Trump’s D.C. occupation is an attack on all of us

On September 10, Donald Trump’s takeover of the Metropolitan Police Department in D.C. officially ended. And yet federal forces remain a presence in the city, largely doing the work of policing the streets, especially in working-class neighborhoods with significant Black, Latinx, and immigrant populations; coordinating with I.C.E. agents and protecting them in their raiding of businesses, schools, and setting up traffic traps to catch drivers unawares; policing public spaces by more intensively enforcing already-existing D.C. curfews, which predate Trump’s takeover; and dispersing and harassing houseless folks. These were all projects that the M.P.D. took up before Trump ever took direct control of them, and now there are more cops to provide muscle. In an attempt to legitimize increased federal presence in the city, the National Guard has also been tasked with a number of beautification projects. At the level of city government, all of this has been met with empty posturing, on the one hand, and capitulation, on the other, especially on the part of Mayor Muriel Bowser, a Democrat. D.C. residents, however, have actively resisted, forming networks to film and repel the police and federal forces, working collectively to get children to and from school safely, and engaging in mass protest. A rally and march on September 6 drew thousands.

In the following interview, conducted before Trump’s direct control of the M.P.D. expired, D.C.-based scholar  Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò analyzes Trump’s takeover and discusses the forms of resistance and experimental collectivity that emerged in opposition to it. The conversation below has been edited for length and clarity.

Jacob Sloan: Perhaps it’s best to begin very generally: As a D.C. resident and a radical scholar in the area, what do you think of the situation, both on the ground and in theory? How would you describe what’s been going on in the city since the Trump administration’s deployment of federal law enforcement?

Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò:  What’s going on in the city definitely feels like an occupation. And, in a way, it feels almost like a kind of preemptive counterinsurgency. It’s been really surreal to watch a steady drumbeat of random federal law enforcement just kind of establish themselves as occupiers, watchers, you know.

To what extent there is some actual strategic imperative at bottom that is related directly to policing and to what extent it is propaganda all the way down, I don’t know. Maybe someone knows. But either way, it’s been chilling to see up close.

Living in D.C., you’re never especially surprised to see federal law enforcement in and of itself, right? There’s all the local law enforcement. There’s the Secret Service. There’s all sorts of different operators, but the scale and militarization of this is not really like anything I’ve seen in my time here.

JS: What do you mean by preemptive counterinsurgency? More often than not, the analysis of what’s going on stops at Trumpian madness or at Trump’s assault on Democrats and a Democratic stronghold. But the lens of preemptive counterinsurgency seems to offer a more constructive and analytically fruitful conception of what’s going on in the city.

OT: Yeah, it’s the kind of operation that you read about when militaries are trying to pacify populations. You have a kind of hearts and minds campaign. I’m reminded of the National Guard doing all the landscaping and reaching out to our ANCs [Advisory Neighborhood Commissions] to try to enlist them in what they’re doing. The image management point of view.

And you know, in a lot of ways, it feels like an oddly direct form of imperial boomerang, because if you read accounts of military infrastructure projects in Afghanistan, everything that went on there seems similar to what’s going on here, except, in our situation, there was no war before, right? Nobody was or is taking shots at these soldiers. They started running these operations.

It really does bring up a kind of hanging question: Is there an actual military imperative here, or are these institutions just doing the thing they know how to do in response to a propaganda directive?

JS: It seems like the struggle is opening up, and that the city is more and more up for grabs, if you know what I mean. Perhaps the answer to the question you leave us with is contained in how things play out. You have a place like L.A., for instance, which just erupts and, in essence, shuts down an attempted occupation by organizing and taking to the streets en masse.

While the march on September 6 was massive and heartening, we’ve yet to see that kind of mass eruption and disruption in D.C.

OT: Yeah, there’s been a very different kind of mobilization here. You know, L.A. stood tall. They had all kinds of folks in a really confrontational mode. They were tracking agents to their hotels and, you know, all the stuff that we’re seeing on social media. Chicago, too, had a big march and demonstration when Trump even mentioned their name.

Those are the standards that I feel like the rest of us ought to at least learn some lessons from, if not try to live up to. But, I will say, for D.C.’s part, there has been a heartening level of mobilization that I’ve seen around the mutual aid end of things. A lot of people—a lot of neighbors I have that I didn’t necessarily think of as politically active—are starting to share mutual aid requests, starting to make delivery runs.

A bunch of us are essentially patrolling the schools in shifts to make sure to watch out for the Department of Homeland Security and whoever else. People are organizing escort services for students trying to get to and from school. So, there’s a lot of mobilization happening that looks more like scaled-up mutual aid than direct combat. And maybe that’s just the thing that will work in our circumstances. Maybe that’s what a mass of people have the appetite for. I guess time will tell to what extent that ends up making a dent in things.

JS: Absolutely. As someone with a kid in a D.C. school, I’ve seen this mobilization around scaled-up mutual aid and care work. It’s a kind of very small, certainly insufficient and occasional, but still striking movement into some sort of collective social reproduction. And it really has taken off and has started to pull folks in that I never would have thought of as political in any real way. People who maybe vote and have fairly status quo political opinions are really involved in these efforts, often out of concerns for their own or other people’s children and for those who care for children.

OT: It’s definitely something different in emphasis, but I also imagine stuff like this happened in L.A., too, right?

So, yeah, I guess the question is to what extent you need the confrontational stuff, to what extent you need the kind of scaled-up care work, and how those things can play constructive roles with each other.

