He’s doing authoritarianism badly. But it could still work in the long run.
Depending on who you listen to, President Donald Trump’s decision to seize control over law enforcement in Washington, DC, is either an authoritarian menace or a farce.
The authoritarian menace case is straightforward: Trump is (again) asserting the power to deploy the National Guard to a major US city, while adding the new wrinkle of federalizing the local police force based on a wholly made-up emergency. He is, political scientist Barbara Walter warns, “building the machinery of repression before it’s needed,” getting the tools to violently shut down big protests “in place before the next election.”
The farce case focuses less on these broad fears and more on the actual way it has played out. Instead of nabbing DC residents who oppose the president, federal agents appear to be aimlessly strolling the streets in safe touristy areas like Georgetown or the National Mall. During a pointless Sunday night deployment to the U Street corridor, a popular nightlife area, they faced down the terrifying threat of a drunk man throwing a sandwich.
“This ostensible show of strength is more like an admission of weakness,” The Atlantic’s Quinta Jurecic writes. “It is the behavior of a bully: very bad for the people it touches, but not a likely prelude to full authoritarian takeover.”
So who’s right? In a sense, both of them. Trump’s show of force in DC is both cartoonish and ominous, farcical and dangerous.
It serves to normalize abuses of power that could very well be expanded — in fact, that Trump himself is openly promising to try it out in other cities. However, both the DC deployment and Trump’s prior National Guard misadventure in Los Angeles show that it’s actually quite hard to create effective tools of domestic repression. Executing on his threats requires a level of legal and tactical acumen that it’s not obvious the Trump administration possesses.
Or, put differently: The power they’re claiming is scary in the abstract, but the way they’re currently wielding it is too incompetent to do meaningful damage to democracy. The key question going forward — not just for DC, but the nation — is whether they get better with practice.The DC crackdown has been impotent so far
Carl Schmitt, a reactionary German legal theorist who would later become a Nazi jurist, famously claimed that emergency powers create an insuperable problem for the liberal-democratic ideal of the rule of law. In theory, the law can limit how and when a person in government can wield emergency powers. But in practice, it all comes down to who has the power to give those words meaning.
Who says what an emergency is, and when it ends? That person, and not the legal text or its underlying intent, is what determines what the law means — and thus has the real power.
Schmitt expressed this idea in a famous dictum: “Sovereign is he who decides on the exception.” And while Trump has surely never heard of Schmitt, let alone read him, this is basically the way his administration has operated.
