In fairness, it’s the right answer. In fact, it’s the only answer Schumer could have realistically given. Among those on the left, he has two strikes against him after declining to force a government shutdown earlier this year to protest the president’s agenda. If he meekly acceded to Trump’s latest authoritarian ploy, he’d lose whatever little confidence Democratic voters still have in him.
Besides, why should the minority party support what appears to be a theater production to gratify a strongman’s vanity? Video is circulating today of FBI and DEA agents walking the beat in Georgetown, of all places, which is a bit like starting a crackdown on crime in Southern California in Beverly Hills. National Guard troops have reportedly been deployed to the National Mall, the capital’s tourist hub, for no ostensible reason “other than to put Trump’s orders on display,” as ABC News put it.
Democrats are not obliged to volunteer as extras in a new episode of The Trump Show.
Still, “no f—ing way” without more doesn’t cut it—and it really doesn’t cut it alongside tone-deaf hosannas to how supposedly safe the city is. “I walk around all the time” in Washington, Schumer crowed in yesterday’s interview. “I wake up early in the morning sometimes and take a nice walk as the sun is rising, around some of the Capitol and the other monuments and things. And I feel perfectly safe.”
That’s super, but Schumer happens to enjoy a security detail as the Senate’s minority leader. Even if he didn’t, it’s idiotic of him to judge the overall safety of the city by celebrating its most well-protected areas. And it’s sub-idiotic in any context for a prominent Democrat to come off as callous about crime, given his party’s well-earned image as indifferent to public disorder.
Democrats need a better response to Trump’s demand for long-term control of the D.C. police force than “no f—ing way.” What should that response be?
‘It’s a trap.’
I wrote yesterday about the lose-lose situations the party keeps finding itself in, partly due to Trump’s knack for demagoguery. But only partly.
Whether to extend the president’s authority over law enforcement in Washington is a paradigm case. If Schumer’s conference yields to him and grants an extension in order to appear tough on crime, the left-wing base will accuse it of being soft on fascism. If Democrats refuse an extension in order to appear tough on fascism, many Americans will accuse them of being soft on crime.
But there are better and worse ways to address that dilemma, and dismissively insisting that “I feel perfectly safe” about a level of crime that’s objectively alarming must be the worst way possible.
Even within the friendly confines of MSNBC, it comes off as tin-eared. “You don’t brag about a rising murder rate,” former Hardball host Chris Matthews told Morning Joe on Thursday of the many liberals sanguinely touting the more encouraging crime numbers in D.C. “Democrats are … falling into the trap of defending what’s indefensible.” To which host Mika Brzezinski replied, “It’s a trap, yes. It’s a trap.”
Uh, sure, I suppose—but it’s a trap largely of their own making. This is why I say Trump deserves only partial credit for engineering these lose-lose situations Democrats find themselves in. They don’t just make it easy for him; they do most of the engineering themselves.
The grimmest thing you’ll read today is S.E. Cupp’s spot-on, 10-step synopsis of how Schumer’s party squandered trust on safety issues ranging from immigration to shoplifting rings to homelessness and public drug use to violent crime. Really, we can boil it down to three steps: Ignore the problem until Republicans take it up, then minimize it, then encourage Americans to get used to it as a nothing-to-be-done inevitability of modern life.
If you had to reduce the problem Cupp describes to four words, you couldn’t do better than the most powerful Democrat in Congress burbling “I feel perfectly safe.” To paraphrase David Frum’s point in 2019 about border enforcement: If liberals insist that only fascists will fight crime, then voters will hire fascists to do the job liberals refuse to do.
In fact, they already have.
Democrats are now stuck, having long ago forfeited the initiative to Trump. Even if they cooked up some reasonably satisfying compromise with the White House now over crime in D.C., Americans would still be left to reflect that the problem never would have been addressed had Schumer’s party been left to its own devices. It took Trump to force the issue; the modern Democratic Party simply won’t be proactive about public safety problems unless cornered.
So I’m afraid “no f—ing way” won’t suffice as a response to the president’s demand for long-term authority over Washington law enforcement. A more acceptable answer would be “we’re ready to work with Republicans to reduce crime, but no f—ing way will we ratify imperious authoritarian crackdowns on American cities.”
What shape might a bipartisan bargain along those lines take?
No kings.
Democrats do have some leverage to make demands here. Polling is on their side—sort of.
Granted, on the question of how bad crime in D.C. is, the “I feel perfectly safe” contingent is out to lunch. A Washington Post survey published in May found 91 percent of locals agree it’s at least a “moderately” serious problem, while 50 percent call it “extremely” or “very” serious.
But Americans dislike the president’s methods. A YouGov national poll from June found 47 percent opposed to Trump’s decision to deploy Marines to Los Angeles following immigration protests there versus 34 percent in favor. A new poll from the same outfit released a few days ago saw an identical split on deploying the National Guard in D.C. and placing the city’s police force under White House control. In both cases, independents opposed the tactics by lopsided margins.
So the lose-lose position that Democrats supposedly find themselves in isn’t as hopeless as it seems. They’ll lose if they let the right turn the D.C. debate into a binary choice between anarchy on the one hand and authoritarianism on the other—which, ironically, is Trump’s own attempt to normalize something malign as “a nothing-to-be-done inevitability of modern life.” Troops in America’s streets or Mad Max-style chaos: To hear the president tell it, it’s simply one or the other.
