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    Before and after: Trump’s extreme goldening of the Oval Office

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    In just seven extraordinary months, Donald Trump’s administration has left an unprecedented mark on the United States. From rewriting the rules of free trade to upending the norms of due process and challenging scientific orthodoxy, no corner of the country has remained untouched, including the president’s own centre of power: the Oval Office.Leaning into his former career as a real estate developer and hotelier, the president has, in his own words, applied some “Trump touches” to the room’s decor. The results have split opinions, with some calling the revamped office a symbol of America’s new golden age, while others have compared it to a professional wrestler’s dressing room.On a tour of the Oval Office in March, Trump was asked about some of the new gold details by a Fox News host. Describing the room as needing “a little life”, he went on to explain how difficult it is to get gold paint to look like gold.That apparent impediment did not hold the president back from continuing his refurbishments. Over the following months, the “goldening” ratcheted up, with gold trimming across the ceiling, door frames and fireplace. Even the sculpted cherubim inside door frames were painted gold.View image in fullscreenOver the months of his administration, the number of of gold trophies and vases littered across the mantlepiece have multiplied and there are now even gold coasters with Trump’s name on them.A White House spokesperson told Fox News that the gold – “of the highest quality” – was all paid for by Trump personally.The president has also multiplied the number of paintings on display, with almost 20 images of presidential predecessors adorning the walls. His predecessor, Joe Biden, had just six paintings on the walls. Barack Obama had pictures of just two former presidents.View image in fullscreenView image in fullscreenThe office is rounded out with pictures of the Trump family, a copy of the declaration of independence and gifts from visitors and well-wishers – including the Fifa Club World Cup trophy, which was given to Trump by the organisation’s president.The White House was approached for comment, but aides have previously told US media that every addition has come at the president’s direction. To help in this venture, Trump has reportedly called in the help of his personal “gold guy”.John Icart, a 70-year-old cabinet maker from Florida, was reportedly flown to Washington on Air Force One to provide the White House with the flourishes he brought to Trump’s Palm Beach mansion, Mar-a-Lago. The gilded carvings Icart added to the room prompted White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt to describe it as a “golden office for the golden age”.Others have been more critical. It was musician Jack White who compared the room to a wrestler’s dressing room, calling it “vulgar” and “gaudy”.View image in fullscreenView image in fullscreenReporter Jon Keegan pointed out that decorative medallions that festoon the walls of the room also bore more than a passing resemblance to “Foam Veneer Accessories” available from Chinese e-commerce site Ali Baba for just $1 a piece.The gold artefacts that have multiplied across the mantle piece are known to have a more auspicious pedigree. Coming from the White House’s own collection, they include a 19th-century French compotier, gilded urns given to president James Monroe and silver dating to the Eisenhower administration.Trump’s style is said to have been inspired by the Versailles hall of mirrors, and he has in the past bragged that the ballroom of his Florida home was itself modelled on the French palace.But in making these changes to the Oval Office, Trump has placed himself in a long tradition that sees every resident of the White House adjust the decor to their liking, including new furniture, wallpaper and rugs. But perhaps no president has gone further to transport the aesthetics of their pre-presidential home to Washington.View image in fullscreenIn the final year of his presidency, Obama was asked what art or object in the Oval Office was most significant to him. He pointed to the carpet beneath his feet. Handmade for him in a Michigan studio, the almost 10-metre-wide rug featured quotes around the perimeter from US leaders including Abraham Lincoln, John F Kennedy and Theodore Roosevelt.It was a line from Martin Luther King that Obama was said to be most fond of: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.”A few months later, as Trump began moving into the White House and America’s winding story took another unexpected turn, Obama’s prized carpet was jettisoned, replaced by a floor covering with a golden tinge. More

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      America survived a coup attempt. Can it endure dictatorial creep? | Lawrence Douglas

