Greetings and welcome to this 49th edition of the Carnival of Fools! America’s grand parade of political clownery tumbles onward through a hot, exhausted August, as Donald Trump once again dominates all facets of the national news. Like it or not, he’s the ringmaster of this circus, and he won’t be relinquishing the center spotlight anytime soon.
This is as emblematic a week as any for the second Trump administration’s overall vibe: His virtues are seemingly indivisible from his vices. As I said at the very start of his term: good Trump, bad Trump, it’s all Trump. Now everybody, please, sit up straight and show some respect for the soldiers about to take the stage.
Send in the Guardsmen
Calling out around the world, are you ready for a brand new beat? Yes, summer’s here, and the time is right for calling the National Guard out into the streets. Trump has been hit where it hurts on the issue of crime in the nation’s capital, and is lashing out in a cynically over-the-top, politically calculated way. I support this wholeheartedly.
A bit of explanation is necessary. When Elon Musk officially severed himself from DOGE back in March (to return to building cars and mechanizing Hitler), he left behind his staff, including Edward “Big Balls” Coristine, a young elite coder who became infamous in political media primarily for his (admittedly juvenile) online handle.
Chalk one up for the theory of nominative determinism, at least: the kid earned his nickname. Coristine was out on the streets of Dupont Circle in the early morning hours of August 3 with a female companion when the pair were attacked by a mob of youths. Coristine intervened to shield the woman from harm and was pummeled brutally for his bravery. (Two have been arrested in connection with the event; interestingly, the group seems to have been from Prince George’s County, engaging in “criminal tourism” in a part of D.C. known for its upper-middle-class softness.)
Once the news went viral a few days later — complete with pictures taken at the scene of a bloodied Coristine — Donald Trump issued a threat on Truth Social: “If D.C. doesn’t get its act together, and quickly, we will have no choice but to take Federal control of the City.” (For those unaware: Washington, D.C., as a federal jurisdiction, has had legislatively granted local government only since the misbegotten Home Rule Act of 1973.)
In case you thought that D.C. might actually have time to respond, more fool you: Yesterday Trump announced, with great fanfare, that he is putting the Washington, D.C., police back under federal control and sending both the National Guard and 200 FBI agents out onto the streets of the nation’s capital to maintain order. “Liberation Day is coming to Washington, D.C.” Trump proclaimed, at a press conference featuring Attorney General Pam Bondi and other administration officials, with all the smugness of a trash-talker playing a winning hand at the World Series of Poker. (Bondi arguably had the comedy line of the event with “Our secret weapon here in D.C. is U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro,” though I doubt she realizes it.)
And good for them. Yes, this is obviously a theatrical overreaction, a mere cosmetic ploy done for the benefit of national politics. (I like to characterize Trump’s brand as “law and order, except for the white-collar, political, and/or sex stuff.”) But the District has brought this humiliation upon itself, and if the Trump administration wants to turn the screws on the city government, I can only say that it’s necessary. (Quite frankly, I expect quality of life in the city to improve over the short term.) Something has gone terribly wrong in Washington over the last half decade, after a prolonged era of improvement, and although the temporary presence of the Guard will likely fail to cure D.C. politicians of their inability to maintain proper order on the streets, it will at least instruct the rest of the nation on how a moderate show of strength can quell opportunistic street crime.
Meanwhile, progressives all over the nation — especially the younglings ensconced in their political staffing and activist positions within the District — are crying bloody murder. Martial law is coming to Washington! Fascist feet will soon be marching in the street! I suppose Trump’s showmanship was guaranteed to spur an equal and opposite reaction from the left, but when I hear these arrivistes wailing like the chorus in “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” and saying things like “D.C. was America’s best big city, now it’s ruined,” I want to know where the heck these people actually come from to think such a thing. (Are they all from remote dairy farms? D.C. is barely even a city.)
Understand: I am a child of Washington, D.C., myself — from a very different era. Born in 1980 in the District and raised right over the border in Maryland, the District of Columbia of my youth was a fearsome jungle known primarily to us locals for its murder rate and Redskins football, but mostly the murder rate. This was a city that elected a notoriously corrupt coke addict to three terms as mayor — and then later tacked on a freebie fourth term in the mid-1990s just to emphasize how little it cared about good governance.
In an era when we were all “free-range kids,” who hopped on buses or Metro trains during lazy summer days, my parents actually showed my brother and me a big map of the District of Columbia and instructed us on where the “no-go zones” were. Back then it was pretty much everything except the Mall, Connecticut Avenue, and maybe those few blocks without convenient Metro access in Georgetown where Averill Harriman used to live. (Adams Morgan? Not during the early ’90s, my friend, not unless you liked drugs.)
But things changed for the District, especially in the aughts and teens. Call it the “post-9/11 boom,” if you will — although the city really turned a corner when it elected the only competent mayor in its history, Anthony Williams — but the influx of young government professionals into D.C. altered its complexion in many ways: The city’s murder rate, once the scandal of a nation, plummeted precipitously. There was a glorious moment there when the D.C. Metro system still worked reasonably well and the streets felt as safe as Giuliani-era New York.
