oil and natural gas. It currently has just three members, after Mark Christie, a Republican, left last week.In June, Trump nominated Laura Swett to take Christie’s place and the president is expected to name her to become chair once the Senate confirms her.If both of Trump’s nomines are confirmed by the Republican-controlled Senate, Ferc would then have a 3-2 Republican majority.Rosner, who has worked in energy in and out of government for two decades, said he was honored to be named.Last year the environmental group Friends of the Earth ran a campaign calling on the Senate, then controlled by Democrats, to block Rosner’s nomination, calling him “a paid cheerleader for the LNG boom”.Trump has said he wants to open pipelines to bring natural gas from Pennsylvania’s gas fields to states in the Northeast. The projects have been opposed by states.A judge in Adams County, Illinois just rejected a request from the Texas attorney general, Ken Paxton, to order the arrest of Democrats from the Texas state legislature who left Texas to block a Republican plan to redraw congressional districts.In a petition filed last Thursday, Paxton had asked the court in a conservative county that overwhelmingly voted for Donald Trump to to honor so-called quorum Warrants — civil arrest orders issued by Dustin Burrows, the Republican speaker of the Texas state house — and order Illinois police officers to “effectuate the civil arrest” of the Democratic lawmakers.In the ruling, which was posted online by Aarón Torres of the Dallas Morning News, the judge ruled that the Illinois circuit court “does not have the inherent power to direct Illinois law enforcement officers, or to allow the Sergeant-at-Arms of the House of Representatives of the State of Texas, or any officer appointed by her, to execute Texas civil Quorum Warrants upon nonresidents temporarily located in the State of Illinois.”Today, a US federal judge struck down rules from 2018 that allow employers to not provide insurance coverage for birth control on religious or moral grounds, Reuters is reporting.During Donald Trump’s first term in office, the supreme court ruled that employers were eligible for religious exemptions when it comes to providing health insurance that covers women’s birth control.The Affordable Care Act, commonly known as Obamacare, requires employers to offer health insurance with access to contraception, but stipulates that they can apply for religious exemptions. The 2018 rules, however, offered a blanket exemption.According to Reuters, Judge Wendy Beetlestone in Philadelphia said there was a gap between how vast the exception is, and the number of employers who would need it.Planned Parenthood clinics treated people who rely on Medicaid at more than 1.5m visits in 2024, new research published on Wednesday shows.But the reproductive health giant’s ability to treat those patients is now in jeopardy due to Republicans’ efforts to “defund” Planned Parenthood by kicking it out of Medicaid.Donald Trump’s tax and spending package, passed in July, bans Planned Parenthood from receiving reimbursements from Medicaid, the US government’s insurance program for low-income people. After Planned Parenthood sued over the ban, a judge temporarily stopped it from taking effect.If the ban moves forward, experts warn that it could cripple the entirety of the US healthcare social safety net.Republicans have long sought to defund Planned Parenthood over the organization’s commitment to providing abortions. But Planned Parenthood does not rely on Medicaid to fund its abortion provision as it is already illegal to use federal dollars, including Medicaid, to pay for the vast majority of abortions. The 1.5m visits documented in Wednesday’s research paper, which was published in the medical journal Jama, only include visits for reasons other than abortion.“Planned Parenthood has filled a very important role in the reproductive healthcare safety net for people living on low incomes,” said Kari White, executive and scientific director at Resound Research for Reproductive Health. White was the lead author on the research paper released on Wednesday. “Other providers have counted on them to do so. They just don’t have the capacity to step in and fill the place that Planned Parenthood has had in the safety net.”The state department has approved potential sales of munitions, precision bombs and precision rockets to Nigeria, according to a statement from the Pentagon. The estimated cost totals $346 million.Several Texas Democratic lawmakers are now speaking about their redistricting fight alongside Indiana Democrats. They’re joining the legislators to push back against the president’s push for Indiana governor Mike Braun to redraw the state’s congressional map – in a similar vein to Texas governor Greg Abbott.Today, state representative Gene Wu, who is also chair of the Texas House Democrats, said that “we need more people to join us”.He added that if Texas Republicans continue to “block the will of the people” Democrats will make to “nullify their actions”.A number of Indiana Democratic lawmakers said that they stand in solidarity with their Texas counterparts. “We need to support them and stand with them, otherwise our people will be subjected to ever changing districts, none of which are representative,” said Indiana state representative Ed DeLaney.

