In a dangerous new escalation of his authoritarian rule, Donald Trump has placed the police of Washington DC under federal control and announced that he will deploy the national guard to the country’s capital. According to the president, crime in the city is “out of control” – no matter that crime numbers are down significantly, including for violent crimes. But, of course, this power grab is not really about facts, it is about distraction and perception, and a chance to reconnect and refocus his base.

Like all the other outrageous things Trump has been doing in the last weeks, the DC takeover is, first and foremost, an attempt to deflect from the Jeffrey Epstein case. As previously demonstrated by his demand to rename the NFL team to the (racist) Washington Redskins, his attacks on the Wall Street Journal, or his calls to prosecute former president Barack Obama (“Barack Hussein Obama. Have you heard of him?”) that he will do anything to get the Epstein case out of the political and public debate.

But it is not just a deflection, it is also an attempt to bring the attention of his base back to the core of their bond with Trump, namely authoritarianism and nativism (which are, as always with the far right, closely connected). There is a clear pattern in the cities Trump links to disorder and........

© The Guardian