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      January 6 demonstrated that longstanding democracies can readily resist a disorganized effort at a coup. They are less equipped to withstand the normalization of exceptional measures: the use of federal agents to quell domestic protest, the staging of police raids on the homes of leaders’ political opponents, the pretextual invocations of emergency powers. Each of these steps may seem temporary and targeted; they may even enjoy a thin patina of legality. But over time, a democratic order turns into what Ernst Fraenkel, a German-Jewish lawyer whose book The Dual State stands as one of the first and most perceptive examinations of Hitler’s regime, called a “prerogative state” – a government in which the executive “is released from all legal restraints and depends solely on the discretion of the persons wielding political power”.So let us be clear: Trump’s commandeering of control of the Washington DC police department was simply an opening salvo. While Americans were greeted with images of soldiers in combat gear, toting rifles and establishing roadblocks and checkpoints near the National Mall, Trump was already tasking his defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, with creating “specialized units” of the national guard to be “specifically trained and equipped to deal with public order issues”.What are the politics behind this militarization of domestic policing? Trump says he alone has the will and resources to pacify the “killing field” of Chicago, but clearly his “crime fighting” justification is no more than a ruse. Statistics – that is, reality – tell us that the crime rate in Washington DC was at a 30-year low when Trump sent in the troops. Which is not to deny the rhetorical power of ruses. Installing soldiers in Democratic strongholds allows Trump to present himself as the protector of law and order, especially to Maga supporters who have been trained by rightwing news outlets to view the nation’s largest and most multiethnic metropolitan areas as dens of iniquity and vice. Never mind that this is the president who pardoned members of the lawless mob that stormed the Capitol, fired career justice department prosecutors who worked to hold insurrectionists to account, and has installed in the department the likes of Jared Lane Wise, an insurgent who was charged with urging his fellow rioters to kill members of the police.Militarizing the police also serves Trump’s politics of intimidation. Here we can connect the deployment of troops on the National Mall to the FBI’s raid on John Bolton’s residences. Both are disturbing displays of the kind of force more familiar to a police state than to a constitutional democracy. The fact that both acts were formally legal – two federal magistrates signed off on the Bolton warrants, while several statutes specific to the District of Columbia authorized the president’s use of the national guard – makes them textbook examples of the kind of dictatorial creep that Fraenkel diagnosed.Deploying troops to police Chicago would, of course, represent a far more alarming and legally dubious exercise of executive power. The Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, a post-Reconstruction law, essentially bars presidents from using troops as domestic police. But we would be naive to conclude that federal law provides an adequate safeguard against the consolidation of the prerogative state. The Insurrection Act carves out disturbing exceptions to the Posse Comitatus Act, allowing the president, in cases of “rebellion”, to deploy the military to enforce federal law. Would a supreme court that has held that a president enjoys broad immunity from future prosecution for all “official acts”, no matter how nefarious, question a president’s determination of what constitutes a “rebellion”?While the appearance of troops on the streets of Chicago or New York may frighten marginalized communities from exercising their basic rights of free movement, it may also trigger an equally dangerous and predictable response. The specter of city streets patrolled by soldiers trained to fight enemy combatants, not US citizens, may well serve not to quell violence but to invite it. The prospect of protests turning ugly and violent is all too real. The deployment of troops, under the pretext of responding to an emergency, then works to create the very emergency that justifies an ever-greater deployment. The danger is this is precisely what the president wants.Why? Trump has already aggressively inserted himself in the battle over the 2026 midterms, pushing Texas to further gerrymander its already gerrymandered districts; jesting that war may supply a justification for delaying elections; and pledging to issue an executive order ending mail-in ballots – while clearly lacking the authority to do so. What if he were to deploy troops to polling places on election day?In principle, a strong edifice of law explicitly bars such a deployment on election day, but imagine if the president, in the wake of a series of violent protests, invokes the Insurrection Act to “safeguard” polling stations from domestic unrest. Now we have armed soldiers at polling stations, handling ballots and “monitoring” the chain of custody – all done in the name of protecting democracy. Legally, such a deployment would stretch the Insurrection Act beyond recognition, but courts deliberate slowly; elections are decided in days.As Fraenkel noted, authoritarianism does not operate outside law; it manipulates law until legality and illegality are indistinguishable.

      Lawrence Douglas is a professor of law at Amherst College in Massachusetts More

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      Grand jury declines to indict alleged Washington DC sandwich thrower

