DC is also the capital of the country and a major tourist destination, and makes a terrible impression being covered with homeless encampments.
Democrats, more than anyone else, should want Trump to flood D.C. with police and turn it into Disney Land. When tourists from Wisconsin or Idaho come to visit the nation's capital, you want them to have a positive impression of what the federal government can build!
You take care of the homeless (and not the homeless 'problem') by accessible mental healthcare, by having good social programs and by ensuring that healthcare costs are equally distributed across society rather than used to bankrupt individuals who then become one of many feedlines into homelessness. Of course that would never happen to you so you see a homeless problem where there are instead many other problems.
For a large swath of the USA homelessness is a real possibility and whether or not they will end up in that situation is mostly a game of chance.
Just endless promises from liberals about how they will fix problems with more liberalism. But I've lived in half a dozen deep blue cities and the only one that came close to actually solving any problems was New York City at the tail end of 19 years of Giuliani and Bloomberg's aggressive policing. Everything else has been empty promises and actually making things worse in most cases.
NYC had a mob problem, and Giuliani and later Bloomberg addressed this, somewhat effectively. Still, when I visited NYC in the early 2000's it still wasn't a safe city by my standards, but those were informed more by what I experienced in other countries than the USA. Washington DC currently does not have a mob problem, and isn't nearly as crime ridden as you make it out to be in your comments in this thread. Yes, homeless people exist. And they exist because of various policies, including federal ones that steer people towards homelessness if their lives get upended. Other affluent countries do not have these problems. Of course people in those other affluent countries typically pay more taxes.
If you really do not like the liberal policies that cities tend to have then maybe you should vote with your feet and move to a rural area or to a city that is run by the Republicans? Then you can be with the people who see things your way.
Even if you believe that the ordering the National Guard to DC is going to address homelessness in some positive way, Trump doesn’t care about that. Mobilizing troops to DC is the latest step in his efforts to dismantle democratic government and consolidate power.
Cleaning up DC is item #11 on Trump’s 2024 platform: https://www.donaldjtrump.com/platform (“REBUILD OUR CITIES, INCLUDING WASHINGTON DC, MAKING THEM SAFE, CLEAN, AND BEAUTIFUL AGAIN.”).
Your complaint isn’t really about “dismantling democracy,” but instead about Trump running roughshod over all the Democrats who run DC even when the people elect a Republican President, such as the anti-democratic permanent civil service. DC is the people’s city. It is constitutionally a federal enclave, and under the DC Home Rule Act the President has the right to federalize the police. Trump did so to carry out the policies people voted for.
No I mean small-d democratic rights which Trump has been eroding as he consolidates power - retaliating against free speech, deploying federal forces against protestors, suspension of due process, concentration camps, and undermining the independence of the judiciary by attacking judges. By limiting our focus to the legal justification of the militarizing of DC we miss the big picture - erosion of small-d democratic norms and processes in our country.
Your proposal is that the military response is primarily to combat homeless encampments in DC, that this is appropriate, and that this won’t happen elsewhere because this problem is unique to DC?
It's not just a military response, but also federalizing the police force. He can go after both the homeless encampments and the gangs. This is appropriate because:
1) Americans deserve a capital city that's at least as safe and orderly as similarly affluent cities like Austin or San Diego, which have homicide rates one-third or one-quarter as high as D.C. over the last decade--even excluding the COVID-era spike in homicides.
2) The orderliness of a city is primarily an issue of policing and incarceration. You don't need to pass national gun control, or address "root causes"--just take gang members off the streets and put them in prison.
3) The problem isn't unique to D.C., but D.C. is an outlier because (a) the aesthetics of D.C. are important because it's the nation's capital; and (b) Trump has express statutory authority to federalize the D.C. police force under the DC Home Rule Act. DC thus can serve as a testbed for Republican policing in a major city, most of which won't elect Republican mayors.
> least as safe and orderly as similarly affluent cities like Austin or San Diego
Neither of those cities are very safe and orderly. Didn’t 3 people just get killed in Austin yesterday? DC is also tiny compared to the outlying cities that surround it. Baltimore anyone?
This is probably just more distraction to get the news stories away from those Epstein files.
