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‘She doesn’t have the power to stop him’: DC mayor walks a tightrope with Trump
During a press conference at the end of August, Washington DC’s mayor, Muriel Bowser, made sure to say “thank you” – in her own way – for Donald Trump’s influx of federal law enforcement in the nation’s capital.“We greatly appreciate the surge of officers that enhance what MPD has been able to do in this city,” Bowser said. She admitted that, after a recent meeting with the president, his knowledge of DC had “significantly increased” since his first term in the White House.Bowser pointed to recent data that shows a significant drop in violent crime, particularly carjackings, since more federal law enforcement began working with DC police. But she also offered some pushback.“What we know is not working is a break in trust between police and community,” Bowser said. “We know having masked Ice agents in the community has not worked, and national guards from other states has not been an efficient use of those resources.” She also underscored that if there were more local police officers, it would cancel out any need for any supplemental federal law enforcement.The president has spent years denigrating DC. After leaving office in 2021, and mounting his re-election campaign, he called the district “horribly run” and a “nightmare of murder and crime”. In August, he justified his “crime emergency” – after a former Doge staffer was attacked in DC – by describing the “bloodshed, bedlam and squalor” of the nation’s capital. He has also falsely claimed that violent crime in the district is the “worst it’s ever been”, despite it reaching a 30-year low in 2024, according to data compiled by the justice department.Trump promised repeatedly to “take over” DC on the campaign trail. Then, on 7 August, he started to send hundreds of federal agents to the capital to work with local law enforcement. Just days later, he declared a “public safety emergency”, allowing him to federalize the MPD for 30 days . He supplemented all of this by deploying the DC national guard. Now, about 2,300 national guard troops are patrolling the district – including several hundred sent from Republican-run states.Bowser did not denounce the move. Instead, she called it “unsettling” and said that it resembled an “authoritarian push” on a Zoom call with local organizers.Expressing deference to the president, while displaying a quiet pushback against his policies, is emblematic of the tightrope Bowser, who is the second-longest-serving mayor in DC’s history and is eyeing a fourth term, has been walking since Trump returned to office this year.It’s a far cry from her past willingness to undermine the president publicly. In 2020, during the height of the George Floyd racial justice protests that swept the country, the mayor called Trump a “scared man” on social media, as he tried to quell the demonstrations in the capital.She also called his use of federal law enforcement officials and national guard at the time an “invasion of our city” before announcing that a section of 16th Street, which is in front of the White House, would be renamed “Black Lives Matter Plaza” – with the road’s new name painted in tall yellow letters on the ground.When Trump returned to office, the pressure from the president and congressional Republicans to rename and pave over the plaza, or risk losing federal funding, forced Bowser’s hand in March. “We have bigger fish to fry,” she said of her decision to comply with the administration’s demands. “Now our focus is on making sure our residents and our economy survives.”Arguably, it signaled a new dawn in her ongoing power struggle with the president.Her apparent cooperation, including a recently signed executive order that ensures cooperation between MPD and federal officers indefinitely, has earned her praise from the administration. Trump congratulated Bowser’s compliance in a post from Truth Social. “Wow! Mayor Muriel Bowser of D.C. has become very popular because she worked with me and my great people in bringing CRIME down to virtually NOTHING in D.C,” the president wrote.On Monday, he also suggested that the mayor was more aligned with the administration’s goals than he had previously thought. “That’s not her ideology, but now I think that maybe is her ideology,” he said, while giving remarks at the Museum of the Bible in DC. “She’s taking a lot of heat from the radical left.”But Bowser’s apparent willingness to work with Trump has elicited frustration from members of the DC council. In a post on Twitter/X, the at-large council member Robert White pushed back against the mayor’s choice to credit federal officers in the capital.“This is trampling on democracy in real time, on our watch,” he said. “Sometimes we want to wait and see what’s happening, but that time has passed.” White later issued a statement that called for the rescission of the mayor’s order, calling it a “permission slip” that Trump was using to justify sending forces into other Democratic-led cities.“I wish there was greater resistance in this moment,” said Zachary Parker, a DC council member who represents Ward 5, which spans the Northeast quadrant of the district.“The mayor has been conciliatory to the president from the day she went to Mar-a-Lago to greet him to now – and look where we are,” he said.For longtime DC political analysts like Tom Sherwood, Bowser is stuck between a rock and a hard place.While he notes that her public appearances, like the late August press conference, could have more “vinegar”, Sherwood also says that language is only part of the dance – Bowser is ultimately forced to bend to the whims of a mercurial president who has a majority in both chambers of Congress.“The mayor has to consider pushing back where she can and not provoking even more attacks from this president, whose mind is like a weather vane when it comes to his attention to the district,” he said. “Both legally and politically, she doesn’t have the power to stop him.”Although DC does have limited self-governance, Congress is ultimately in charge of the district. Meanwhile, the president is allowed to keep both federal agents and national guard troops in the capital for as long as he deems necessary.