Remember “I alone can fix it”? President Donald Trump, who made that laughable statement in his 2016 convention acceptance speech, is now testing the theory in Washington.

Trump and his party have been threatening a D.C. takeover for years and made it part of the Republican platform last year. But it was all just empty talk and random uppercase words until a former staffer at the Department of Government Efficiency was reportedly attacked in an attempted carjacking in the wee hours of Aug. 3 in a busy area of bars and restaurants.

It doesn’t matter at all to Trump that D.C.’s violent crime rate fell to a 30-year low last year and is down another 26 percent so far this year compared with 2024, or that a police report suggests police saw the incident and intervened. This particular victim — a teenage Elon Musk protégé and notorious DOGE operative — gave this particular president the “emergency” he needed to declare a “public safety emergency.”

Of course, he called it “a historic action to rescue our nation’s capital from crime, bloodshed, bedlam and squalor and worse.” He has federalized the city’s Metropolitan Police Department and deployed 800 members of its National Guard (to start). Over the weekend he sent 450 federal police officers from 18 agencies to patrol the city.

It’s the second time this year that Trump has played the National Guard card to show who’s boss. He sent 4,000 Guard troops and 700 Marines to Los Angeles in June, over the objections of Gov. Gavin Newsom and Mayor Karen Bass, ostensibly to restore order amid immigration raids. But the move sparked........

© The Korea Times