WASHINGTON, DC – SEPTEMBER 10: The rising sun turns the sky orange behind the Washington skyline, including the Lincoln Memorial, left, Washington Monument, center, and the U.S. Capitol Building, right, on September 10, 2024, as seen from Arlington, VA.
Donald Trump has attacked many American cities. But as president, he’ll have direct authority over only one — his once-and-future home of Washington, D.C., where city leaders are bracing for his wrath and hoping for the best.
Trump’s first term was treated like an unwelcome nuisance in the capital, where more than 9 out of 10 voters rejected Trump at the polls every time he ran for office and protested him and his officials almost constantly.
But ahead of Trump’s return to the White House, District of Columbia officials fear losing their tenuous grip on the limited self-governance they have painstakingly achieved over decades since Trump has repeatedly vowed to “take over” a city he describes as a “filthy and crime-ridden embarrassment to our nation.”
While not long ago Washington officials hoped for full statehood, now they simply want to preserve their ability to elect their own leaders.
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“A second Trump presidency presents risks for D.C., which lacks the protections of statehood and full home rule,” Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton, the district’s longtime representative in Congress who has limited voting power, told NBC News. “I will continue to defend D.C. home rule from any attacks that may come our way.”
There will be little to stop Trump if he wants to make good on his threat to federalize the capital. Constitutionally, the District of Columbia is a ward of the federal government. Its limited self-government is derived from Congress and can be rescinded whenever the president and Congress wish.
With the stroke of the pen, for instance, Trump could take over the D.C. National Guard and even the Metropolitan Police Department, the city’s local municipal police force, at least for a certain amount of time. And he could deploy more federal law enforcement officials, as he did during the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020.
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A Republican-controlled Congress can override ordinances passed by the district’s elected Council and impose its own rules, such as potential restrictions on abortion. And together, Trump and Congress could strip the district’s local autonomy or reimpose something like the Financial Control Board, which supervised the city’s spending in the 1990s.
“We have been discussing and planning for many months in the case that the district has to defend itself and its values,” D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser said at a press conference the week after Trump’s election.
The mayor was in office during Trump’s first term too and clashed with him repeatedly, culminating in her having “Black Lives Matter” emblazoned in giant yellow letters on a plaza near the White House, which became a magnet for racial justice protests that Trump quashed with federal law enforcement agents.
In her post-election press conference this year, however, Bowser took a notably more conciliatory tone.
On behalf of the city, Bowser said she was “congratulating president-elect Trump and his team on their victory,” adding that “Washington D.C. is prepared to welcome the new administration.” She emphasized places where the city and Trump can find common ground and collaborate.
“We know that we can work together with the Trump administration,” she said.
Bowser and Trump do have some common interests, such as getting more federal workers to return to the office, a Trump priority which would also help downtown businesses that have been struggling since the Covid pandemic, hurting the city’s tax base.
Trump has also spoken often about wanting to revitalize federal buildings and its vast land holdings in the city, which include many neighborhood parks, potentially creating jobs and boosting tourism. He also wants to keep the FBI headquarters in downtown D.C., instead of moving it to the suburbs.
But there is much more that separates them than unites them.
Trump has said he wants to “take over” the city — “I wouldn’t even call the mayor,” he mused in a speech last year — and said, “an important part of my platform for president is to bring back, restore, and rebuild Washington, D.C.”
Project 2025 calls for Congress to use its authority over the district to require it to issue more vouchers for private schools, override the district’s law allowing physician-assisted suicide, and relocating federal agencies outside of Washington, which Trump tried to do during his first term.
“President Trump was re-elected by a resounding mandate from the American people to change the status quo in Washington,” said Karoline Leavitt, a spokeswoman for the Trump transition who has been tapped to serve as White House press secretary, when asked about his plans for the capital city. “That’s why he has chosen brilliant and highly-respected outsiders to serve in his administration, and he will continue to stand behind them as they fight against all those who seek to derail the MAGA agenda.”
Republicans in Congress have long used so-called riders attached to spending bills to micromanage D.C., such as one that has prevented the city from implementing a legal marijuana market after voters approved the idea by referendum more than a decade ago.
Now, reproductive rights groups worry the Republican trifecta could target abortion rights in the city since the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision would no longer protect them.
And they could go even further, if they wanted to.
Washington has had its own government elected by residents only since the 1970s with the passage of the D.C. Home Rule Act, but that could be repealed by a similar act of Congress.
“The District has home rule, and the Congress could change it. They could. That is possible,” Bowser said at her press conference.
In 1995, as the city struggled with the crack epidemic and after a wave election that saw Republicans win control of the House for the first time in decades, Democratic President Bill Clinton signed a law creating a federal oversight board for the city. The five-member District of Columbia Financial Control Board had day-to-day power to override decisions by the D.C. Council and its mayor and supervise how it spent the money it raised through taxes on its residents.
The Control Board only stood down in 2001, after the city produced four consecutive balanced budgets, and city leaders worry now that Trump and congressional Republicans could use crime or other issues as an argument to install a similar oversight board.
But Norton is most concerned about the city’s police force, which, under the Home Rule Act, the president can federalize for up to 30 days in the event of an emergency. Congress can then pass a resolution to extend the period of the president's control.
“During his first term as president, Trump considered federalizing D.C.’s police force for his own purposes,” said Norton, who has repeatedly introduced bills to try to amend the law to keep the local police local. “The first priority and responsibility of the D.C. Police must be to the residents of the district.”
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