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      Grand jurors have rebuffed federal prosecutors by refusing to approve a criminal indictment against a man who allegedly threw a sandwich at a law enforcement agent in protest against Donald Trump’s deployment of armed troops on the streets of Washington DC.It is the second time in recent days that a grand jury had declined to vote to indict a person accused of assaulting a federal officer and signaled strong public objection to Trump’s decision to send national guard troops and federal agents onto the streets of the US capital, purportedly to crack down on violent crime.The case of Sean Charles Dunn, who was accused of hurling the sub-style sandwich, became a cause celebre after video of the episode went viral on social media.Dunn, 37, a former justice department paralegal, was initially charged on 13 August after being accused of throwing a sandwich at a Customs and Border Protection officer who was patrolling an area of Washington’s north-west district known for its bars and restaurants with other agents.Footage shows a man, presumed to be Dunn, confronting an officer as he stood on the kerbside. He then threw a soft object at point-blank range, hitting the agent in the chest, before running off with the officer and several of his colleagues in pursuit.The complaint against Dunn states that he stood close to the officer and called him and his colleagues “fascists” and shouted: “I don’t want you in my city.”After the incident, the Trump administration posted footage of a large group of heavily armed officers going to Dunn’s apartment, heightening the attention the case attracted. Posters depicting Dunn lofting a sandwich have since appeared around the nation’s capital.It is rare for federal prosecutors to fail to secure charges at a grand jury hearing, given that they control the information that jurors hear and defendants’ lawyers are prohibited from being in the courtroom.It is unclear if prosecutors will continue to seek to press charges against Dunn, which they could do by withdrawing the felony charge and refiling it as a misdemeanor, which does not need an indictment.But even that would amount to a symbolic climbdown for the Trump administration, which has demanded that offenses by prosecuted under the most serious federal charges, which carry heavier sentences.Dunn is due to appear before a magistrate judge on 4 September in a hearing intended to determine whether a crime was committed.The spurning of the indictment against him mirrors the case of Sidney Lori Reid, against whom federal prosecutors failed three times in 30 days to secure an indictment of a felony assault against an FBI officer, after she was arrested during an immigration protest last month.Prosecutors on Monday reduced the charges to a low-level misdemeanor, suggesting that they had inflated the accusations against her.On the same day, a judge dismissed all charges against a man who was arrested last week at a Trader Joe’s store after police alleged he had two handguns in his bag.Judge Zia M Faruqui said prosecutors had violated Torez Riley’s constitutional rights in charging him, declaring: “Lawlessness cannot come from the government.”A flurry of defendants have been charged with federal crimes over relatively minor infractions that would normally be handled by local courts, if they resulted in criminal charges at all, since Trump’s highly controversial troop deployment. Critics have condemned the deployment as an attempted military takeover of a city run by the president’s Democratic opponents and motivated by a desire to intimidate rather than to stamp out crime. More

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      Why Trump’s attack on the Smithsonian matters | Kimberlé Crenshaw and Jason Stanley