      At the Kennedy Center today, Donald Trump announced that he would host this year’s honors himself – scheduled for December. But some of the biggest news came out of the far-reaching press conference he held after announcing this year’s honorees (which include ‘Rocky’ star and fervent Trump supporter Sylvester Stallone).

      Trump promised ‘very severe consequences’ if Vladimir Putin doesn’t agree to ceasefire at their Friday meeting in Alaska. He didn’t, however, elaborate on what those penalties will be. He also floated the idea of a trilateral summit with Volodymyr Zelenskyy “almost immediately” after his individual meeting with Putin.

      The president said that he’s eyeing an extension of the initial 30-day limit for the federal takeover of the DC Metropolitan Police. “I don’t want to call national emergency. If I have to I will. But I think the Republicans in Congress will approve this pretty much unanimously,” Trump said. He added that any discussions about DC statehood are “ridiculous” and “unacceptable”.

      When it comes to the surge of federal law enforcement on DC streets, a White House official said 43 arrests were made on Tuesday night –twice the total of the previous evening. More than 1,450 officers participated, about half of which were from the city’s police department, while only 30 national guard troops were deployed of the roughly 800 that defense officials have said are expected to arrive for the mission.

      The city’s Democratic mayor, Muriel Bowser, has sought a cordial working relationship with the president since his return to the White House, but changed her tone on Tuesday, urging residents and voters during a social media event “to protect our home rule and get to the other side of this guy and make sure we elect a Democratic House so that we have a backstop to this authoritarian push”.

      At his Kennedy Center appearance today, the president continued to disparage Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell. “He’s truly incompetent,” Trump said. He went on to reveal that he’ll be naming the nomination for Powell’s replacement “sometime in the next week”. He’s down to “three of four names,” he added. A reminder that Powell’s term ends in May.

      Additionally, on the foreign diplomacy front, the president took part in a virtual meeting with Zelenskyy and European leaders today which the German chancellor described as “very good” and “constructive”. Zelenskyy confirmed that Trump would call him straight after the Friday meeting with Putin to talk it through details.