Pre-covid, Austin’s homicide rate was around 4 per 100k. San Diego’s is typically under 4x DC’s never got below 14 per 100k (in 2012) and spiked up to 40 per 100k in 2023.
DC is 20% more populous than Baltimore. The nearest city larger than DC is Philly, 140 miles away.
I left China in 2016 and now I live in Seattle. I lived in Austin for a summer in 2001 (the summer before 9/11) and it was…hard, I had to evict a squatter from my sublet, the property crime was high and people skulked around in the morning looking through everyone’s trash. Anyways, not sure if your argument is that it is better or worse now, but definitely not a place I want to live in ever again.
There are 6.3 million in the greater DC area, DC is a small part of what goes on in that region.
> makes a terrible impression being covered with homeless encampments.
As a DC resident, this would be comically wrong if the stakes weren’t so high. Even if you’re only talking about the downtown areas where tourists go, you have to go looking for a handful of places where homeless people hang out. The city has had problems providing housing capacity after the pandemic but that spike has been ebbing and it’s not something the National Guard can help with unless they’re deploying field housing and a kitchen.
I don't know where the homeless encampments are, but I've been going to DC for work every 6 months for the past 3 years and have not seen any homeless. Last time there I took a very long evening walk from the Lincoln Memorial to Congress and then back to through the Penn Quarter all the way to Kennedy Center, late in the evening, all prime tourist areas, and didn't see a single homeless person.
I'm sure they exist somewhere -- but downtown DC is definitely not "covered" with homeless encampments.
The solution to homelessness is not to bring in the military and “send the homeless far away” (to paraphrase what Trump said). The solution to homelessness is to provide housing and support.
The U.S. government has been broken for years (under both parties). We can’t sweep our problems under the rug by making D.C. look good. Also, I’m pretty sure the majority of people from Wisconsin or Idaho who vote for Republicans don’t do it because they went on a trip to D.C. and thought it was terrible.
Homeless people are people too. The government owes them its support just like it owes support to the finance guy who goes to work in a suit. "Use guns to make sure that wealthy people never have to see a poor person" is horrifying to me.
I love how you just switched seamlessly from “homeless people” to “poor people” as if they’re the same group. The serial offenders and chronically homeless are a distinct 1-2% of the population.[1] They terrorize ordinary poor people far more than they bother rich people. The police already clear the homeless encampments out of the neighborhoods where the finance guys and tech bros live. This is about extending that benefit to the other 97% of the population.
[1] This is obviously true, because every city has poor people, but not every city allows homeless people and serial criminals to intrude on the public sphere. Tokyo has many, many people who are quite poor by the material standards of DC. Tokyo isn’t clean and orderly because it somehow got rid of all the poor people.
And what's the national guard supposed to do with the homeless? Beat them senseless on the sidewalk? Don't you think that would leave a much worse impression on hypothetical tourists? Jesus fucking Christ.
Bizarrely, tourism is way down since they've started arresting foreigners at the border for no reason, so maybe start there if you care about that? But you probably only care about issues that are convenient to your talking points.
In fairness they are also talking about using FBI special agents to assist with the homeless problem. I, uh... can't imagine that will actually happen but who the hell knows as this point.
> makes a terrible impression being covered with homeless encampments.
If only there were ways of working with unhoused people rather than have the NG disappear them…
> Democrats, more than anyone else, should want Trump to flood D.C. with police and turn it into Disney Land.
Do Democrats have a special affinity for theme parks that their Republican counterparts do not?
Were I to travel to D.C. for leisure, I would expect to see unhoused people because it’s a city. But I’d be exceedingly put-off by military personnel patrolling the streets.
> Were I to travel to D.C. for leisure, I would expect to see unhoused people because it’s a city.
You've really been stockholm-syndromed by this godforsaken country and Western culture's persistent aversion to enforcing the law against anyone perceived as less fortunate. This wouldn't be acceptable in peer Eastern countries' capitals like Singapore, Tokyo, or Beijing
DC is also the capital of the country and a major tourist destination, and makes a terrible impression being covered with homeless encampments.
Democrats, more than anyone else, should want Trump to flood D.C. with police and turn it into Disney Land. When tourists from Wisconsin or Idaho come to visit the nation's capital, you want them to have a positive impression of what the federal government can build!