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      In a letter sent to Smithsonian secretary, Lonnie G Bunch III, on 12 August, the Trump administration announced its plan to replace all Smithsonian exhibits deemed as “divisive” or “ideological” with descriptions deemed as “historical” and “constructive”. On 21 August, just nine days later, the White House published a list of said offending fixtures – the majority of which include exhibits, programming and artwork that highlight the Black, Latino and LGBTQ+ perspectives on the American project. Included in his bill of particulars was an exhibit that rightly depicts Benjamin Franklin as an enslaver, an art installation that acknowledges race as a social construct and a display that highlights racist voter suppression measures, among others.The assault on the Smithsonian comes wrapped, as it were, as part of a broader attack on democracy, scenes of which we see playing out every day. The federal occupation of Washington DC, the crackdown on free speech on campus, the targeting of Trump’s political opponents, the gerrymandering of democracy – these are interwoven elements of the same structural assault. So with many fires burning across the nation, concerned citizens who are answering the call to fight the destruction of democracy may regard his attack on history and memory as a mere skirmish, a distraction from the herculean struggle against fascism unfolding in the US. But this is a mistake. Trump’s attack on American museums, education and memory, along with his weaponization of racialized resentment to package his authoritarian sympathies as mere patriotism, is a critical dimension of his fascist aims. The fight for democracy cannot avoid it, nor its racial conditions of possibility.Fascism always has a central cultural component, because it relies on the construction of a mythic past. The mythic past is central to fascism because it enables and empowers a sense of grievance by a dominant racial or ethnic group whose consent is crucial to the sustainability of the project. In Maga world, the mythic past was pure, innocent and unsullied by women or Black leaders. In this kind of politics, the nation was once great, a byproduct of the great achievements of the men in the dominant racial group. In short, the assault on the Smithsonian and, more broadly, against truthful history and critical reflection is part of the broader fascist attack on democracy.From this vantage point, racial equality is a threat to the story of the nation’s greatness because only the men of the dominant group can be great. To represent the nation’s founding figures as flawed, as any accurate history would do, is perceived, in this politics, as a kind of treason.The success of the fascist dismantling of democracy is predicated on the widespread systematic failure to see the larger picture. The anti-woke assault that is a key pillar of Trumpism is part of that failure, partly due to the racial blinders and enduring ambivalence of too many in positions of leadership in the media and elsewhere. Those who sign on to the attack on “wokeness” but regard themselves as opponents of the other elements of the fascist assault are under the mistaken assumption that these projects can be disaggregated. In fact, the dismantling of democracy and of racial justice are symbiotically entangled. To support one is to give cover for the others.It is clear that the Trump administration understands this relationship and fully weaponizes racist appeals as a foundational piece of its fascist agenda. And if this was once the quiet part, it is now pronounced out loud in official government documents. In an executive order issued on 27 March 2025 titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History”, Trump reveals that his mandate to ban “improper ideologies” targets core commitments repudiating a scientific racism that historically naturalized racial hierarchy thereby neutralizing resistance. According to Trump, the problem with the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s exhibit The Shape of Power: Stories of Race and American Sculpture was that it promoted the idea that “race is a human invention”.The understanding that race is a social construct as opposed to a biological fact is perhaps the most fundamental advance in repudiating enslavement, genocide and segregation. Rejecting the idea that racial inequality is natural or pre-ordained – a claim that grounded enslavement and dispossession in America – forms the cornerstone of the modern commitment to a fully inclusive democracy. Trump’s declaration that this cornerstone is “improper” is an effort to turn the clock back, upending the entire American postwar project. It is no coincidence that this “proper” ideology Trump exposes is constitutive of a more well-known strand of fascism – nazism. How else can we understand why Maya Angelou was purged from the Naval Academy library while Adolf Hitler remains?The fight against fascism in the US must be as robust in its embrace of racial equality as Trump’s embrace of outdated ideas about race and racism. The defense of memory, of truthful history, of telling the whole American story rather than ascribing agency in history to the deeds of “great men” is vital to the American democratic project. A pro-democratic education fosters the agency of its citizens by teaching about social movements that overturned entrenched hierarchies which blocked democratic equality and imposed racial tyranny. The story of how ordinary Americans lived and struggled and remade America is essential knowledge in developing and sustaining a multiracial democracy. The Smithsonian has been a vital institution in making this knowledge accessible to the masses. The National Museum of the American Latino and the National Museum of the American Indian, for example, provide artifacts and perspectives about the nation’s westward expansion that challenge the myth of unoccupied territory and manifest destiny. The National Museum of African American History and Culture brings forward the global scale of enslavement as well as its infusion across national institutions, culture and politics.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionMuseums allow us to reckon with the brutality of the American legacy as well as expose our citizens to the people, institutions and strategies that charted a different course towards becoming a “more perfect” union. Fascist erasures like Trump’s hide behind the claim that truthful encounters with the past inflame and divide. This instinct is the opposite of the truth. A functioning democracy does not restrict perspectives to those of the dominant group, much less make it illegal to teach alternative ones.A people who cannot remember their past are a people who cannot resist a fascist future. Knowing our history can give us the weapons and wherewithal to battle Trump’s efforts to catapult us back to a time when the majority of Americans lacked both the civic and economic power that we have now. The fight for our museums and for our memory is a critical bulwark against the unraveling of American democracy. It is vital that we fight to protect our repositories before it’s too late.

      Kimberlé Crenshaw is an American civil rights advocate and a scholar of critical race theory. She is a professor at the UCLA School of Law and Columbia Law School, where she specializes in race and gender issues

      Jason Stanley is the Bissell-Heyd Chair in American Studies in the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy at the University of Toronto and the author of Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future More

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      Trump signs executive order to eliminate cashless bail in Washington