The obvious move for Schumer is to meet Trump halfway on crime while trying to turn the public’s skepticism of the president’s tactics to his advantage. If I were him, I’d invite Republicans to name a dollar amount that they think is needed to improve law enforcement’s ability to fight crime nationally, beginning in D.C., and then I’d offer to double it.
But in return, I’d demand their cooperation on reforms to limit the president’s powers to deploy the military on U.S. soil. The solution to crime is not monarchy.
No other demand will do, I think. If instead Democrats were to offer funding for police in exchange for some extraneous political priority like, say, undoing the unpopular Medicaid cuts in the One Big Beautiful Bill, they’d be accused of using crime as leverage for partisan purposes. How many Americans is Chuck Schumer willing to see murdered in order to get his way on food stamps?
Even worse would be Democrats trying to tie the issue somehow to the Jeffrey Epstein saga, as Schumer has begun to do. “This is again just a distraction,” he said of Trump in yesterday’s interview. “He’s afraid of Epstein. He’s afraid of all that. … We are not going to give up on Epstein.” I regret to inform the senator, and all of you, that voters don’t give much of a damn about Epstein and haven’t since the issue erupted last month. And dismissing the D.C. takeover as a “distraction” instead of recognizing it as the authoritarian frog-boil that it is inadvertently aids Trump by encouraging the public not to worry about it.
Deploying American soldiers against Americans isn’t a “distraction,” it’s the point of Trump’s presidency. And so Democrats should use the leverage they have over extending his D.C. takeover to make it harder for him to do that—politically, at least.
I’m not naive. I realize that congressional Republicans will never agree to work with the left to limit the president’s most frightening powers. Probably 85 percent of my newsletters dating back to 2022 have dwelt to some degree on the fact that the GOP is now an autocracy and wants America to be one too. A bill introduced by Democrats to limit Trump’s domestic military authority wouldn’t approach 60 votes in the Senate. I’d be mildly surprised if it received 50.
But politically, it would serve the important purpose of placing Trump and the GOP on the defensive in the D.C. takeover. We’re willing to bankroll beefed-up policing everywhere, Schumer might say. (He should be eager to say it to start rebuilding goodwill with the working class.) But no president, especially this one, can be trusted with the sweeping powers granted under the Insurrection Act to use the military on American soil. It’s time to reform it. Past time, frankly.
And that permanent standing “Domestic Civil Disturbance Quick Reaction Force” that Trump wants at the Pentagon? That’s not happening either. It’s fine to have a contingent of National Guard troops on standby in case of rioting, but that can and should be under the control of America’s governors, as the Guard usually is. Democrats might agree to supply funding for a separate force for each state with the proviso that the president will have no authority to commandeer it.
In fact, I’d be open to rescinding the executive’s power to take control of the Guard under any circumstance without the local governor’s consent. There are good arguments against that position, but an America where George Wallace is in the White House rather than the governor’s mansion is an America that should revisit its thinking on the subject.
Republicans can have a vigorous bipartisan congressional effort to fight crime, or they can have a dictator, but they can’t have both: That would be my offer to the GOP if I were advising Democrats. It’s the best I can do to turn a lose-lose into a win-win, making public safety a liberal priority and forcing right-wing proto-fascists to explain why Trump’s power to deploy troops internally is so sacred that they’ll turn down a fat check from Chuck Schumer for America’s police in order to preserve it.
Will it work?
“It won’t work,” you might say. “The public won’t welcome Democrats’ ultimatum as a check on authoritarianism. Many will treat it as a sinister attempt to facilitate the left-wing riots of tomorrow by reducing Trump’s ability to stop them.”
Yeah, they probably will. This country is cooked, you may have heard. “Anarchy wins unless Trump can deploy the Marines to Beverly Hills” is a pitch-perfect summary of the sophistication with which the great and good American people now approach serious problems.
It’s worse than that, actually. Not only would Schumer need to worry about the general public siding with Trump if Democrats forced a “less crime or more dictatorship?” gut check, he’d need to worry about the progressive dopes in his own base throwing a tantrum over Democrats working with Republicans to fund cops. We’re only five years removed from “defund the police,” remember. Some of these people are arguing right now that the current rate of crime in the capital is acceptable.
The Democratic Party, in short, is caught between two groups of postliberal idiots: one that doesn’t care enough about tyranny and another that doesn’t care enough about disorder. Whatever its leaders end up doing will probably backfire.
But if that’s too pessimistic, I’ll remind you here that many Americans do worry about Trump’s authoritarian ambitions. The audience for a “less crime or more dictatorship?” Democratic frame for what’s happening in D.C. might be larger and more receptive than we (well, I) think.
And even if Schumer foolishly sticks with his “no f—ing way” approach to the president’s stunt, this dispute probably won’t matter come November 2026. There is an issue that’s badly hurting Trump, after all, and it’s poised to get worse, possibly to the point of crowding out all other policy priorities. Modern Americans might be fine with autocracy, but they’re emphatically not fine with “veggie-flation.”
Chances are fair that, by next fall, we’ll have soldiers stationed in every major blue-state city, voters will be perfectly okay with it—and they’ll still go out and rock Republicans at the polls. What a country.