      And finally, for now at least, a federal appeals court lifted a lower court’s injunction that required the state department to continue making payments to foreign aid contractors. In a 2-1 decision, the appellate panel effectively granted a Trump victory – allowing the administration to cut billions in congressionally appropriated funding for foreign assistance.
      We can soon expect to hear from Texas Democrats in Chicago, who will join several Indiana Democratic lawmakers who are pushing back against the president’s pressure campaign to redraw their own state’s congressional map.The White House said on Wednesday that law enforcement made dozens of arrests in Washington DC overnight after federal agents and national guard troops fanned out across the city as part of Donald Trump’s campaign to quell a “crime crisis” that local officials say does not exist.The national guard arrived on the National Mall late on Tuesday, while agents from the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), FBI and Department of Homeland Security were seen in several neighborhoods , sometimes accompanied by local police officers.Video circulating on local media showed police and federal agents arresting at least one person that evening in Columbia Heights, home to the city’s largest Hispanic population. Other videos showed traffic stops near Kennedy street in Northwest Washington, which in years past has been the site of gang activity.A White House official said to expect a “significantly higher” presence of national guard troops over the days to come, as well as round-the-clock patrols by federal agents, which have thus far only been present in the evenings. The administration argues the steps are necessary to fight what Trump has called an “out of control” crime problem in the nation’s capital, but local officials have disputed that characterization.Data shows that crime rates plunged last year to the lowest levels in three decades, though the capital does have higher rates of some violent crimes compared with cities with similar populations.Democratic lawmakers have condemned Trump’s incursion as an authoritarian move intended to distract his supporters from outrage over his refusal to make public files related to disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein, a one-time friend who has become a fixation of conspiracy theorists.The Democratic mayor, Muriel Bowser, has sought a cordial relationship with Trump since his return to the White House, but changed her tone on Tuesday, urging residents and voters during a social media event “to protect our city, to protect our autonomy, to protect our home rule and get to the other side of this guy and make sure we elect a Democratic House so that we have a backstop to this authoritarian push”.A White House official said a total of 43 arrests were made on Tuesday night, twice the total of the previous evening. More than 1,450 officers participated, about half of which were from the city’s police department, while only 30 national guard troops were deployed of the roughly 800 that defense officials have said are expected to arrive for the mission.The White House said a total of 19 teams of officers from various federal agencies are in the city “to promote public safety and arrest violent offenders”, while the national guard will “protect federal assets, provide a safe environment for law enforcement officers to make arrests, and deter violent crime with a visible law enforcement presence”.More than 40 Ice agents from Homeland Security Investigations (HSI, which does long-term investigations into transnational crimes) are working with the DC police, the Drug Enforcement Administration and other federal agencies this week as part of Trump’s takeover of the capital to mitigate crime, NBC News is reporting.Per NBC’s report, “they can make arrests of citizens with no nexus to immigration violations”. “Yesterday, HSI worked with other agencies in an operation near the DC Metro in Union Station; its agents told NBC News that they were not there for anything immigration related, but were surveying busy areas around DC.”Separately, Enforcement Removal Operations (ERO, which carries out operations like arresting immigrants for immigration crimes and detaining and deporting them) is increasing its operations in DC, according to NBC. The news outlet reports that “there was a ‘targeted enforcement operation’ to arrest immigrants in a Home Depot parking lot in DC yesterday, and there have been reports of other immigrant arrests in the DC area.”“The President was clear, he will make DC safe and beautiful again, and ICE is proud to be a part of the solution alongside our federal law enforcement partners,” an agency spokesperson told NBC about the operations. The agency is conducting both immigration enforcement operations and undertaking efforts to fight crime in support of the US Marshals Service, they said.They said the operations were intelligence-based, and the efforts at Union Station and the Home Depot resulted in arrests of criminal undocumented immigrants convicted of assault, theft and gang activity.“We will support the re-establishment of law and order and public safety in DC, which includes taking drug dealers, gang members, and criminal aliens off city streets,” they said.A senior official appointed to the defense department led a thinktank that promoted fake news about the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua (TdA) gang, according to InSight Crime, a non-profit analyzing organized crime.Joseph Humire was appointed this summer to be the head of policy focusing on the western hemisphere within the office of the under secretary of defense for policy. He was previously the executive director of a conservative thinktank focused on global security. Humire’s appointment comes as the Trump administration is ramping up its aggressive strategy against organized crime in Latin America and the Venezuelan government, which it accuses of working with TdA.Under Humire’s leadership, the Center for a Secure Free Society thinktank published the “TdA Activity Monitor”, tracking alleged crimes by accused members of the gang throughout the US. According to InSight Crime, at least five event entries in the tracker appeared to have been “completely fabricated”. InSight Crime found zero basis for the false entries, with local police departments telling researchers the purported crimes were nonexistent. InSight Crime analyzed more than 90 of the entries, finding many relied on unverified sources.“Some incidents are included multiple times, inflating the gang’s perceived presence and activities,” researchers found.Asked if he was confident he could get Putin to stop targeting civilians in Ukraine, Trump said:
      Well, I’ll tell you what. I’ve had that conversation with him. I’ve had a lot of good conversations with him. Then I go home and I see that a rocket hit a nursing home, or a rocket hit an apartment building and people are laying dead in the street.
      So I guess the answer to that is no, because I’ve had this conversation.
      He ended his briefing there. More

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      And here is your host … Trump casts himself for Kennedy Center honours