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      Donald Trump on Monday signed two executive orders aimed at eliminating cashless bail for people accused of crimes in Washington DC and other jurisdictions, an escalation in his efforts to take control of law enforcement in the capital city and beyond.The executive orders direct Washington and other localities to end their cashless bail programs, which allow people charged with crimes to leave jail while they await trial without paying what can be large sums of money. The order says that the federal government will reconsider funding decisions, services or approvals if Washington does not comply.One order also instructs the attorney general, Pam Bondi, to identify jurisdictions across the US that have cashless bail policies and revokes federal funds and grants that go to those jurisdictions, according to the White House.“They kill people and they get out,” Trump said about cashless bail in the Oval Office when he announced the order. “We’re ending it, but we’re starting by ending it in DC, and that we have the right to do through federalization,” he added.Data shows that crime does not increase by any significant margin in places that have implemented cashless bail programs, as Washington did in 1992, and people released from prison without posting bond are extremely unlikely to commit violent crime. Nevertheless, Trump has taken aim at the policy and claimed it has contributed to the city’s violent crime rate, which last year hit a 30 year low.Washington was one of the first jurisdictions to enact cashless bail, starting a trend of cities and states moving to a system that doesn’t lock people up for their inability to pay. In 2023, Illinois became the first state to enact cashless bail.“You don’t even have to go to court sometimes,” Trump claimed falsely about Illinois in the White House Monday.Trump has also falsely said that under cashless bail policies, “somebody murders somebody and they’re out on no cash bail before the day is out.” In Washington and other places with cashless bail, a judge can make a determination to detail someone pre-trial if they feel that the accused is a danger to the community or a flight risk, as is often the case with those accused of murder.Jeremy Cherson, the director of communications for the Bail Project said Trump’s executive order would deepen inequities and waste taxpayer dollars. The Bail Project is a national organization that pushes for bail-related policy change and provides free bail assistance to low income people.“The data is clear that bail reform has not led to increased crime,” he said. “While the president is right that the current system is broken, he is wrong about the solution.”“What we’re pursuing is a system where safety, not wealth, determines release pretrial, and if you look at a lot of the jurisdictions across the country that have minimized or eliminated the use of cash bail, that’s what their systems do.” More

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      When immigration shows up at daycare: crackdown in DC terrifies families and workers

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      Early on Tuesday morning, as parents went to drop off their young children at a bilingual childcare center in north-west Washington DC, they received a message from the administrator saying that unmarked cars were parked directly outside.Shortly after 8am, federal agents in tactical vests arrested two people unaffiliated with the center, the administrator said.“While these activities are not connected to our program, we are closely monitoring the situation and taking extra precautions to ensure everyone feels safe entering and leaving the building,” read the message to parents, reviewed by the Guardian.Foram Mehta, whose son attends the daycare, said she had feared immigration raids there for months, but her fears escalated when Donald Trump sent national guard troops and federal agents to Washington two weeks ago. She said she was concerned about her own safety as a brown person, even though she’s an immigrant in the country lawfully, and also worries for her undocumented neighbors.She, and other Washington residents, including undocumented parents and caregivers, said they were avoiding parts of the city where federal agents have been reported, and she said her parents who are visiting were “strictly forbidden to go anywhere alone – even down the street to the grocery store”.In a city already upended by the second Trump administration’s mass firings of government workers, Trump’s decision to take over the city’s police force, send thousands of federal agents to Washington, and ramp up immigration enforcement has left many residents on edge and grappling with how to go about their lives in a city that no longer feels safe. The return to school for most public schools on Monday has cast that in sharp relief.The White House said on Friday that 719 people had been arrested since the start of the federal crackdown, with many hundreds of them immigrants in the country without legal documents. On the ground, that has looked like federal agents patrolling the streets for undocumented immigrants, setting up checkpoints at busy intersections, stopping delivery drivers and pedestrians, and detaining immigrants at their places of work.The crackdown has especially been affecting parents and caregivers as the new school year begins. Parents told the Guardian they were scared to send their children to school. Nannies are calling out or asking to be escorted to and from work. Daycares are having to implement new safety precautions.Once off limits for immigration enforcement and arrests, schools and daycares feel as if they are no longer safe for employees and for children, many Washingtonians said.Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (Ice) did not respond to the Guardian’s request for comment. Last week, Ice’s acting director, Todd Lyons, told NBC that Washington parents should not expect to see Ice officers at schools on the first day Monday, but that they may come to school campuses in the future.“It’s gotten to the point where people are scared to be out and about,” said Amie Santos, a Washington resident who lives near the daycare. “Nothing about this is making DC safer.”For many Washingtonians, the potential targeting of people and institutions that care for small children has been especially alarming. Multiple people told the Guardian they were struggling with childcare, as so many who work as nannies or in childcare centers are immigrants.Claire, a mom who asked not to use her real name due to fears about her undocumented nanny, said her caretaker called out of work last week with short notice, saying she was concerned about reports of increased police and arrests.View image in fullscreen“She said there’s a very heavy police presence and she’s hearing all of these stories from other nannies and from friends and acquaintances that there are all of these checkpoints,” Claire said. “She said she and her husband are both staying home and not coming into work, either of them.”Claire gave her the week off and is working to figure out options to make her more comfortable to return to work this week, including offering to pick her up from her home.The nanny, who has been in the country for almost three decades, has a teenage child, and “she is so concerned about deportation – that something could happen to her and her husband – that she has asked if we would take care of her child if that were to happen”, Claire said.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionOther parents said they were driving their children to the neighboring state of Maryland to meet their nannies who live there, or that their nannies have been staying inside rather than venturing outside, or driving throughout the city rather than walking.In a neighborhood parents group, a mom on Tuesday shared a document template for parents to fill out and give to their nannies as they escort their children around the city.“In the event that [NANNY’S NAME] is detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) or any other law enforcement authority, this letter affirms that [CHILD’S NAME] is my child and should be immediately returned to me, [HER/HIS MOTHER/FATHER/PARENT] and legal guardian,” the template reads. “Under no circumstance should [CHILD’S NAME] be taken into government custody or placed in foster care.”With the new school year beginning in the middle of Trump’s federal takeover, parents are also concerned about what might be happening at schools.Sebastien Durand, the director of facilities at a public charter school in north-west DC whose role involves student safety, said the school had engaged with families this week before the school year begins.“It was made clear to us that they are all extremely scared,” he said. “Quite a bit of them were actually asking if we can go back to a pandemic era-type of school where they didn’t have to come to school and we had to provide something remote.”He said he explained to them that legally they can’t do that, but the school decided to use its own funds to run buses from the closest Metro station to the campus for at least the next two weeks. The school is concerned about attendance, he said, especially with rates still lower than desired since the pandemic.For children that have already started the school year, the first week has been fraught. Santos’s five-year-old son started kindergarten on Monday at school in north-west DC. On the second day of school, there were unmarked police cars with agents who appeared to be in tactical gear parked in front of the school, she said. That evening, parents were told the school was enhancing security measures and all students, parents and caretakers would be required to wear colored lanyards with photo identification to enter school grounds. The school will also be running a bus for students and caretakers from the Metro to the parking lot.“As you can imagine, it’s been hard,” Santos said. “We had to talk to our son about what was going on, why there was increased security, the importance of kindness, that not everybody feels safe and welcome.“With kids going back to school, there are intimidation factors at play,” she added, “and it’s creating an aggressive environment that I don’t think is conducive to learning or to children.” More