Everyone now understands the city to be sliding into reverse, particularly since the Covid era, except those who are paid not to acknowledge this reality. The denialism about D.C.’s slide is rhetorically built on the fact that its murder rate, despite still competing with Chicago for “worst in nation” honors, has improved from a legendary nadir in the early 1990s. And indeed, not as many people are dying in Washington as once did. It’s certainly an improvement.
But the city has nevertheless collapsed in recent years into an epidemic of carjackings, shoplifting, and petty thuggery — a variation on “broken windows” crime — that has affected the lives of every single person I know there. Everybody has either been the victim of a crime or knows of an acquaintance who was. Aside from the carjackings – which are usually reported due to potential auto insurance claims – the vast majority of these crimes are invisible in the official statistics. (The police are uninterested in responding to so-called “minor” crimes like this, the courts refuse to seriously punish it, and residents know it.) And everybody in the city knows there are three classes of criminals on the prowl: professionals (who are rare but real), homeless drug addicts, and teenagers engaging in crime for the sheer entertainment value of it. You can avoid the first, and usually the second if you know where not to go — but the third group is now intentionally targeting gentrified areas precisely because they lack either police presence or the sorts of people inclined to fight back. (Surprise, surprise — antisocial thugs are savvy about choosing meek targets.)
Trump’s anger — and extreme reaction — was motivated in this case specifically by an attack on a member of his administration who’d attracted attention, but his underlying point retains validity: Over the last decade the District of Columbia has allowed the safety of its streets to decline to the point where neighborhoods that had once been “reclaimed for civilization” have reverted to their old status as notorious crime zones. The kind of crime Trump is reacting to — opportunistic, committed by gangs of young thrill-seekers — is no stranger to my own city of Chicago. Our mayor has refused to do anything except defend the criminals themselves, and the safety of our downtown has declined accordingly.
Thankfully, Trump isn’t handcuffed by the self-imposed limitations of D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser, the City Council, and the chief of police. It’s worth pointing out that a show of strength on the streets is precisely what will keep hordes of budding criminals off them. Maybe D.C. politicians should take stock of their own failures rather than decrying Trump’s move.
The Republicans Will Win the Gerrymandering Wars — If They Follow Through
A final note (for now) on what remains the biggest story in American politics: the gerrymandering wars. I wrote at length last week about the upcoming (and inevitable) sea change in electoral politics, pointing out that while we are all currently in the midst of a Mexican standoff, the Republicans are likely to be the last ones standing once everybody’s done firing their bullets.
Let Gavin Newsom follow through on his plan to respond to Texas’s mid-decade redistricting with a state constitutional ballot amendment allowing him to “temporarily” turn California into a 49–3 Democratic wasteland. Let Kathy Hochul do the same, even if she has to wait until after 2026 to jam an updated New York map through. Let JB Pritzker somehow find a way to create a 17–0 map in Illinois the next time around. It won’t be enough. If the Republicans play tit-for-tat, they are still going to win this war and then some.
The first, and primary, reason for this is that, until now, many Republican-run states have “pulled their punches” cycle after cycle during redistricting, whereas states with Democratic trifectas have not. Progressives constantly shriek in denial when this is pointed out — “What about Ohio?!” — and yet even most of them realize, looking at the congressional maps of states like Maryland, Massachusetts, California, Illinois, and Washington, that they dirtied their hands long before now.
You can complain about Jim Jordan’s old district all you want, but the objective truth is inarguable on numbers alone and has nothing to do with “district shapes” or lines on a map: The reason Democrats can’t properly retaliate against Republican mid-decade redistricting is that they already ruthlessly maximized their numbers when they had the chance. (The story of how Democrats gerrymandered California, despite its nominally “independent” redistricting commission, by shamelessly, and brilliantly, gaming the public hearing process is legendary among redistricting experts, but alas a story for another time.) There is simply not that much juice left for them to squeeze.
Did you think Ohio’s current lines looked unfair to Democrats, in a state that has now become solidly red? Imagine how much more unfair they’re about to get. The only reason that is even possible is because the GOP held back during previous cycles while Democrats did not. In my prior piece I mentioned that JD Vance was pressuring Governor Mike Braun to draw Frank Mrvan out of his northwestern Indiana House seat; a friend pointed out that they’re also going after Andre Carson’s Indianapolis district, distributing it among other safe Republican seats.
There is a second reason the GOP, if it persists, is going to win this war. In my earlier piece, I foolishly neglected to mention Louisiana v. Callais, the case currently before the Supreme Court concerning the Voting Rights Act. It makes Republican odds that much better. For those unaware, the VRA, or at least its judicial interpretation, for well over a half a century now has required certain Southern states to carve out designated “minority districts,” and there is a very good chance that most or all of its strictures are about to be tossed out.
If so, that means that Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana, and South Carolina are prepared to redraw their maps as well, eliminating most of the Southern Congressional Black Caucus in one fell swoop. (To my progressive friends: If you’re still upset at Jim Clyburn for ensuring Biden’s presidential nomination back in 2020, here comes some stone-cold revenge.) Stack those atop the changes expected from other Republican-controlled states, plus anticipated census gains for red states in 2030, and as things now stand, the GOP could find itself looking at 17–20 “new” seats by 2032 — at which point the challenge will be to hold them.
Until next week.