Home Rule For DC!

Just this past week, it looks like Trump has put another project on the front burner: he's going to reverse "home rule" for the District of Columbia. This was a major civil rights agenda item when I lived in Bethesda, just across the border in Maryland, with my family in the 1960s. The photo above speaks volumes: the only visible white figure marching with Dr King is Paul Moore Jr, Episcopal Suffragan Bishop of Washington, scion of one of the country's wealthiest families, later unmasked as a serial sexual predator. What on earth is going on here?

Even at the time, Moore fit the type of the Northern philanthropist "helping" Southern blacks depicted in Ralph Ellison's 1947 Invisible Man. What was in it for that rich white guy? We've come to understand this only very slowly, but it looks like Trump has had insight into this, among many other things.

President Donald Trump threatened Tuesday to have the federal government take control of Washington, D.C., after an assault on a well-known original staffer for the Department of Government Efficiency in the nation's capital over the weekend.

Edward Coristine, also known by his online name, “Big Balls,” and a woman characterized in a police report as his significant other were the victims of an unarmed attempted carjacking early Sunday.

. . . “Local ‘youths’ and gang members, some only 14, 15, and 16-years-old, are randomly attacking, mugging, maiming, and shooting innocent Citizens, at the same time knowing that they will be almost immediately released,” Trump wrote on Truth Social, saying minors as young as 14 should be tried as adults.

. . . “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, and put criminals on notice that they’re not going to get away with it anymore,” he added.

At the time, Congressional oversight of the District of Columbia, often exercised via segregationist senior Southern Democrats, was thought to be a major civil rights injustice, which the District of Columbia Home Rule Act of 1973 was intended to remedy. It instituted a mayor and city council equivalent to other major cities, but with restrictions. Among other things, the municipal judges continued to be appointed by the president, but this seems to have done nothing to restrict the revolving-door justice system that's enabled the juvenile crime problem Trump mentions.

But the problem of Washington, which simply can't be ignored, is the overall problem of the 1960s Civil Rights movement writ small. It was a key issue for Dr King, who's in the march at the far right in the photo above. Here we are 50 and 60 years later, and with almost every issue connected to the African-American community, we see the implicit questions: "Emmett Till died for this?" "Martin Luther King Jr marched for this?" It looks like Trump, who is gradually getting to be acknowledged as one of the most consequential presidents, is going to take this problem on:

End home rule and re-federalize D.C. immediately. It is long overdue, as D.C. is clearly incapable of governing itself. The days of D.C. holding the government and the country hostage need to be over. https://t.co/549EsUoebF

— Sean Davis (@seanmdav) August 5, 2025

Trump continued to telegraph his intentions yesterday:

President Donald Trump said on Wednesday that he may mobilize the National Guard in Washington, D.C., if the city is unable to crack down on violent crime.

The commander in chief, who deployed National Guard troops to Los Angeles earlier this year in response to anti-ICE riots, made the comment at the White House after a reporter asked if he was considering taking over the police in D.C.

“We’re considering it, yeah, because the crime is ridiculous,” Trump said, adding later that his plan may include “bringing in the National Guard, maybe, very quickly, too.”

But Trump also delegates these priorities, and it looks like Jeanine Pirro will be the face of remaking the District:

Jeanine Pirro, a former Fox News co-host who was confirmed by the U.S. Senate on Saturday as the U.S. attorney for D.C., told "The Ingraham Angle" on Wednesday that she wants to help enact President Donald Trump’s vision of making the federal district "safe" and "beautiful."

"Youth violence is on the rise — not just in D.C., but across the country. And if you think that these kids need to be coddled and they need to be hugged — they need to have consequences, they need to understand that enough is enough, that we're going to put them in jail or some kind of youth rehabilitation detention facility and not allow the D.C. Council — one of whom I just recently indicted — to take cover for these kids," Pirro said.

"It's time to end it. That's what the president wants, that's what we're going to do."

I would just point out that the image of the wealthy plutocrat Paul Moore Jr marching with Dr King, on one hand a concrete illustration of Ralph Ellison's view of the world in Invisible Man, is also a manifestation of the populist Ferdinand Lundberg's understanding of the social order in America's Sixty Families and The Rich and the Super-Rich. His grandfather, William Henry Moore,

organized and promoted or sat as a director for several steel companies that were merged with among others the Carnegie Steel Company to create United States Steel. He and his brother James Hobart Moore helped create the Diamond Match Company, National Biscuit Company, First National Bank, the Delaware, Lackawanna and Western Railroad, the American Can Company, the Lehigh Valley Railroad, the Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific Railroad, the Continental Fire Insurance Company, the Western Union Telegraph Company, the American Cotton Oil Company, and Bankers Trust.

The people who ran the country from the post-Civil War era through the Bushes and Obama were the people who were all in favor of the Washington, DC we see today, and a great deal else. What on earth is going on here?