ESSAY: Trump vs. cities
What the federal takeover of Washington, D.C. reveals
On Monday, President Trump ordered the National Guard to Washington, D.C., where he said 800 troops would help address an “out of control” crime crisis that turns out to be invented. Asserting “I alone can fix it” control over D.C. police, Trump painted a picture of “roving mobs,” “caravans of mass youth,” and “bloodthirsty criminals.” FYI, violent crime in D.C. is at a 30-year low.
Trump is not self-made, but his reality always has been.
Stoking fear of cities has been a focus of Trump’s second term. He also deployed the National Guard to Los Angeles to contain protests of his Gestapo-like immigration raids. He is openly intervening in the New York City mayoral race by ginning up fear of the Democratic nominee, Zohran Mamdani, as “a 100% Communist Lunatic” who would usher in chaos and disorder. Trump can’t keep “Chicago” out of his mouth.
It is strange living in a big city — New York, in my case — and hearing outsiders tell me how dangerous it is. It’s as if I started warning of cupcake poisonings at Sunday church socials across rural America — a surprise to anybody currently eating one.
However, many of Trump’s critics stop the analysis with the fact of his “truths” being false. The more interesting question is how those invented truths work. And in this case, he is not randomly stoking a fear of cities in people who don’t live there. He is doing so because cities have a strange power to give focus to diffuse anxieties about where the nation is headed.
A more generalized national anxiety that the country’s complexion is changing, that white people are being replaced by immigrants, can be given flesh by a story of foreign migrants camping out on city streets. A more generalized anxiety about gender norms changing and children learning things parents don’t understand can be given flesh by a headline about a parade of drag queens. A more generalized anxiety that the country has grown ungovernable can be given flesh by exaggerated tales of cities overrun by junkies and criminals.
In a time of growing inequity and intense status anxiety, the city also looms in the imagination of many far away as something both above and beneath them. It overawes them, and it sneers at them. It makes them feel underdressed and in need of a better haircut on business trips or tourist jaunts with the family, and it makes them feel grateful not to live in that secular den of filth. It is home to wealth they cannot dream of, and homeless encampments that make them shake their heads and count their blessings and clutch their purses and store up anecdotes to unspool at the club back home.
And, of course, there is this primordial anxiety: Cities are where so many of the country’s children end up when their families fail them. When kids are shamed and tormented and sent to conversion therapy for being who they are or loving who they love, where do they go? Cities. In a sense, I understand the resentment, because we who live in cities show up those families who cannot fulfill their most basic duty. We love their kids when they can’t — or won’t. We pick up where their love left off.
Trump, with his ear for hatred and fear and bitterness, taps into these feelings and makes cities his foil. But perhaps no one should be more afraid of cities than he.
He doesn’t want people thinking for themselves, but in cities, people, separated from the customs and prejudices and folk ideas of other places they derive from, tend to do just that. He wants people to believe that people who are different cannot live together in peace, and in cities people do that, too. Check out the halal Chinese takeout joint near me. He wants Americans to thirst for a restored past, but in cities people chase the future and tend not to be destabilized by the new. He is waging a war on immigrants, but the immigrant spirit — of uprooting, moving, seeking — defines cities. He wants a population of docile subjects, but cities are highly opinionated places; the people drawn to them are often the ones less capable of herd behavior.
Rural America is often, tiresomely, portrayed as Real America. But it’s always seemed to me that America doesn’t end where the traffic swells and the buildings rise. Cities are America. In cities, multiracial democracy isn’t an abstraction. It’s your commute.
Think of Rome, Paris, Istanbul, Mumbai. Cities have often been around a lot longer than the countries around them, and they often outlast nations, empires, reichs. Our cities will still be here when he is gone. And people will still be living in all the ways his small mind cannot fathom — freely, loudly, kaleidoscopically, tolerantly, jazzily.
In the meantime, if Trump doesn’t feel safe in Washington, he’s welcome to leave — the city, and the job.
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Great essay, as usual, Anand. I tuned into morning Joe this morning and Joe is pontificating, with full throat, on the extent to which DC is a crime ridden cesspool. Makes me crazy that some in the corporate media allow themselves to be dragged into Trump’s trap. Embarrassing. If you are on there soon can you make the point in an equally full throated way that THIS IS NOT THE POINT. IT IS A FASCIST TRAP AND A RUSE. (That was me screaming at my radio before I tuned the dial. 😏)
Halal and Chinese. But we have taxidermy and cheese… I have heard that crime is way up in Palm Beach. Billionaires are fiercely fighting over the few remaining laborers who will make their beds and serve them lunch. Call in the national guard, I say!