WASHINGTON — After a decade of threatening to take over the deeply Democratic District of Columbia, President Donald Trump on Monday announced he would exert more federal control over the capital city by taking command of its police department and declaring a public safety emergency.

Trump used a late-morning press conference at the White House to announce he had signed orders and letters to place the Washington Metropolitan Police Department under his control by invoking Section 740 of the 1973 Home Rule Act. The president also announced he would activate hundreds of D.C. National Guard troops to assist local and federal law enforcement. Those troops should be in place later this week. Attorney General Pam Bondi now has direct control over MPD, with Terrance “Terry” Cole, administrator of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, installed Monday as the interim MPD commissioner.

The president called violent crime, car thefts, homelessness and uncleanliness in the District “out of control,” adding from the lectern in the White House briefing room: “We’re going to take our capital back.”

“We’re not going to let it happen anymore. … We’re not going to take it,” he said, contending the murder and violent crime rate in D.C. is higher than in some of the “worst places on earth,” mentioning Bogota, Colombia and Mexico City, Mexico. Trump ticked off a number of violent crimes and murders that featured victims he knew or were GOP aides on Capitol Hill. He also highlighted packs of young people, some of whom have been arrested for illegal activities.

“They fight back until you knock the hell out of them — because that’s the only language they understand,” Trump said. “Caravans of mass youths rampage through city streets at all times of the day. They’re on ATVs, motorbikes. They travel pretty well.”

Trump said he would work with lawmakers to change statutes for the District to end things like “no-cash bail,” predicting such a bill would get no Democratic votes in either chamber because that party is “weak on crime” and “have no idea what they’re doing.”

Sent to the White House twice largely by a political base that is white and Republican, Trump for years has complained publicly about the crime, homelessness and the appearance of the capital city, which features a Black population that is the largest among all of residents. More than 75% of the residents of the city are registered Democrats.

“And you people are victims of it too. You reporters — and I understand a lot of you tend to be on the liberal side — but you don’t want to get mugged and raped and shot and killed, and you all know people and friends of yours that that happened,” he said, flanked by his top federal law enforcement officials and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.

“And so you can be anything you want, but you want to have safety in the streets. You want to be able to leave your apartment or your house, where you live and feel safe in, going to a store to buy a newspaper or buy something, and you don’t have that now,” he said.

“We will bring in the military, if needed.”

The American Civil Liberties Union’s D.C. office, in a post on its website, assessed the 1973 Home Role Act as giving the Office of the President “limited power to temporarily take over the D.C. police department ‘for federal purposes’ under ‘special conditions of an emergency.’”

The group’s assessment did not list any other authorities that a president would have to federalize other aspects of the District’s governance.

D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser, a Democrat, said Sunday on MSNBC that “any comparison to a war-torn country is hyperbolic and false.”

“There are very specific things in our law that would allow the president to have more control over our police department,” Bowser added. “None of those conditions exist in our city right now.”

The Pentagon’s press office had not responded to an email asking what exactly would be the rules of engagement for the National Guard troops, and if they would be given the authority to detain and arrest suspects of criminal acts.

Trump’s Monday moves were the latest in a broader push to use the powers of his office in a more expansive and aggressive manner than his predecessors.

“The essential idea that’s being advanced here is that the executive branch has much more fulsome legal authorities to define what the federal government does than it has exercised traditionally in the past or that’s traditionally been recognized,” said Scott Anderson, a fellow at the Brookings Institution and Columbia Law School. “Foundationally underlying that is a constitutional assertion … that this is what the president can do because he controls the executive branch.”

The D.C. actions also reflect Trump 2.0’s more interventionist streak than his first administration. For instance, his administration and Nvidia reached a deal allowing the company to sell artificial intelligence chips in China — but the federal government will receive a portion of any profits from those sales. And, earlier this year, Trump traveled to Pittsburgh to announce a U.S. Steel merger with Japan’s Nippon — and a so-called “golden share” in the new company for the federal government he oversees.

‘Our cherished capital’

Trump floated taking action to inject himself and his administration into the city’s governance last week after a former Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) employee was assaulted around 3 a.m. on Aug. 3 in the 1400 block of Swann Street, NW, in the popular 14th Street corridor during what the Metropolitan Police Department called an attempted carjacking.

“The Mayor of D.C., Muriel Bowser, is a good person who has tried, but she has been given many chances, and the Crime Numbers get worse, and the City only gets dirtier and less attractive. The American Public is not going to put up with it any longer,” Trump wrote Sunday on social media.

“Just like I took care of the Border, where you had ZERO Illegals coming across last month, from millions the year before, I will take care of our cherished Capital, and we will make it, truly, GREAT AGAIN! Before the tents, squalor, filth, and Crime, it was the most beautiful Capital in the World. It will soon be that again,” the president added.

Trump used a Tuesday social media post to warn 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, and put criminals on notice that they’re not going to get away with it anymore,” adding: “If this continues, I am going to exert my powers, and FEDERALIZE this City.”

Trump and some Republican lawmakers have contended violent crime and other illegal acts have been on the rise in D.C., a claim Bowser and other Washington officials say is undermined by MPD crime statistics.

Violent crimes spiked in the city in 2023, then that rate began to decline last year, hitting a seven-year low over the 12-month span from May 2024 to May 2025, according to data analyzed by RealCrimeIndex.

The District’s murder rate has come down, back to levels consistent until an increase in 2021. The number of reported rapes also have fallen over the same 12-month period, while robberies have returned to 2023 levels after a substantial increase in 2024. Aggravated assaults have been decreasing since late 2023.

But Bowser and the D.C. Council have been unable to get their arms around some crimes, including auto thefts — those have declined, but the numbers are higher than the period from 2018 to 2023.

Rep. Eleanor Holmes Norton, in an Aug. 7 statement, said that “even if crime in D.C. weren’t at a historic low point, President Trump’s comments would be misguided and offensive to the more than 700,000 people who live permanently in the nation’s capital,” adding: “D.C. residents, a majority of whom are Black and brown, are worthy and capable of governing themselves without interference from federal officials who are unaccountable to D.C.”

Meantime, Trump said he intended to clean up trash, graffiti, “grime and dirt,” adding police and troops would be “getting rid of the people from underpasses and public spaces … all over the city” and conducting other operations quickly.

“The process,” he said, “starts right now.”

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