My hair is not on fire. I know because I just checked. But it should be.
President Trump – words that alone should instantly ignite the follicles of anyone who reads or utters them – has “temporarily” taken over the police force and all law enforcement responsibilities in my hometown of Washington, DC. As if the August heat wasn’t bad enough, now DC must suffer the hot orange breath of Trump and his cabinet clown car as they play out their childhood cops-and-robbers fantasies, but with the added bonus of heavily armed National Guard troops whose training is in anything but urban policing.
The nation’s capital has long been used by Republicans to show how tough they are on crime and people of colour, largely because, as a fiefdom of the federal government with virtually no self-governing authority, the city literally cannot fight back. Any time the occupant of the White House wants to kick down, DC’s chin is close and always poised to be punted.
Both The Washington Post and The New York Times called Trump’s law enforcement takeover “extraordinary”, which I suppose it is in the narrow context of a president extending federal power over a US city. But in any other context it’s business as usual, and our collective national problem is we’re treating it as such. Trump’s accidental genius is, in appropriately simian behaviour given his intellect and emotional maturity, to throw so much poop at America’s favourite walls, windows and doors that we can’t clean it all off, so we clean none of it. And he has a band of bully-enablers eager to smear the poop he flings across the national landscape so fervently, there’s no way to keep up with the mess.
Americans are, certainly in relative terms, struggling right now. No one knows what will happen next, because the depravity of Trump and his toadies seems so far to have no limits. Nor does his fictitious hyperbole. He’s going to “rescue our nation’s capital from crime, bloodshed, bedlam and squalor and worse”. Don’t try to imagine what could be worse than bedlam and squalor; it just spoils the magic.
“Our capital city has been overtaken by violent gangs and bloodthirsty criminals, roving mobs of wild youth, drugged-out maniacs and homeless people, and we’re not going to let it happen any more.” Except, uh, facts. Violent crime in DC reached a 30-year low in 2024, a trend that has continued into 2025. Attorney General Pam Bondi’s bottle-blonde locks should have burst into flames when she stepped to the podium and said, with a level of certainty accessible only to the truly delusional: “Let me be crystal clear: crime in DC is ending and ending today!”
But Trump has made life in the US more difficult and uncertain, and as a result most Americans have a calendar so filled with survival they don’t have time or energy to produce a level of outrage appropriate to the current threat our own government poses to our democracy and the relatively cushy recliner we’ve sat in for decades.
We’re like the proverbial frog in the pot of cold water that allows itself to be boiled alive by gradual heating, except that we’ve been dropped in already boiling water and are too busy making a living and looking at our phones to hop out. Speaking of proverbial animals, Trump is like the blind squirrel who found an acorn in that he’s right about one thing, but of course in the wrong manner: this is an emergency, and we have to start acting like it.
We need to be screaming 24/7, because Trump 2.0 is democracy’s zombie apocalypse. I don’t have an answer for what or where or how we should be screaming, I just know we need to scream as loud as we can for as long as we can. As much as we crave normality, the more we act like any of this is normal, the more we risk it becoming so.
Jonathan Kronstadt is a freelance writer working in Washington, DC.