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      “There is a connection, hard to explain logically but easy to feel, between achievement in public life and progress in the arts,” are among the words inscribed in marble at the John F Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington. The age of Elizabeth was the age of Shakespeare, it says.The age of Donald Trump is the age of Trump’s ego. Trump the president, commander-in-chief and master builder. Trump the supremo of the upcoming Olympics, football World Cup and America’s 250th birthday. Trump whose self-aggrandisement is the size of a planet: on Wednesday not even the Kennedy Center’s cavernous Hall of Nations could contain it.The president announced that he will host this year’s Kennedy Center Honors – after all, he used to be on The Apprentice, so how hard can it be? He unveiled this year’s honourees – screened by him to veto “wokesters” – and grumbled that he had never been one. He reminded everyone that he has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.Nearby, the giant bust of Kennedy may have shed a tear or two as Trump, wearing dark suit, white shirt and red tie, strode into the marble-walled, red-carpeted Hall of Nations to continue his hostile takeover of the nation’s capital – and the country’s cultural life.The 100ft-high arts complex on the banks of the Potomac River and its annual arts awards might seem trivial in the scheme of Trump’s authoritarian crusade. But there are few better measures of how his second term is proving more ambitious, intentional and effective than his first.View image in fullscreenTrump 1.0 never set foot in the Kennedy Center. Each year the Honors took place without him, with recipients including his critics such as as Cher, Lin-Manuel Miranda and Sally Field. And there were diverse lineups: Gloria Estefan, LL Cool J, Lionel Richie, Debbie Allen, Berry Gordy, Gladys Knight and Queen Latifah.Trump 2.0 has been a very different proposition in his targeted approach to immigration and crime, his vendettas against political opponents and his bullying of law firms, media companies and universities. Suddenly the Kennedy Center, like the Smithsonian Institution’s museums, finds itself in the line of fire of Trump’s war on woke.Like Shakespeare’s Richard III, who feigns reluctance to take the throne as a tactic to appear more virtuous, Trump claimed he didn’t really want to take on hosting responsibilities when his staff asked.“I said: ‘I’m the president of the United States! Are you fools, asking me to do that?’ ‘Sir, you’ll get much higher ratings.’ I said: ‘I don’t care, I’m president of the United States. I won’t do it.’”But then, in his telling, his chief of staff, Susie Wiles, intervened. “I said, OK, Susie, I’ll do it. That’s the power she’s got. So I have agreed to … They’re going to say: ‘He insisted.’ I did not insist but I think it will be quite successful actually. It’s been a long time. I used to host The Apprentice finales and we did rather well with that.”The Kennedy Center Honors were established in 1978 and recipients have included George Balanchine, Warren Beatty, Aretha Franklin, Tom Hanks, Arthur Miller, Stephen Sondheim and Barbra Streisand. Trump remarked: “I wanted one. I was never able to get one.”A group of Trump lackeys sitting stage left burst into laughter then realised he wasn’t joking and fell silent. “It’s true, actually. I would have taken it if they would have called me. I waited and waited and waited and I said: ‘To hell with it, I’ll become chairman and I’ll give myself an honour. Maybe next year we’ll honour Trump, OK?”All right, now that time he was joking. Wasn’t he?Trump announced a characteristically white male-heavy list for this year’s honourees: actors Michael Crawford and Sylvester Stallone, singers George Strait and Gloria Gaynor, and members of the rock band Kiss. As he spoke of each, a curtain was pulled back on their photo in very retro, low-tech style.Crawford, he noted, was born in England in 1942 and made his Broadway debut in 1967. “I was there. I shouldn’t say that but I was there. It seems like a long time ago, and he became an international sensation in the 1980s for his original portrayal of the Phantom of the Opera – one of the greatest ever, ever, ever, ever.”It was hardly surprising from a man whose cultural tastes refuse to acknowledge the existence of the 21st century, though there was no mention of the 70s British sitcom Some Mothers Do ’Ave ’Em in which Crawford played accident-prone Frank Spencer, known for the catchphrase “Ooh Betty!”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionStallone’s characters Rambo and Rocky are more Trump’s style: macho, muscular, primal, violent, taking no prisoners. The kind of great white hopes that he would now like to see policing the streets of Washington. The president mused: “Rocky, Rambo – if you did one, you’re good. You do two?“I’ll never forget I was a young guy and I went to see a thing called Rambo and it had just come out. I didn’t know anything about it but I was in a movie theatre – like we used to go to movie theaters a lot – and I said: ‘This movie is phenomenal! What the heck?’ And that turned out to be a monster.”Trump described Stallone as one of the biggest names on the Hollywood Walk of Fame but then remembered this is supposed to be all about him. “In fact, the only one that’s a bigger name on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, they say, is a guy named Donald Trump. I’m on the Hollywood Walk of Fame too, if you can believe that one.”Strait, Gaynor and Kiss met with his approval too. Trump might have stopped five wars in the past six months, by his own estimate, but he still had time to handpick the Kennedy Center honourees and make sure no agitators, dissidents or subversives slipped through the net. The role of the artist is the worship of Trump.“I would say I was about 98% involved,” he remarked. “They all went through me … I turned down plenty. It went too woke. I turned I had a couple of wokesters. Now, we have great people. This is very different than it used to be. Very different.”The Oscars, he said, now gets “lousy ratings” because “it’s all woke” and “all they do is talk about how much they hate Trump.”Just as he is vowing to make Washington DC beautiful again, Trump has big plans for the Kennedy Center, which at least one Republican in Congress has proposed renaming after him. Trump promised to “fully renovate” the entire infrastructure, ripping out and replacing all the seats, and make it a “crown jewel” of arts and culture in the US. “The bones are so good,” he cooed.But if his White House desecration is anything to go by, expect the Kennedy Center to become a monument to dictator chic, dripping in rococo gold and festooned with garishness. Another Kennedy quotation inscribed on the exterior marble wall says: “This country cannot afford to be materially rich and spiritually poor.” More