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      Trump is wrong about crime – but right about the fear of it | Austin Sarat

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      In most of America’s largest cities, crime, especially violent crime, is down. But the fear of crime is increasing.Donald Trump has made a career out of ignoring the reality of crime rates and of stoking that fear. Well before he entered politics and throughout his political career, he has talked about city life as life in a proverbial jungle.In 2022, he talked frequently about the “ blood-soaked streets of our once-great cities” and said: “Cities are rotting, and they are indeed cesspools of blood.” And he never strays far from that playbook.On 11 August, the president returned to his demagogic characterizations of America’s urban areas when he deployed national guard and federal law enforcement agents to the streets of Washington DC. He said the city was awash in “crime, bloodshed, bedlam, and squalor”.He claimed that “crime is out of control in the District of Columbia”. In fact, violent crime in the District of Columbia is the lowest it has been in more than three decades.But Trump didn’t just ignore the data. He leaned into a different problem in Washington: fear of crime.Referring to Washingtonians who like to jog, the president said: “People tell me they can’t run any more. They’re just afraid.”And he was not content to target just the nation’s capital. “You look at Chicago,” he said, “how bad it is. You look at Los Angeles, how bad it is. We have other cities in a 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.”Never mind that, like Washington, as CNN reports, Chicago, Baltimore and other cities also have had “substantial declines in 2024, 2025 or both”.So far, Democratic political leaders have repeated those statistics as if that in itself will carry the day. In so doing, they are repeating a mistake made by Joe Biden when he asked people to focus on economic statistics that showed declines in the rate of inflation rather than their lived reality.Unfortunately, the statistics matter much less than the fear of crime. That fear is a real problem, and Democrats need to acknowledge and respond to it.Let’s start with the District of Columbia. A Washington Post-Schar School poll conducted in mid-August found that 31% of Washingtonians said crime was an “‘extremely serious’ or a ‘very serious’” problem in the District. Last year, the same poll found that number to be 65%. Some of this decline can be attributed to the fact that residents of the city overwhelmingly oppose what the president has done and don’t want to be seen as lending it legitimacy.But however you measure it, fear of crime is not just a District of Columbia problem.In New York City, 75% of residents say that crime is a serious problem. As an essay posted on Vital City puts it: “Whatever crime statistics show, most of us are worried that it could happen to us. That feeling is nebulous and hard to overcome … We the people say crime is a serious problem, and most of us will continue, for now, to look over our shoulders and worry when someone we love leaves home.”National surveys suggest that “Americans’ fear of crime is at a 30-year high”. Other survey evidence highlights the fact that “73% say crime has ‘some’ or ‘major’ impact on how they live their lives”. Among Black and Hispanic Americans, that number is even higher.Not surprisingly, many Americans now favor long prison sentences for convicted criminals.Explanations vary for the paradox that as crime rates fall, fear of crime persists.Crime stories often dominate local news coverage, and the more gruesome the crime, the greater the coverage. That is why fear of crime is driven not by a dispassionate examination of data but by the power of individual stories of victimization.That pattern is intensified by social media. Studies have shown that social media usage stokes crime fear.Demographics also matter. Crime fears are greater among older people, and, as the population ages, those fears increase.Fear of crime is also associated with a generalized sense of disorderliness in our communities and the world. And, as the economist and criminal justice scholar John Roman argues, because “our collective tolerance for disorder is declining”, our fear of crime is increasing.Of course, it doesn’t help that Trump uses the bully pulpit and his public visibility to emphasize and exaggerate the crime problem as part of his authoritarian project. But blaming Trump for the fear of crime problem is not any more of a winning political strategy than reciting the latest data on falling crime rates.Democrats can’t and shouldn’t run away from either the crime problem or the fear of crime problem. They will have no credibility in offering responses to the former until they establish credibility on the latter.They would be well-advised to tackle the fear problem openly and to embrace responses, like investing in programs that repair public spaces and revitalize neighborhoods, while also being clear that people who fear crime have reason to want to see more police on the street.Trump knows the potency of the fear of the crime problem. That’s why he boasted that after his deployment of national guard in Washington, DC, “People are feeling safe already … They’re not afraid any more.”But we don’t need the national guard to do what local police can do when they are well-trained, responsive to the needs of all communities and well-resourced. The best long-term response to the president’s agenda for American cities is to make sure that the people who live there have more confidence in their safety and less fear of crime.

      Austin Sarat, William Nelson Cromwell professor of jurisprudence and political science at Amherst College, is the author or editor of more than 100 books, including Gruesome Spectacles: Botched Executions and America’s Death Penalty More

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      Donald Trump accused of ‘turning military on American citizens’ over plans to send National Guard to Chicago – US politics live

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      Hello and welcome to the US politics live blog. My name is Tom Ambrose and I’ll be bringing you the latest news lines over the next few hours.We start with news that Donald Trump has been accused of “turning the military on American citizens” after a Pentagon official confirmed that planning is under way to send National Guard troops to Chicago.Illinois attorney-general Kwame Raoul also told CBS News that the president’s actions are both “un-American” and “unwise strategically”.Accusing the president of “turning our military on American citizens in his ongoing attempts to move our nation toward authoritarianism,” he added:
      His actions are not just un-American. They are unwise strategically. Our cities are not made safer by deploying the nation’s service members for civilian law enforcement duties when they do not have the appropriate training.
      To be clear: We have made no such request for the type of federal intervention we have seen in Los Angeles or Washington DC. There is no emergency in the state of Illinois.
      It comes as lieutenant-governor Juliana Stratton accused Trump of pursuing “political theatrics, not safety,” since crime in Chicago is already declining and there was no local request for troops.In a statement to ABC7 Chicago, she said:
      Tonight’s reporting from the Washington Post that President Trump is preparing to deploy federal troops in Chicago proves what we all know: he is willing to go to any lengths possible to create chaos if it means more political power-no matter who gets hurt.
      As lieutenant-governor and throughout my career, I’ve fervently fought for the reformation of our criminal legal system and under the Pritzker-Stratton administration, we’ve made tremendous progress.
      Crime in Chicago is declining and there’s absolutely no rationale for this decision, other than to distract from the pain Trump is inflicting on working families with his dangerous agenda. Illinois, governor Pritzker and I are here to stand for your rights, your freedoms, and will protect you against whatever storms of hate and fear come our way.
      Earlier on Sunday, Hakeem Jeffries, House minority leader and New York Democratic congressman, said Donald Trump has “manufactured a crisis” to justify sending federalized national guard troops into Chicago next, over the heads of local leaders.Read our full report here:In other developments:

