“Sean Dunn—who, at the time, was an employee for the Justice Department—threw a Subway sandwich at a cop and was subsequently charged with felony assault of a federal law enforcement officer.
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the federal government sent “20 police officers to [Dunn’s] home” to rearrest him on a federal warrant
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The government’s disproportionate response to this offense epitomizes why Trump’s plan appears to be, at least for now, more political theater than a real solutions-oriented approach.
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one murder is still one too many, and some neighborhoods—primarily Wards 7 and 8 across the Anacostia River—disproportionately struggle to get crime under control. Police clearance rates, meanwhile, are abysmal: Law enforcement in 2024 made an arrest in just 60 percent of homicide cases and 31 percent of non-fatal shootings. In other words, if you kill or shoot someone, there’s a really good chance you’ll get away with it. (That problem, however, is a national one.)
Put differently, there’s work to be done. Crime is a serious problem. And serious problems demand serious solutions: where resources are targeted and used effectively to deter—and solve—crimes that violently infringe on the rights of others. It is not serious, then, to use resources to patrol Georgetown, one of the safest neighborhoods in D.C., or the National Mall, where crime is a rarity, while the highest-crime neighborhoods have reportedly not yet seen an increased law enforcement presence. Or to send nearly two dozen government agents to rearrest someone accused of throwing a sandwich, instead of just letting him turn himself in for his appearance in federal court.”
The clearest success that worked against Covid was the vaccines, and it is the main thing Trump, RFK, MAGA, and MAHA are attacking. These substantial attacks will result in deaths.
“The president deployed nearly 2,000 law enforcement officers into a city supposedly teeming with criminals. And yet the effort netted some 380 arrests in 10 days, and many of the charges the administration has bragged about are for low-level nonviolent offenses, such as possession of narcotics or carrying a pistol without a license.”
“The Trump administration is seeking a 10 percent stake in Intel, Bloomberg reported this week, which would involve converting some or all of the company’s CHIPS Act grants into equity in the company. The exact terms of the deal remain unclear”
“More than 2,200 National Guard soldiers and airmen, a majority from out of state, have been deployed to D.C. to support what Trump has framed as a concerted effort to tackle crime and homelessness in the nation’s capital.”
Trump and Republicans for years lied and exaggerated about Democrats using the justice system against them. Now, in full honesty, Trump repeatedly uses the justice system against people who criticize him. U.S. democracy is on shaky grounds.
“President Donald Trump threatened to open an investigation targeting Chris Christie over the former New Jersey governor’s decade-old “Bridgegate” scandal after Christie criticized Trump on television earlier in the day.
The threat came just days after the FBI searched the home and office of another Trump critic, former National Security Adviser John Bolton, as part of an open criminal investigation. Trump lashed out at the former friend-turned-foe Christie in an evening Aug. 24 post on Truth Social, remarking that he just watched “Sloppy Chris Christie” on ABC’s This Week.”
“The Trump administration’s 50 percent tariffs on imported steel and aluminum were expanded this week to cover hundreds of imports that plainly are not steel or aluminum. Among the items targeted by the new tariffs: dairy products like milk and cream, as well as gasoline and other fuels, fire extinguishers, baby strollers, furniture, engines, and motorcycles. In short, anything that contains steel or aluminum or that is (as with dairy products) transported or stored in steel or aluminum containers could now be subject to those massive import taxes.”
“The initial images of bored Drug Enforcement Administration agents strolling past perplexed joggers on the National Mall were more clownish than carceral. Local street resistance to the occupation was limited to a drunk guy throwing a sandwich at a federal agent.
But inevitably, as this operation has dragged on, things have taken a darker turn. The sandwich-thrower was overcharged and rearrested in a needless, publicized show of force.
Masked federal agents have set up an unconstitutional checkpoint, violently arrested at least one delivery driver, and filmed themselves tearing down a banner protesting their presence in the city. Each day, more and more National Guard members pour into the capital.
The conversation about Trump’s declared crime emergency has understandably, albeit unhelpfully, provoked a lot of discourse about how safe D.C. is, whether a federalized local police department will make it safer, whether federal agents are being deployed in the right places and going after the right crimes, and on and on.
This incessant crime conversation has distracted from just how un-American Trump’s show of force in the nation’s capital is.
Uniformed troops and masked federal agents doing routine law enforcement at the command of the president is just not how we do things in the United States.
The entire point of the U.S. Constitution is to prevent the federal government from becoming a despotism, and one of the primary ways it does this is by limiting how many men with guns it has at its disposal.”