I Deppitize You! - Trump Federalizes The DC Police And Chocolate City Turns White

'They ain't comin' up in here', said Pharoah Jones, referring to Donald Trump's storm troopers. 'Jus' let 'em try' was the word on the street - Martin Luther King Avenue to be more precise, the main thoroughfare in Anacostia, Washington DC's most blighted slum, a police hands off area under the mayoralty of Muriel Bowser. 

Of course Pharoah had nothing to worry about.  Trump was not interested in addressing Anacostia's endemic crime, just assuring that it stayed there. 

'Black people have suffered enough', the Mayor said, holding up a large portrait of George Floyd 'murdered' at the hands of the Gestapo police of Minneapolis.  'We shall never forget', the Mayor shouted to a gathering of her supporters in Brentwood, another of the Capitol's inner cities. 'Never again', she shouted, shall storm troopers invade our communities, take our streets from us, destroy polity and good will.  I with all the authority vested in me defund the police!' to which the crowd roared their approval. 

'And', she went on when the cheering died down, 'I will decriminalize the minor offenses for which our black men have been routinely rounded up and thrown into jail.  What is an Armani dress when a family is starving? How can a Rolex watch matter to a destitute family looking to survive?' 

Again the crowd whooped and hollered their support.  Finally their demands had been met. The jails and prisons already chock-a-block with black men would be filled no longer with the innocent only looking to do right by their families.

And then Donald Trump federalized the police and sent in the National Guard.  Using all the power vested in him as the Chief Executive whose control over the District of Columbia, a federal enclave, was enshrined in the Constitution. 

'Pimps and crack ho's will go running for the exits', the President said in his news conference announcing the move. 'Marauding gangs who have with impunity walked into stores and emptied their shelves will be found, arrested, and serve time.  Things are about to change in DC'. 

'You betcha', said Marfa Potter a native Minnesotan who was sick and tired of the rancid protests of Black Lives Matter, the fol-de-rol, the whole DEI jamboree championing George Floyd, a career criminal, a thug, turning him into a national hero; and when she heard that Donald Trump was taking over Washington, 'the nation's city' and had vowed to return it to the peaceful, clean, untroubled place ordinary Americans expected of their capital, she cheered.  'Finally', she said. 

Yet not everyone in Washington was pleased.  Yes, said Lily Bayard, a longtime white DC resident, confirmed progressive who, although never having set foot outside her own upper middle class neighborhood of Northwest, it will be good to shop in a CVS without getting robbed; and yes it will be nice to drive across town without getting carjacked, but all in all this is simply another act of white supremacy, rounding up the black man and in a classic racist display, incarcerating him without parole.  

'Typical', said Marfa Potter when she overheard the Bayard woman get on her soapbox over coffee at Starbucks.  'Tripe, pure nonsense', she mumbled as she stared at the coffee klatch at the next table. 

Lily was on a roll, and in her own quiet but determined way talked about the pride, dignity, and honor of the black man, his rise from slavery, his forest roots and primal soul; and how the fascist in the White House was once again ready to throw him into chains, send him back to the cotton fields and ride herd on him like a plantation overseer. 

'Bullshit', Marfa said, this time more loudly so that the ladies' cabal could hear her. Lily turned in her direction, gave her an ironic, dismissive smile, and turned back to her friends. 'As I was saying', she continued and for another fifteen minutes laid bare the racist intentions of the President. 'DOGE was just the beginning', she said.  'Since we sat back and let it happen, Trump feels he is invulnerable.  He has always had an animus - no, a hatred - for the black man and he is bound and determined to have done with him'. 

 

The last time anything like this federal take over happened was a few decades ago when the mayor and the city council had run the city's finances into the ground.  There not only was nothing left in the coffers after years of corruption, financial chicanery, and downright thievery, and the city was in debt with the lowest credit rating of any metropolitan area in America.  Anthony Williams was given federal authority to right the ship, weed out the corruption, and restore some measure of financial stability.  He did the job and was rewarded by a resounding win at the next mayoral election. 

But this, shouted Lily, was a heinous abuse of power with only one goal in mind.  The President could care less about crime.  He wanted only to send a message to the American public.  Black is finished.  The erasure of DEI was only the first step. 

Now, Lily had never been east of the park, nor ever had set foot across the Anacostia River - the black parts of town, and never would.  During the early COVID months when vaccines were hard to come by and the only openings were in Anacostia, she preferred to take her chances of getting the virus rather than set foot in a pestilential slum. 

Yet she never wavered in her support of the black man,  A huge Black Lives Matter banner hung from her porch, and rainbow signs festooned her lawns.  'Democracy Matters' was her byword, and she did what she could to rally support for decriminalization of minor offenses, defunding the police, and emptying the prisons.  Like most Washington liberals, she was an ersatz supporter, a virtual sister who howled about injustice but did nothing about it. 

Washington was once called Chocolate City, for among the nation's largest cities it had the highest percentage of black residents, well over fifty percent and in the halcyon years even more.  Gradually as the city emerged from its one-horse town image, young white people began to move in to gentrified neighborhoods and old time black residents left for nearby Maryland cities.  In time it was not only no longer Chocolate City but a metrosexual mecca. 

 

Washington is still an apartheid city, as racially divided as any city of South Africa in the old days.  East of Rock Creek Park is almost all black, and west of it all white.  The north-south busses are all white; the east-west ones all black.  The problem is that black gangs do not respect traditional borders, and while there is plenty of black-on-black crime, black-on-white crime has increased.  

Federal Washington, the Mall, the Capitol, and the tony neighborhoods of Georgetown, Cleveland Park, Spring Valley, and Wesley Heights are the neighborhoods in Trump's sights - and this was what drove Lily Bayard crazy.  A pogrom was in the offing, and Trump's secret police would be stationed there to round up any black man who dared cross the line. 

Now, die-hard liberals like Lily aside, most white Washingtonians were quite happy that Trump was taking over DC. Year after year the city council had authorized millions in walkin' around money for the slums and the situation there had only gotten worse; and this decriminalization, defund the police nonsense was the last straw.  They had had enough, so Bravo, Donald!

The sight of armored army vehicles on the streets of the Capital sent progressives like Lily Bayard around the bend, but most others felt more secure than they ever had. The man means business, they said, and this was only the beginning 

Trump is racking up successes, all of them contentious ones like this one, but he is undaunted and undeterred.  Progressives don't know what hit them.