“Every political person I’ve spoken to who doesn’t like what the mayor is doing can’t answer one question,” Sherwood said. “If you were mayor, with the limited power you had, what would you have done differently?”Many progressives in DC argue that Bowser is playing too nice, and isn’t reflecting the fact that almost 80% of DC residents oppose the takeover, according to a recent Washington Post-Schar School poll.While there isn’t any recent polling to show how the impact of the federal takeover has affected the mayor’s approval among DC locals, in May, 53% of residents were happy with Bowser’s job leading the district – a marked improvement from 46% the year prior. But the mayor has failed to reach the crest of approval ratings she received in the first five years of her tenure, which began in 2015.Recently, more than a hundred groups, local organizations and unions signed an open letter to Bowser, saying that her actions since 11 August had appeased Trump. “History is calling upon you to lead our people, not to cower in the face of an authoritarian who does not have our best interests in mind,” the letter reads.Ultimately, the mayor has to play the long game when handling the administration, according to a DC government source familiar with the mayor’s thinking. “We’re only eight months into this. There’s a lot of time left on the clock. DC’s only tool in the toolbox is soft power,” the source said. “Her only job is to protect the residents of Washington DC. She’s going to use whatever strategy is going to yield the best result for that specific mission.”Trump’s police takeover expired on 10 September, and the US House is not expected to vote on an extension – a sign that there might be a payoff to Bowser’s strategy.But, for Michael Fanone, the former DC police officer who has chronicled his work helping to defend the Capitol during the January 6 attack, it’s not as simple as hoping that Trump’s focus on the district will wane.“I don’t think we can say whether or not we know definitively that he’s off her back. I think that you see he’s moved on to another shiny object,” he said, referring to the surge of federal immigration agents in Chicago, and the president’s repeated threats to deploy national guard troops to the city. “Quite frankly, this isn’t just a local fight.”While the governors of blue states, like California’s Gavin Newsom, Illinois’s JB Pritzker and Maryland’s Wes Moore, have all taken vocal stands against the president, Sherwood recognizes that Bowser can’t risk the same ferocity. “I think she has made the calculation that most DC citizens will support her effort trying to battle Trump without the weapons other governments have,” he said. More
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The real bias monitor at CBS is Donald Trump | Seth Stern
News outlets, including CBS, are free to run their editorial operations as they see fit. If they independently decide to hire a bias ombudsman, that’s their prerogative. If they think the best person to monitor bias at this moment is a career partisan like Kenneth Weinstein, that’s cause to question their judgment, but not necessarily a first amendment concern.That all changes, however, when the monitoring is at the behest of the federal government. And that’s what’s going on at CBS. The creation of the ombudsman role was one of many capitulations CBS’s owners made to the Trump administration to persuade the Federal Communications Commission to approve the Paramount-Skydance merger.Other concessions included a commitment to end DEI and, of course, the $16m dollar bribe to Trump, laundered as a settlement payment to resolve his frivolous lawsuit over 60 Minutes’ editing of an interview with then vice-president Kamala Harris. Two days after the check hit, the FCC approved the merger. And though Paramount denies it, Trump claims there was also a side agreement to sweeten the deal with $20m in pro-Trump PSAs.Given the original sin of that rotten transaction, there is no room for benefit of the doubt when it comes to Weinstein’s hiring.The day the hire was announced, the FCC chair, Brendan Carr – known for his lapel pin with a golden bust of Trump – told the Wall Street Journal that his supposedly independent agency was “fully aligned with the agenda that President Trump is running”. When it comes to the press, that agenda is clear: censorship and retribution.Weinstein’s past Trump bootlicking raises questions about whether he’s too biased to monitor bias. Soon after the administration extracted its latest surrender from CBS – a commitment to no longer exercise its constitutional right to edit interviews, in response to criticism from the homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem – it was reported that Weinstein had deleted his X account.So the man tasked with policing transparency at CBS is already obscuring his own words? Not a great start as a journalistic ethicist.David Ellison, CEO of the new Paramount Skydance Corporation and son of Larry Ellison, who recently became the world’s richest person, insists Weinstein won’t report to the government. The ombudsman role is about transparency, not oversight, he claims. It will ensure that CBS showcases “varied ideological perspectives”, presumably including that of his dad’s buddy in the White House, who also wants to broker a deal for the Ellison family to control TikTok.One might argue that a serious bias monitor would focus on whether journalists’ biases (and yes, journalists have biases like everyone else) interfere with their pursuit of truth rather than implementing a nonsensical “all perspectives are created equal” policy. But again, absent government interference, Ellison’s entitled to write the job description as he sees fit.The government, however, apparently does intend to oversee – and, if it sees fit, interfere with – CBS’s bias policing. Carr reportedly