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........

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