President Trump is threatening to federalize the District of Columbia — and the catalyst is an unusual one.
In the early hours of Sunday, a young man was allegedly beaten in an attempted carjacking in the nation’s capital.
The man in question is Edward Coristine, who had a burst of fame earlier this year owing to the combination of his role in Elon Musk’s quasi-official Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and his nickname: “Big Balls.”
Trump on Tuesday afternoon posted a message on social media that included a photo of a bloodied Coristine and the president’s sentiments that crime in Washington was “totally out of control.”
Although Trump neither named Coristine nor made any reference to his DOGE role, he added that “if D.C. doesn’t get its act together, and quickly, we will have no choice but to take Federal control of the City, and run this City how it should be run.”
Asked at a White House event with Apple’s Tim Cook on Wednesday afternoon about overturning home rule for D.C., Trump replied, “We’re going to look at that. In fact, the lawyers are already studying it.”
Those remarks mark a new phase in Trump’s tumultuous relationship with the city.
Here are the main takeaways.
What can Trump do?
Trump would struggle to fully federalize D.C. because doing so would require a repeal of the law that gives Washington its current measure of self-government — the Home Rule Act of 1973.
Repeal would need the approval of the House and the Senate. Trump might well be able to get such a measure through the lower chamber, but he would struggle mightily to overcome Democratic resistance in the Senate. Trump would need a filibuster-proof majority of 60 votes, and there are only 53 Republicans.
However, as The Washington Post and others have noted, a president does have other powers that can be used at his discretion.
One enables Trump to take control of the district’s police — the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) — on a temporary basis. Asked about that on Wednesday afternoon, Trump replied, “We’re considering it, yeah.”
He could also call out the National Guard, which he also suggested Wednesday afternoon was under consideration.
In full states, that power rests with the governor — though of course that did not prevent Trump from calling out the National Guard in California in June, despite the opposition of Gov. Gavin Newsom (D).
Trump also has all kinds of other leverage to get what he wants in D.C., owing to how closely the city’s fortunes are tied to the federal government.
But full federalization seems a big stretch.
Violent crime is in decline in Washington
Trump’s claim that violent crime is “out of control” is a subjective judgment. But if his intent was to suggest that such crime is rising, that’s incorrect.
The latest figures from the MPD show violent crime overall as having declined 26 percent relative to this time last year.
Declines are seen across every category: Robberies are down 29 percent; assaults with a deadly weapon are down 20 percent; and sex abuse, the category that includes rape, is down 48 percent.
Murders are down 12 percent.
Those figures are all the more impressive because the crime figures last year were markedly down from the year before. Homicides fell 32 percent in 2024 as a whole relative to 2023.
The 2024 figures were heralded by the Department of Justice in early January — when former President Biden was still in the White House — as representing the lowest level of violent crime in the district “in over 30 years.”
A delicate balancing act for the D.C. mayor
District of Columbia Mayor Muriel Bowser (D) was a Trump foe in his first term.
Her stance was most clearly on display in 2020 when she greenlighted the renaming of a street within view of the White House as “Black Lives Matter Plaza,” following the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis.
But Bowser has been more conciliatory this time around, as seen when she praised the efforts of a task force that was set up by Trump in a March executive order.
Much of her changed tone is to do with economics. During last year’s election campaign, Trump pledged to move up to 100,000 federal jobs out of the D.C. region, which would be fiscally disastrous for the city. His cuts to agencies are already having an effect.
Bowser’s position is also a reflection of how much sway the Republican-controlled Congress has over the district.
The D.C. budget got a $1.1 billion hole blown in it in March, when a federal government funding bill forced a return to 2024 budget levels.
Trump’s words this week call Bowser’s strategy into question.
Her relatively mild approach to Trump in his second term also holds its own political dangers in a fiercely Democratic city. Former Vice President Kamala Harris received almost 93 percent of the vote in the district last November.
D.C. has long been a GOP target
Trump has lashed out at Washington plenty of times before — and not only in terms of supposedly “draining the swamp.”
In 2023, he complained about driving through the city and seeing “the filth and the decay, and all of the broken buildings and walls and the graffiti.”
During the same period he also judged the district to be a “filthy and crime ridden embarrassment to our nation.”
This time around, Trump has allies who want to push the antagonism toward the district even further.
Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) and Rep. Andy Ogles (R-Tenn.) earlier this year introduced legislation aimed at repealing the Home Rule Act.
But clashes between Republicans and the district are nothing new.
For a start, the long-running campaign for full statehood is adamantly opposed by the GOP because its success would in effect guarantee two extra Democratic senators.
Back in the days of D.C.’s most controversial mayor, the late Marion Barry (D), a GOP-led Congress took back much of the control over the district’s finances, hamstringing Barry in his fourth and final term.
Separate from partisan politics per se, the history of D.C.’s relationship with the federal government is deeply intertwined with race and racism.
The city had a measure of self-government in the early 19th century — until the right to vote was extended to include Black men, whereupon Congress seized control within a few years.
Between then and the 1970s, presidential appointees ran the city — an increasingly untenable paternalism in a city that was then majority-Black. Black Washingtonians are no longer an outright majority, but they continue to represent a plurality of the district’s population.
A strange coincidence
The fact that the precipitating incident for Trump’s latest volleys at the district revolves around Coristine is a curious coincidence.
It also provided some opportunity for mischief for headline writers. “Trump threatens D.C. takeover to avenge ‘Big Balls’” was New York Magazine’s framing of the story.
There is no doubt that an incident occurred.
Two people, both aged 15, have been charged with unarmed carjacking in the matter.
There is also no evidence that the incident had anything to do with Coristine’s role in the government or his position with DOGE, which has come under tremendous criticism in Washington, D.C.
If any other 19-year-old had been the target of an alleged carjacking in the Capitol city, however, it is unclear that it would have received the attention of this incident.