said his agency was in a “trust but verify posture”, when it comes to the anti-bias commitments it unconstitutionally extracted. He noted: “When you make a filing at the FCC, we have rules and regulations that deal with false representations to the agency,” adding that his agency was “going to stay in touch with [Paramount] and track this issue”.In other words, the FCC is positioned to use Paramount’s seemingly coerced commitments during the merger process – including the bias ombudsman – to punish CBS if it steps out of line, or better yet, make it think twice about doing so in the first place. An independent bias cop would be all over the Columbia Journalism Review’s reporting on Thursday on alarming corporate meddling, by old and new ownership alike, in an effort to slant the network’s coverage in Israel’s favor. What an opportunity to hit the ground running! But don’t hold your breath.Legally, the government cannot use regulatory penalties as an end run around the constitution to control the news. As a prior version of Carr said in 2021: “A newsroom’s decision about what stories to cover and how to frame them should be beyond the reach of any government official.”But that assumes a government that respects the limits of its authority. The United States doesn’t have one of those. If this administration needs a pretext to punish CBS, it’ll find one – whether it’s alleged misrepresentations to regulators or some other bizarre theory government lawyers have yet to dream up.And don’t expect the FCC to push back. My employer, Freedom of the Press Foundation, filed an attorney disciplinary complaint against Carr in July, which included a laundry list of his overreaches and extra jurisdictional actions, from threatening corporate owners of cable news networks that don’t air Trump’s press conferences to efforts to meddle in online content.The FCC regulates neither cable news nor online speech, and Carr knows that. He also knows he can’t force even those he does regulate to broadcast whatever he wants. But those on the receiving end of Carr’s correspondence understand that he’s not speaking to them as an independent regulator but as one of Trump’s henchmen. It isn’t about whether they violated whatever regulation he cites (if he even bothers), it’s about whether they’re kissing the ring emphatically enough for his boss’s liking.The Trump administration has abused its powers to shake down Paramount and secure a foothold inside CBS’s newsroom. That doesn’t mean CBS will never criticize Trump again – that would be too obvious. But its owners know they might get slapped if it goes too far. That’s enough to tame a watchdog – especially a corporate one that prioritizes endeavors more lucrative than defending the first amendment.The new CBS might not quite be state media, but it’s certainly going to be state-supervised media. Congratulations to Weinstein on the title, but the real bias ombudsman is Donald Trump.
Seth Stern is the director of advocacy at Freedom of the Press Foundation and a first amendment lawyer More
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Charlie Kirk shooting: new video of suspect released by FBI amid urgent appeal for help from the public
US officials have issued an urgent appeal for help from the public as they continue to search for the shooter of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, releasing new videos and photos from the scene of the attack in Utah.More than 24 hours after Kirk was shot while speaking in front of thousands of people at a Utah university, the state’s governor, appearing alongside FBI director Kash Patel and other officials, said “we need as much help as we can possibly get.”“We cannot do our job without the public’s help,” Utah’s governor, Spencer Cox said, adding that the FBI had received more than 7,000 leads and tips so far.The newly released video showed a person wearing a hat, sunglasses and a long sleeve black shirt running across a roof, climbing off the edge of the building and dropping to the ground. The suspect is believed to have fled into the local neighbourhood after firing the one shot and has not yet been identified.Investigators said they had obtained clues, including a palm print, a shoe impression and a high-powered hunting rifle found in a wooded area along the path the shooter fled. But they were yet to name a suspect or cite a motive in the killing.View image in fullscreenThe direct appeals for public support at the night-time news conference, appeared to signal law enforcement’s continued struggles to identify the shooter and pinpoint the person’s whereabouts. Authorities didn’t take questions, and Patel did not speak at the news conference. The FBI is offering up to $100,000 for information leading to the identification and arrest of the person.The death of Kirk – a close ally of President Donald Trump – has drawn renewed attention to the escalating threat of political violence in the United States which, in the last several years, has cut across the ideological spectrum. The assassination drew bipartisan condemnation from political leaders.In appealing for information, Cox said on Thursday, “there is a tremendous amount of disinformation” online.“Our adversaries want violence,” Cox said. “We have bots from Russia, China, all over the world that are trying to instil disinformation and encourage violence. I would encourage you to ignore those, to turn off those streams.”Cox also pledged to find the killer and pursue the death penalty.Kirk’s casket arrived in his home state of Arizona aboard Air Force Two, accompanied by vice-president JD Vance. Vance’s wife, Usha, stepped off the plane with Kirk’s widow, Erika.Vance helped carry Kirk’s casket with a group of uniformed service members as it was loaded on to the plane. Kirk’s conservative youth organisation, Turning Point USA, was based in Phoenix.