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      Trump’s Washington DC takeover is straight out of a fascist playbook| Moustafa Bayoumi

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      A key chapter in the fascist playbook has always been to convince the public that it is living in such a state of mortal danger and unbridled chaos that the only chance of survival is to cede individual rights to the determined will of the Dear Leader. That’s why fascist leaders have constantly demanded that their populations venerate all violence performed in the service of the state and revere the apparatuses of state violence, such as police forces and the military. In this scenario, state violence is not only necessary for the nation’s survival. State violence is understood as even beautiful, something the public can and must believe in.Buying into state violence this way produces something historian Robert Paxton has called a “mobilizing passion”. In his book The Anatomy of Fascism, Paxton described how “the beauty of violence and the efficacy of will” is produced and then mobilized by fascists by creating “a sense of overwhelming crisis beyond the reach of traditional solutions”. In other words, there’s always a grave, existential threat lurking around every corner, and only fascist violence can restore order to a lawless world. To the fascist, as Umberto Eco once put it, “life is a permanent war”.Enter Donald Trump. Whether it’s an existential threat of “wokeness” run amok in American universities, or the extraordinary danger of unauthorized immigrants picking our vegetables, Trump is prepared to battle everyone and everything, including his own windmills, to restore the country to some illusory past glory that we are all supposed to believe in, and be willing to sacrifice ourselves for.But the sad truth is that many, if not most, of Trump’s justifications for his policies, are unsurprisingly based on bald-faced lies or gross exaggerations simply to further his pursuit of absolute power. Yet it doesn’t seem to matter. With each new announcement, Trump continues to prove how excellent he is at crafting the illusion of problems where there basically are none and leading his followers down an often-violent path of retribution. (Remember January 6, DC’s most violent day in recent history?) By doing so, he seeks to constantly expand his authority while also deflecting from all the substantial problems that are staring him in the face. And these problems are not insignificant. Think of the Jeffrey Epstein scandal or the continuation of global conflicts that he promised months ago he would uniquely be able to end.The federal takeover of the Washington DC police department, announced with loud fanfare by Trump on Monday, is the latest example of this phenomenon. About 800 national guard troops will be deployed in the nation’s capital because, according to the president, “our capital city has been overtaken by violent gangs and bloodthirsty criminals, roving mobs of wild youth, drugged-out maniacs, and homeless people.”This does sound rather frightening. Fortunately, it’s not true. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to matter.First, the facts. Crime in DC is at historic lows. “Total violent crime for 2024 in the District of Columbia is down 35% from 2023 and is the lowest it has been in over 30 years,” the justice department announced earlier this year. And crime numbers for 2025 are even better, substantially lower than 2024. Violent crime in 2025 is down 26% compared with 2024.The DC council understands this. The council responded to Trump’s announcement with an angry joint statement: “This is a manufactured intrusion on local authority. Violent crime in the District is at the lowest rates we’ve seen in 30 years. Federalizing the DC police is unwarranted because there is no Federal emergency. Further, the National Guard has no public safety training or knowledge of local laws. The Guard’s role does not include investigating or solving crimes in the District. Calling out the National Guard is an unnecessary deployment with no real mission.”Such facts ought to matter. So why don’t they to Trump?Facts don’t matter for Trump because facts have