So here’s what I don’t get, he’s [Trump] been sitting on the Epstein Files this whole time and every time someone brings it up there’s suddenly some kind of brand new emergency: Putin gets to keep part of Ukraine, job numbers are “fake,” let’s investigate Letitia James, investigate Jack Smith. It’s like, Dude, just release the files. If your name’s not in there, you’d think you’d want everybody to see them, right? But instead, it’s constant shiny distractions, while the one thing that matters just stays locked up. Look, man, if you still think he’s playing 4D chess, I hate to break it to you, but the guy’s barely playing checkers and he’s eating the pieces. I mean, c’mon, how much horseshit before you realize your Alpha Male is just an 80-year-old dude with early dementia spray-tanning his face at 3 AM while rage tweeting about Rosie.

– Joe Rogan

As a naive country kid from the glacier-smoothed farmlands of central Indiana, I arrived in DC in 1977, lived in the District through 1982 and commuted back there to work from Baltimore for another year.

DC was a much rougher place and poorer, though more vibrant, city in the 70s and 80s than it is now that it’s been almost completely gentrified. I didn’t have a car, so I rode the Metro, took the bus, or walked everywhere. I went all over town at all hours, from Tenley Circle to Adams Morgan to Anacostia, often late at night going to clubs to hear bands, going to and from the libraries at Georgetown or Catholic because AU’s was so shitty, working at Blues Alley and a movie theater deep down Connecticut Avenue, and later giving talks and attending organizing meetings for the Freeze Campaign.

In all of those hundreds of trips downtown, I had two “violent” encounters. As a freshman at AU, I was aggressively propositioned in the bathroom of the Rayburn Building by a staffer for a Georgia congressman, who then stalked me back on campus and made harassing and obscene calls to the dorm phone at Hughes Hall for a couple of weeks. The second incident occurred six years later, when I was grabbed from behind, thrown to the sidewalk and kicked repeatedly by two Caucasian men in trench coats after giving a talk at GW against the Reagan arms buildup. They didn’t take my wallet, but they did warn me to “keep my fucking mouth shut.”

I was out for a couple of minutes when a 70-plus-year-old black man bent down and helped me up. His name was Jerome. He walked me the three blocks down H Street and up 23rd Street, where I got patched up in the same Emergency Room that had treated Reagan after he was shot by John Hinckley a couple of months earlier. Jerome told me he’d been sleeping in different city parks since he was evicted from his apartment and now “Reagan is trying to evict us from the streets.” In all my years in DC, Black people treated me only with acts of kindness, not violence. What would you expect from the city of Frederick Douglass and Duke Ellington?

Meanwhile, inside the White House during those years, all sorts of felonious acts and constitutional villainy were being plotted by the likes of Cap Weinberger, Bill Casey, Robert Macfarland and Oliver North.

The real criminals in DC today, who are dangers to the Republic worthy of sending SEAL Team Six to suppress, are the lobbyists for the tobacco, financial, oil, insurance, coal, nuclear, Pharma, and weapons industries (not to mention AIPAC) who have corrupted our political system and profited from using the federal government to inflict death and misery around the globe. Trump is using racial stereotypes to scare his 70 demographic on Fox News and manufacture a crisis that doesn’t exist so that he can use his Praetorian Guard to shield and distract attention from those who are looting the public estate for private gain.

Meet the people in charge of the feds seizing control of DC…

The one thing the founders of the Republic feared even more than slave rebellions and tribal uprisings was the kind of standing army Trump has now sent into DC:

“A standing army is one of the greatest mischiefs that can possibly happen.”

– James Madison

“The Army is a dangerous instrument to play with.”

– George Washington

“Standing Armies are dangerous to liberty.”

– Alexander Hamilton

Cities whose violent crime rate is higher than DC’s…

Memphis, Tennessee
Kansas City, Missouri
Springfield, Missouri
Alexandria, Louisiana
New Orleans, Louisiana
Monroe, Louisiana
Pueblo, Colorado
Anniston, Alabama
Little Rock, Arkansas
Myrtle Beach, South Carolina
Birmingham, Alabama
Atlantic City, New Jersey
Camden, New Jersey
Albuquerque, New Mexico
Louisville, Kentucky
Indianapolis, Indiana
Tulsa, Oklahoma
Cincinnati, Ohio

After ordering the occupation of DC, Trump threatened to send federal troops to NYC, Baltimore and Oakland: “They’re so far gone. This will go further. We’re starting very strongly with DC.” By the way, crime in DC is at historic lows…

DC Mayor Muriel Bowser: “I think I speak for all Americans — we don’t believe it’s legal to use the American military against American citizens on American soil.”

Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott’s response to Trump’s threat to impose a military occupation of DC, NYC, Oakland and Baltimore:

I think it’s very notable that each and every one of the cities called out by the President has a black mayor, and most of those cities are seeing historic lows in violent crime.

In Baltimore, we have the fewest amount of homicides through this date on record. That’s 50 years, a 50-year low. Maybe we are too far gone. Too far gone from the broken right-wing policies of zero tolerance policing and all the things that did not make our city safer for all those many years.

The president could learn a lot from us. Instead of throwing things at us.

As DC came under military occupation, the District’s lone member of Congress, the enfeebled Eleanor Holmes Norton, who is 88 years old, was nowhere to be seen…

Biden rejected DC statehood, leaving it vulnerable to the authoritarian takeover of the City Trump is now executing. Its lone representative in Congress is a semi-coherent Congresswoman, who, after ineffectively representing the District for the last 34 years, is running for office again in 2026.

How badly did Reconstruction fail DC? A........

© CounterPunch