“So much of the success we’ve had in this administration traces directly to Charlie’s ability to organize and convene,” Vance wrote on social media, referencing Kirk’s role in getting Donald Trump elected last year. “He didn’t just help us win in 2024, he helped us staff the entire government.”Kirk was a provocateur and a divisive figure who is credited with helping bring young people, especially men, into the US president’s Make America Great Again (Maga) movement.In a statement on Thursday, TPUSA wrote: “All of us have lost a leader, a mentor, and a friend. Above all, our hearts are with Erika and their two children. Charlie was the ideal husband and the perfect father. Above all else, we ask you to pray for the Kirks after the incomprehensible loss they have suffered.”Kirk’s killing drew bipartisan condemnation of the rise in political violence in the US.Trump, who said he would award the Medal of Freedom posthumously to Kirk, spoke to Kirk’s wife on Thursday.He said that authorities were making “big progress” towards tracking down the suspect and that in regards to a motive, he has an “indication … but we’ll let you know about that later”.Just hours after Kirk had been declared dead after being rushed to a nearby hospital on Wednesday, Trump delivered a video message from the Oval Office, vowing to track down the suspect.View image in fullscreen“My administration will find each and every one of those who contributed to this atrocity and to other political violence, including the organizations that fund it and support it,” Trump said.One day after his inflammatory address, blaming “the radical left” for Kirk’s death, Trump appeared to strike a more conciliatory tone, agreeing with a suggestion from a reporter that his supporters should not respond with violence.The White House quickly posted the exchange on social media, perhaps hoping to tamp down anger that has already spilled into violence, with the beating of a critic of Kirk in Boise, Idaho, during a vigil on Wednesday night.Don Bacon, a Republican from Nebraska who is retiring after this term, told NBC News that he wished Trump would unite the country after the shooting, “but he’s a populist, and populists dwell on anger”.“I have to remind people, we had Democrats killed in Minnesota too, right?” Bacon added, in reference to the murder of Minnesota’s former house speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark, in June by a gunman with a hitlist of 45 people, all Democrats.With Reuters and the Associated Press More
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The Guardian view on the killing of Charlie Kirk: a perilous moment that may lead to more | Editorial
“Democracy is the way that we have diverse societies that don’t kill each other, largely,” Lilliana Mason, a leading scholar of partisanship, observed recently. She added: “As soon as we stop believing in it, it disappears.” Dr Mason’s own research suggests that there is sharply rising tolerance of political violence. On Wednesday, it claimed one more victim.The shocking killing of the co-founder of Turning Point USA Charlie Kirk, a hugely influential activist who rallied young people to Donald Trump’s cause and far-right ideology more broadly, has been widely and rightly condemned across the political spectrum. Leading Democrats and progressive activists made clear that such violence must not be tolerated.Before a perpetrator had even been identified, the president, like several other Republicans, blamed “radical left political violence”, claiming that liberal rhetoric against conservatives was “directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country”. Mr Trump himself faced two attempts on his life last year. He cited other victims, but not the many Democrats who have been targeted, including Melissa Hortman, the Minnesota state representative shot dead at her home alongside her husband, Mark, in June. Meanwhile, some far-right commentators spoke of vengeance.Political violence is hardly a new phenomenon in a country that has seen a civil war, four presidential assassinations, and lynchings. But it is rising again. Ordinary Americans are being radicalised. In such an environment, one thing unites the political poles; any prominent figure is vulnerable, though women and people of colour are particularly targeted. Threats to members of Congress rocketed last year.“Demonising those with whom you disagree” is indeed dangerous, but Mr Trump himself has normalised vicious attacks on opponents. The tolerance of violent action – as with Mr Trump’s blanket pardons for the January 6 rioters – sends a message too. The roots of violent acts are complex, but an environment conducive to political attacks may channel the propensities of potential perpetrators. Robert Pape, director of the Chicago Project on Security and Threats, has warned that US politics may be on the brink “of an extremely violent era … The more public support there is for political violence, the more common it is.” The US addiction to guns drastically increases the impact.Acts of political violence exact an appalling human toll in lives lost and families shattered; Mr Kirk’s death leaves two small children fatherless. But they also – by design – deter other people from political or other civic activity at all levels. The most extreme voices may persist and prevail. Blaming political adversaries before a perpetrator has even been identified risks fuelling anger and attacks, to everyone’s cost. Research by Dr Mason, of Johns Hopkins University, and Nathan Kalmoe, of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, found that a fifth of respondents said political violence could sometimes be justified, but three-fifths thought it could sometimes be justified if the other side committed violence first.Yet other research notes that people appear less willing to condone violence if misperceptions of the other side’s extremism or propensity for force are corrected. In this perilous moment, the response to such hateful crimes should be to coalesce to stress non-violence and civic tolerance. To instead promote division will only increase the threat to politicians and activists of all stripes, and strike another blow to democracy itself.
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