For for the better part of a week, President Donald Trump has ramped up his rhetoric against a familiar foe, denouncing Washington, D.C., as one of the most dangerous cities in the world. On Monday, he ordered a federal takeover of law enforcement in the nation’s capital, and deployed the National Guard, claiming he will “liberate” the capital. Here’s our reverse chronological liveblog of what happened.

Per the New York Times, this is why you don’t print out a too-nuts-to-be-true chart that J.D. Vance retweeted last week and then show it to a room full of reporters, even if that chart confirms all your biases:

The table cites the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, Statista and local government statistics, but most of the figures could not immediately be corroborated, and it was not clear how recent they were. The cited U.N. data, for example, lists a homicide rate of 7.7 per 100,000 for Lima, the capital of Peru, but that figure is from 2016. The figure also appears to mix up the flags of Mexico and Ethiopia, and it incorrectly refers to Lagos as the capital of Nigeria. (It was moved to Abuja in 1991.)

A separate table was on display at the news conference, and was later shared by Karoline Leavitt, the White House Press Secretary, which showed a different selection of cities and different homicide rates.

I just wrote about how inventing emergencies is the president’s superpower:

By virtually any standard, violent crime in D.C. is falling, not rising, and there’s no “emergency” requiring unprecedented federal intervention in local law enforcement and abrogation of a half-century tradition of home rule. However, the 1973 congressional statute that gave Washington home rule provides for a temporary (but extendable) federal takeover of Washington’s police force in cases of a presidentially declared emergency. So facts be damned, that’s what Trump declared, just as he has declared fake emergencies to justify his usurpations of congressional powers over tariffs and trade and his authoritarian measures to detain and deport immigrants.

Inventing emergencies isn’t just a strategy to mobilize Trump’s supporters and intimidate his opponents — it’s his superpower, giving him permission slips to sweep aside laws, policies, precedents, and other public institutions that stand in his way. Emergency provisions are invariably drafted with more responsible presidents in mind, and courts will typically give any president considerable deference, even if they suspect or even know this president is fabricating pretexts in order to inflate his own power.

Read the rest here.

The New York Times checks in on how things are going in California, where Trump deployed the National Guard against the wishes of Governor Newsom following mass anti-ICE protests in Los Angeles in June:

Since July 1, the Pentagon has released most of the roughly 4,000 members of the California National Guard who were federalized, along with 700 Marines. A sprawling tent city that was erected in June to house thousands of soldiers at a military base south of Los Angeles in Los Alamitos is being dismantled. Only about 300 troops remain.

Testifying in federal court on Monday, William Harrington, who until last week was the deputy chief of staff for the Army task force with tactical control over the Guard troops, said that those still on duty in Los Angeles were “supporting the request for assistance” from federal law-enforcement agents. But officials at the California National Guard and the military’s Northern Command, which is overseeing the force, said earlier Monday that the remaining troops were mostly on standby or guarding federal buildings and not being used for immigration enforcement.

The Times previously reported that the deployed troops have complained about how they aren’t given much to do:

On the base near Los Angeles where the troops have been stationed, soldiers have complained that only a small fraction of them were even given assignments beyond the base. Those who were sent out typically were ordered to guard federal facilities or provide backup to immigration agents delivering warrants or conducting arrests.

In July, for example, one National Guard contingent sat in trucks while immigration agents conducted a show of force in MacArthur Park in Los Angeles. Another contingent faced protesters in a field outside a cannabis farm during a raid in Ventura County.

The mission was supposed to end on August 6; instead it has been extended through at least early November.

The California mission and the D.C. mission vary in important ways, but from the Times report, it certainly seems the California deployment has mostly been just a show of force.

In the wake of the Trump administration’s deploying members of the D.C. National Guard into the city’s streets, D.C. congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton and Maryland senator Chris Van Hollen intend to reintroduce their legislation that would give the District of Columbia control of the National Guard when Congress returns in September.

The District of Columbia Police Home Rule Act would declare the D.C. mayor the “Commander-in-Chief of the D.C. National Guard” as well as repeal the aspect of the city charter that grants the president the power to federalize the Metropolitan Police Department.

“President Trump’s unprecedented federalization of the D.C. Police today and his activation of the D.C. National Guard without D.C.’s consent underscore the necessity of D.C. statehood,” Norton said in a statement. “Until we get the full protections that statehood would provide, our........

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