always operated as nothing more than an inconvenience for him. Just ask Erika McEntarfer, former commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics. She was recently fired by Trump after accurately reporting employment statistics, and those specific numbers contradicted Trump and his policies. But with every new policy enacted by this administration, Trump’s fact-free worldview becomes a lot more worrisome.That’s true for this policy, too. Owing to its historically limited autonomy, the District of Columbia is governed differently than other parts of the county. And under the Home Rule Act of 1973,the federal government can take over its policing functions for a period of 30 days. Congress would probably then have to extend that time limit if needed. But to think that Trump is focused on federal policing authority solely to deploy it to Washington DC is to also believe that Donald Trump has never seen a spray tan machine.Here is Trump: “We have other cities also that are bad, very bad,” he said at his press conference. “You look at Chicago, how bad it is. You look at Los Angeles, how bad it is. We have other cities that are very bad. New York is a problem. And then you have of course Baltimore and Oakland. We don’t even mention that any more, they’re so far gone. We’re not going to let it happen. We’re not going to lose our cities over this. And this will go further. We’re starting very strongly with DC.”Now, here are the facts. In Chicago, homicides are down 33% in 2025. Los Angeles had the “lowest homicide total in nearly 60 years” in 2025. New York’s police department is reporting that “from January 2025 through May 2025, New York City experienced the lowest number of shootings and murders in recorded history.” The Baltimore police department has stated that 2025 “continues to see double-digit reductions in gun violence, including a 22% decrease in homicides”. And the Oakland police department reported last week “that overall crime in Oakland has dropped by 28% in the first six months of 2025” including a 24% decrease in homicides.Donald Trump wants to take over all forms of law enforcement in the United States, from local policing to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agency that is now pumped up on budgetary steroids. (Under Trump’s so-called big, beautiful bill, Ice will now expand to become the largest federal law enforcement agency in US history, with a bigger budget than most nations’ militaries.) Trump’s desire to control all forms of state power, and to expand them beyond belief, is a move straight out of the fascist playbook. And it’s completely dependent on the production of both extraordinary fear and blatant lies.The first way of fighting such an obvious power grab is not to give in to the fear and not to believe the lies. But what is less understood about Trump is that he doesn’t even care if we believe his lies. Like all such leaders, what Trump really wants is just that we no longer believe in the truth. The difference between not believing the lies and believing in the truth may sound slight, but it’s exactly in that distinction where some people are allowed to live and others must die. It’s where democracy is found or democracy is lost. And it’s why holding on to the very concept of truth ultimately matters so much more than just arguing over the lies.

      Moustafa Bayoumi is the author of the award-winning books How Does It Feel to Be a Problem?: Being Young and Arab in America and This Muslim American Life: Dispatches from the War on Terror. He is professor of English at Brooklyn College, City University of New York More

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      National guard arrives in Washington DC – in pictures

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      A Humvee vehicle leaves the Anacostia Park Police Field Office. Tuesday’s arrests included Tuesday’s arrests related to homicide, firearms offences, possession with intent to distribute narcotics, fare evasion, lewd acts and stalking, according to the White House. ‘A total of six illegal handguns were seized off of District of Columbia’s streets as part of last night’s effort.’

      Photograph: Annabelle Gordon/Reuters More