Trump’s WashingtonHow President Trump is changing government, the country and its politics.Good evening. Tonight, we’ll start with the latest from Anchorage, where President Trump is meeting with President Vladimir Putin of Russia. Then, we’ll look at how the federal takeover of Washington intensified as this week went on.
A week in Trump’s Washington
It has been a strange five days in Washington, where I live. In a remarkable exertion of his power, President Trump has taken over the city police force and deployed the military to patrol the streets, becoming the first president in history to turn a city of 700,000 people into a laboratory for what he describes as crackdown on crime. It has put the federal government in the quotidian business of clearing homeless camps and monitoring nightlife, and left residents fearful and unsettled by questions like who can be stopped, and for what — and who is in charge. Many of the details of Trump’s takeover are vague. What’s become clear, though, is that the administration’s grip on the city has only tightened as the week has worn on, while pushback — both in the courts and on the streets — has begun to intensify. Here are four takeaways from an extraordinary week. There was a palpable increase in federal law enforcement on the streets, but few details about the arrests they have made.Residents of Washington, D.C., are used to the presence of federal law enforcement officials like the Secret Service or the United States Park Police. But they are not usually used to seeing so many of them, or in quite these roles. My colleague Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs, who has been out nightly covering how Trump is deploying the hundreds of federal officers he has at his command, watched F.BI. agents conducting traffic stops. He observed agents who ordinarily investigate federal weapons violations standing watch as local police officers tried to subdue a disturbed man at a bus stop. They have also cleared homeless camps. There are scant details, however, about exactly what these officers are doing. The White House is releasing data claiming dozens of arrests per night, but they are not always specifying exactly what crimes the people arrested are accused of committing. For example: The director of the F.B.I., Kash Patel, said that 45 arrests had been made overnight on Wednesday. The Metropolitan Police Department, which the Trump administration now controls, makes an average of 68 arrests a day in Washington. So far, the highest-profile crime involved a sandwich. The presence of the military was muted.While federal agents have made a larger show of force, the impression of a major military presence across the city has yet to materialize. National Guard members under Trump’s command have been mostly seen massing in parking lots and taking photos with tourists, Nicholas reported. They do not have the power to make arrests. Officials have telegraphed a larger surge over the next few days, saying that 100 to 200 soldiers might be on the streets at any given time to support police officers. While their presence may well increase, the situation could come to resemble Trump’s deployment of some 4,000 California National Guard soldiers and 700 Marines to Los Angeles in June. There, they guarded federal buildings during protests and provided some backup on immigration raids, but with little to do, many questioned their mission. Trump officials appear to have an additional agenda item: immigration enforcement.Trump launched his takeover with talk of carjackings, robberies and homicides, and promised that his efforts would make the city “crime free.” But the federal takeover appears to be pushing beyond violent crime — an issue that city leaders suggested they were open to working with federal officials on — into the realm of immigration enforcement. Patel and the White House have promoted the arrests of people they said were immigrants here illegally. Immigration violations are not classified as violent crimes; officials did not specify precisely why all of the people they said were immigrants had been arrested. On Thursday, Attorney General Pam Bondi cleared the way for the local police to aid in immigration enforcement, rescinding D.C. policies that had previously prevented them from doing so as she moved to tighten the administration’s control over the capital. “D.C. under federal control is not going to be a sanctuary city,” Tom Homan, the White House border czar, said on Fox News earlier this week. Officials in Washington grew increasingly defiant, as protests popped up.At the beginning of the week, local officials, including Mayor Muriel Bowser, a Democrat, took a conciliatory approach to the president’s takeover, suggesting they were open to working with federal agents and the military on reducing crime. Their posture has shifted. After the administration ramped up its immigration enforcement, and after Bondi named Terry Cole, the head of the Drug Enforcement Administration, the city’s “emergency police commissioner” on Thursday, city leaders sued the administration on Friday while protesters gathered in the streets. At a hearing over the lawsuit on Friday afternoon, city and federal officials agreed to rewrite Bondi’s order to give Cole a more modest role controlling the police department. The deal, which was still in the works Friday evening, would give ultimate authority over the department back to its chief, Pamela Smith. (The judge said that if the two sides couldn’t finalize the agreement, she would step in.) Still, the broader show of federal force in the city is expected to continue.
IN HIS WORDS Warm words for another dictatorOn his way to Anchorage to meet Vladimir Putin, President Trump elevated another international leader out of Western isolation. My colleague Ivan Nechepurenko, who covers Russia, explains. Hours before his high-profile meeting on Friday with the Russian leader, Trump said he had placed a call to Putin’s closest ally, President Aleksandr Lukashenko of Belarus, one of the longest-ruling dictators in the world and a figure long shunned by American presidents. They had a “wonderful talk,” Trump said. In a social media post, Trump called Lukashenko, whom many Western countries view as an illegitimate leader after his contested re-election in 2020, “the highly respected President.” It was a shift from his rhetoric in 2020, when Trump called the situation unfolding in Belarus, where security forces crushed mass protests, “terrible.” “I look forward to meeting President Lukashenko in the future,” Trump wrote. Got a tip? THE MOMENT
Eric Lee, a photographer for The New York Times, has lived in Washington for nine years. On Wednesday night, he walked 13 miles all over the city to document the federal takeover of his home. He was walking near the Ellipse when he saw a traffic stop being conducted by officers from both the Metro Transit Police Department and Homeland Security Investigations, an agency that is part of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. An arrest had just been made, and the transit officers were searching the suspect’s car. But after Eric photographed that moment, he turned his camera toward a child who was also watching the scene unfold. Read past editions of the newsletter here. If you’re enjoying what you’re reading, please consider recommending it to others. They can sign up here. Have feedback? Ideas for coverage? We’d love to hear from you. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com.
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