September 5, 2025
It’s nonetheless unclear—and that’s the issue.
DC Mayor Muriel Bowser speaks the US District Courthouse in Washington, DC, on August 15, 2025.
(Jim Watson / AFP through Getty Photos)
Washington, DC, Mayor Muriel Bowser has undergone a speedy transformation over the previous three weeks. What started as capitulation to Trump’s ongoing army occupation of town has now turn into a pivot to one thing confused, unclear, and even perhaps ominous. The regime’s criminalization of DC’s residents is now not—as her defenders declare—one thing being imposed on Bowser by racist, sexist Donald Trump. This now seems to be one thing that she is, to cite The Washington Submit, “welcoming.”
Regardless of Bowser’s objections to this framing—earlier this week, she excoriated the Submit at a press convention for utilizing “welcoming” of their headline, a phrase she says she didn’t use—and regardless of her insisting that she was “outraged over the intrusion on our federal autonomy,” her actions communicate louder than her phrases. First, the Democratic mayor credited the surge in federal regulation enforcement for decreasing crime within the metropolis—a deceptive, right-wing narrative that ignores the truth that crime at all times drops with the beginning of the varsity 12 months and that each development line since 2023 has proven crime dropping in the city. Then, on September 2, she issued an order to proceed coordinating with federal regulation enforcement “to the utmost extent allowable by regulation inside the District” even after Trump’s emergency order expires. That doesn’t sound like “outrage.” That feels like consenting to a brand new actuality.
And now, given the possibility to combat again, Bowser is standing apart. In a press convention after DC Lawyer Common Brian Schwalb—who doesn’t work beneath Bowser—sued the Trump administration to cease the deployment of the Nationwide Guard within the metropolis, Bowser was evasive, refusing to answer reporters unequivocally as as to whether she helps the lawsuit—which is odd, given her beforehand said “outrage.” Positive sufficient, based on a supply very acquainted with the decision-making course of that went into the lawsuit, it was written and issued independently from Bowser’s workplace. Even after a federal court docket dominated final week that Trump broke the regulation by sending troops into Los Angeles, Bowser gained’t again the AG’s transfer.
So Bowser could insist that she will not be “welcoming” an indefinite occupation. However let’s take a look at what she has, via her actions, already welcomed. She has welcomed the demise of house rule. She has welcomed the crippling of the native financial system, which has misplaced billions as individuals select to remain house relatively than cope with checkpoints or a sneering South Carolina Nationwide Guardsman with dwell ammo on their approach to dinner. Due to this, we at the moment are seeing a pointy discount in shifts for servers and cooks and misplaced wages. She has welcomed a youth curfew for our business areas that now, with all people staying house, seem like ghost cities.
Present Challenge
Because of all that Bowser is welcoming into town, dad and mom are afraid to go to work and youngsters are afraid to go to highschool. The variety of dad and mom preserving their youngsters out of college to keep away from the danger of the state abducting their youngsters is horrifying—and half-empty lecture rooms are an emblem of this terror. (After all, the schooling secretary has stated nothing about this. If there’s a hell under, Linda McMahon—who thinks AI is a steak sauce—must put money into a number of sunscreen.) One highschool is even canceling an annual Hispanic Heritage parents-and-students picnic and soccer recreation as a result of they worry it would turn into a ripe ICE goal.
That’s not all. Mayor Bowser could rankle on the phrase “welcoming,” however how else do you describe her silence as federal police and ICE are overtly and systemically engaged in racial profiling? This unconstitutional observe is so pervasive that white resisters have taken to sporting Mexican flag decals on their automobiles as a way to bait ICE into puling them over, which wastes ICE’s time and will save individuals from federal abduction and a slave/torture jail in El Salvador or South Sudan. For the authorities, there isn’t any Structure within the streets of DC.
By cooperating with a army occupation and emboldening the Metropolitan Police Division, Bowser has stoked fear in the US-born Black community as effectively. The MPD, with their long-standing problems with racialized brutality, are really now off the leash. Trump and his white-supremacist lickspittles, like Nazi prawn Stephen Miller, enjoyment of saying that “the Blacks” now love them as a result of they really feel secure beneath their watch. This isn’t solely a lie; it’s deeply offensive: an argument echoing the philosophy of an 18th-century plantation grasp. It doesn’t make a lick of sense in a metropolis the place, based on The Washington Submit, 80 percent of the individuals need them gone.
Bowser’s defenders—and they’re dwindling earlier than our eyes—at the moment are elevating the specter of some form of blackmail, making an attempt to guess what Trump would possibly “have on her.” Bullshit. That line of inquiry quantities to drained excuse-mongering for a Mike Bloomberg–educated centrist mayor who appears to be—as centrists usually do—slouching towards the facet with the weapons. The opposite excuse they declare is that, with out statehood, Bowser has no selection however to take this posture. Additionally bullshit. It’s true that the federal authorities can proclaim a 30-day state of emergency in DC. However Bowser had grounds, as AG Schwalb is displaying, to problem the emergency declaration in court docket: As a result of violent crime within the metropolis has hit a 30-year low, there isn’t any precise emergency—or at the least there wasn’t one till the Tennessee Nationwide Guard began patrolling the streets with dwell ammo.
Bowser could possibly be approaching this in a approach that protects her constituents and resists authoritarianism. She could possibly be holding press conferences day-after-day, highlighting the army occupation’s results on residents and the native financial system. She could possibly be saying that she stands with each the protesters and the Democratic politicians which have proven some backbone, like Baltimoree Mayor Brandon Scott, who’s operating a metropolis the place violent crime has dropped to a 50-year low. Even when Bowser had been overrun within the courts, she may nonetheless have drawn a line within the sand that the federal occupation of cities, absent an actual emergency, is an authoritarian, unconstitutional energy seize, practically unprecedented in US historical past, and have to be resisted in any respect prices. As an alternative, when the army took over Union Station—in all probability as a result of when Stephen Miller, JD Vance, and Pete Hegseth wished to gladhand and seize a fascistic photograph op with the troopers, they had been heckled mercilessly—there was no phrase from Bowser on the Trump regime’s proclaimed triumph in the battle of Shake Shack.
Traditionally, being the mayor of DC is a dead-end gig. Former populist mayor Adrian Fenty’s ditching the city to relax on yachts with Steve Jobs’s widow, Lauren, might be the perfect any of them have completed climbing the ladder. The hyper-ambitious Bloomberg acolyte Muriel Bowser clearly has better ambitions, and she or he is keen to climb over the our bodies of her constituents to get there. (Anti-Zohran speaker on the DNC? Ivanka or Melania’s new “good friend” for public appearances? New VP of the Trump Group?) Within the course of, she is undercutting the individuals truly doing the work to make this nightmare finish.
What’s extraordinarily clear is the significance of a broadly constructed Free DC demonstration on Saturday, September 10, at 11 am, in Malcolm X (or Meridian) Park. The stakes are excessive to point out town and the world that Bowser will not be the voice—or at the least not the only real voice—of DC.
Don’t consider it as a neighborhood protest. Everybody ought to come: As a result of if we don’t combat again, your metropolis can be subsequent.
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