      France summoned the American ambassador Charles Kushner after he wrote a letter to president Emmanuel Macron alleging France had failed to do enough to stem antisemitic violence, a French foreign ministry spokesperson said on Sunday.

      Sergei Lavrov, Moscow’s most senior diplomat, praised efforts by Donald Trump to end the war, in an interview on NBC on Sunday, while US vice-president JD Vance said Washington would “keep on trying” to broker talks in the absence of a deal.

      In the opening weeks of Donald Trump’s second term, Gavin Newsom wagered that peacemaking was best: a tarmac greeting for Air Force One, an Oval Office visit and a podcast slot for Maga’s biggest names. But then Trump came for California, and its governor dropped the niceties. Read the full report here.

      The president and his allies have been accused of executing a “pattern of lawfare” akin to those exerted by authoritarian regimes in Hungary and Russia after adopting a new strategy to target political opponents: allegations of mortgage fraud. Read the full report here.

      The justice department is alleging in a new court filing that three Smartmatic executives who were indicted last year on bribery and money-laundering charges transferred money from a 2018 voting machine contract with Los Angeles county into slush funds that were originally set up to pay bribes to overseas election officials. More

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      Judge blocks White House from defunding 34 municipalities over ‘sanctuary’ policies

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      A federal judge has blocked the Trump administration from cutting off federal funding to 34 “sanctuary cities” and counties that limit cooperation with federal immigration law enforcement, significantly expanding a previous order.The order, issued on Friday by the San Francisco-based US district judge William Orrick, adds Los Angeles and Chicago, as well as Boston, Baltimore, Denver and Albuquerque, to cities that the administration is barred from denying funding.Orrick, an Obama appointee, previously ruled it was unconstitutional for the Trump administration to freeze funding to local governments with “sanctuary” policies, limiting their cooperation with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice).The April ruling came after cities including San Francisco, Sacramento, Minneapolis and Seattle sued the administration over what they claimed were illegal executive orders signed by Donald Trump in January and February that threatened to cut off funding if Democrat-controlled cities do not cooperate.Cities and counties suing the administration contend that the executive orders amount to an abuse of power that violate the constitution. The administration argues that the federal government should not be forced to subsidize policies that thwart its control of immigration.The administration has since ordered the national guard into Los Angeles and Washington DC, both cities with sanctuary designations, under a law-and-order mandate. On Friday, Trump said Chicago is likely the next target for efforts to crack down on crime, homelessness and illegal immigration.“I think Chicago will be our next,” Trump told reporters at the White House, later adding: “And then we’ll help with New York.”The number of people in immigration detention has soared by more than 50% since Trump’s inauguration, according to an Axios review published Saturday, reaching a record 60,000 immigrants in long-term detention or around 21,000 more than at the end of the Biden administration.Separately, the US attorney general, Pam Bondi, last week issued fresh threats to 30 Democrat-led cities and states, including to the governors of California, Illinois and Minnesota, and the mayors of New York, Denver and Boston, to drop sanctuary policies.Bondi said in the letter that their jurisdictions had been identified as those that engage “in sanctuary policies and practices that thwart federal immigration enforcement to the detriment of the interests of the United States”.“This ends now,” Bondi wrote.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionDemocrat leaders uniformly rejected the Trump administration’s assertion. Minnesota’s governor, Tim Walz, said in response that Bondi’s order was “some kind of misguided political agenda” that “is fundamentally inconsistent with our founding principles as a nation”.The accelerating confrontation between the administration and Democratic-led jurisdictions comes as the Pentagon began ordering 2,000 national guard troops in Washington to carry firearms.US officials told NBC News that the US defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, had authorized national guard members who are supporting local law enforcement will probably carry weapons but troops assigned to city beautification roles would not.The official said troops supporting the mission “to lower the crime rate in our nation’s capital will soon be on mission with their service-issued weapons, consistent with their mission and training”, according to the outlet. More