How To Prepare for Trump Taking Over Your City
A leading Democratic mayor has a game plan. But he also has concerns that the national party isn’t doing more to support them.
A Shining City Under Siege
ON MONDAY MORNING, President Donald Trump stood at the lectern in the White House briefing room and portrayed the nation’s capital as a crime-infested war zone that had become so dangerous that he had no other option but to declare an emergency, take over the local police, and deploy the National Guard.
Of course, his depictions of Washington, D.C. were wildly misleading. The city has its troubles. But it has also seen a significant decrease in crime over the last two years. And while D.C. might be an easy target for Trump given that it has limited self-governance, it’s unlikely that he will stop there. After all, he’s not hiding his ambitions.
“We have other cities also that are bad. Very bad. You look at Chicago, how bad it is. You look at Los Angeles, how bad it is,” Trump said. “New York has a problem. And then you have of course Baltimore and Oakland. We don’t even mention that anymore, they’re so far gone.”
It’s worth noting that all of the cities Trump mentioned have seen homicide and violent crime decline this year. They’re also all in Democratic-run states, placing leadership there in an unprecedented situation: anticipating the possibility of some sort of confrontation with federal authorities.
I wanted to get a better sense of how mayors in particular are preparing for this possibility and what they plan to do if the president does, in fact, deploy the National Guard against their will. So I called up Justin Bibb, the mayor of Cleveland and the head of the Democratic Mayors Association. As the president of the DMA, Bibb has a good sense of what mayors from big and small cities alike are thinking. Many of them are genuinely alarmed about how far Trump will take things and are yearning to see some cohesion and preemptive support from Democrats in D.C. What that would look like. . . . You’ll have to read on. My conversation with Bibb, which has been lightly edited for length and clarity, is below.
LAUREN EGAN: What was your initial reaction to Trump’s press conference on Monday?
JUSTIN BIBB: I was disgusted. It’s unfortunate, just another distraction from this administration. And more than anything, I just have a lot of empathy for my colleague and friend, Mayor Bowser from D.C. She’s got to walk a rope where, you know, D.C. doesn’t have full statehood, they just cut a billion dollars out of her budget in this ‘Big Ugly Bill.’ But despite all the craziness, she’s still able to reduce violent crime by over 30 percent.
There’s still more work to do. Any mayor will tell you that one shooting is too many, one homicide is too many. But what we don’t need is an administration in the White House being counterproductive in our efforts to address public safety in our cities.
EGAN: What were you hearing from other Democratic mayors as you’ve tried to make sense of this?
BIBB: A lot of us have been talking over the last couple days. Number one, for my fellow black mayors, we were disgusted at the fact that he’s essentially targeting cities led by black mayors. Number two, the common consensus among any mayor I talked to is