I was also heartened by the march because I was glad to see some standing up. Collective actions are starting to gain momentum. There was the march and a run. And I take it from Free D.C.’s way of moving that there will eventually be more marches.

One thing I’m really curious about is how people living here will respond to the mayor [Muriel Bowser] and the city council, who’ve played this very differently: Bowser, the accommodationist, telling Trump he can have cooperation; the City Council trying to make endruns around her and appeal to Congress.

Who will get credit for whatever transpires or who will get blamed for whatever transpires?

We’ll soon get something of an indication, because the mobilization is set to technically expire soon, right? What that will mean, we’re about to find out.

JS: We touched on this a bit in relation to the march, but what kinds of organizational possibilities do you see emerging out of all of this?  I’m curious, too, about the role of already organized—even if inadequately or unevenly—groups who’ve been working in D.C. for a while, both grassroots and community groups and also organizations like labor unions.

Could you possibly speak to the role of these organizations, the role you’ve seen or been aware of them playing in this moment? What role should they be playing? Of course, as you say, much of what’s going on right now is open-ended and still to be decided, so this question of organization is crucial.

OT: It’s tough. One of the biggest differences between ourselves and other cities is the federal government, which is such a large chunk of the labor market here. A massive chunk of people have either been fired or made extremely precarious by the Trump administration. Union workers are being laid off. People are having their working conditions, even their jobs, essentially yanked out from under them. People who had been working remotely have had that rescinded. Because of all of this, the power of labor in D.C. feels very different. It feels like it’s a somewhat different relationship to the broader goings on than in other cities like L.A. and Chicago, and maybe that’s part of why people are taking the present set of strategies.

That said, teachers’ unions have been very involved with setting up community defense of the schools. The involvement of teachers’ unions is one of the main reasons why that has been so effective. Even on the higher ed side of things in the city, we’re starting to see some movement and organizing, including the movement of these higher ed organizing efforts into citywide organizing by asking what higher ed can contribute.

But I’m not aware of, for instance, transit workers organizing around this, which I think would be strategically helpful, if people were up for that. And I think that might be the kind of escalation it’s going to take to move things along from here, if, of course, appetite can be drummed up for that.

JS: Absolutely. Actions by transit workers have played such an important role throughout the history of the labor movement—I think of Stan Weir’s account of the  1946 Oakland General Strike—and also in more recent history, especially the anti-racist uprising of 2020. I mean, we saw bus drivers, in New York City and Minneapolis, most famously, refusing to transport protestors who’d been arrested. And all of this goes, too, for those non-transit city workers in D.C. who keep the place itself running in one way or another.

This also seems like a crucial moment when it comes to anti-racist organizing, especially in the face of the Trump administration’s broader attack on the racialized working class and on immigrant workers and the protection federal troops are lending agencies like ICE in D.C. How does what’s going on plug into anti-racist organizing that was already going on in the city? I mean, even though this has shifted over the years, D.C. still has a really large Black, immigrant, and Latinx population. How does the occupation relate to racism and the current racial regime of U.S. capitalism?

OT: It’s the other side of the strategy. You know, it’s the active side of the strategy that they pursued passively, right? So they opened with the DOGE campaign and with massive layoffs that disproportionately affected Black workers, especially Black women workers, in the area. This has no doubt had some effect on both unemployment rates here and on the Black-white unemployment gap in the area.

And so, the withdrawal of employment is coming ahead of, you know, the reality that the one thing we do seem to have jobs for is hunting down the people that are caring for children, right, and doing work of any other kind here, right? So, I think there’s definitely a sense, there’s definitely a broad understanding, that we are all under attack. And that the bigoted ways that some of us are under special attack feed into that attack on all of us. That’s very much the vibe I’m getting from, particularly, the Free D.C. kind of side of things.

JS: It seems crucial, as you say, to link these specific, localized events to the most intensively pursued and certainly the most coherent projects of the Trump administration—namely, the assault on the heterogeneous working class, the Left and left-wing possibility more generally, and the legitimization of all of this through very public attacks on already oppressed populations. In a certain sense, that’s as American as apple pie, right? And, as you say, we can’t decouple this from an incredible economic hit, driven by the Trump administration’s commitment to austerity.

OT: They’re softening up the city and the people who live here. Even just thinking about it from almost a military perspective, right? Unemployment, economic uncertainty, uniforms in the streets, all of this keeps people inside. It keeps workers out of restaurants. It keeps the people who do have employment on edge and maybe less willing to take risks. So, in a very visceral and direct way, these attacks on some of us are weakening the immune system of the whole city.

They even sometimes helpfully frame it as a fight against the city as a whole. They sometimes exert some kind of message discipline and talk about, you know, fighting criminals and fighting crime and fighting for “law-abiding citizens.” But more often, they’re like, “We’re going to bring D.C. to heel. We’re going to bring Chicago to heel. We’re going to take over Los Angeles.” And people hear that for what it is. And I think and hope that the anti-racist side of politics continues to play the role of defending the city.

JS: It’s striking that, yet again, and in opposition to arguments by class reductionists on the Left, anti-racist politics has become incredibly central and is pulling more and more people in, especially in situations like the one in D.C. If we’re talking about the necessity of escalation, this seems really important.

I’ve been surprised by the lack of broad, synchronized, public, and mass opposition in the city, though the march does point in a different direction. It’s an important shift.

OT: And the more we can shift in that direction, the stronger we’ll be.

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Featured Image credit: Virginia Guard Public Affairs; modified by Tempest.