WASHINGTON—While the U.S. Marines and National Guard begin to transition out of Los Angeles and into other states to assist with President Donald Trump’s racist and fascist immigration enforcement plan, the administration is beginning to ramp up its threats against D.C.’s Home Rule and African Americans. Symbolic proof of the president’s intentions is his administration’s order that a statue of a racist Confederate general and likely founder of the Ku Klux Klan be resurrected in the capital.
On Tuesday, Trump went on an unhinged tirade against D.C.’s local government, claiming that there is rampant crime in the nation’s capital and threatening a federal takeover in order to prosecute Black youth, as young as the age of 14, as adults.
“Crime in Washington, D.C., is totally out of control,” Trump wrote. “Local ‘youths’ and gang members … are randomly attacking, mugging, maiming and shooting innocent citizens,” he added, “at the same time knowing that they will be almost immediately released.” He said local youths do not fear law enforcement “because they know nothing ever happens to them.”
The threat to lock up Black youth is reminiscent of his purchase of a full-page ad calling for the death penalty of the five young Black men who were wrongly convicted in the Central Park Five case in the late 1980s.
Part of the reason the administration is setting its sights on African Americans is due to their power in Washington, D.C. They make up a plurality of the local population, a Black woman sits in the mayor’s office, and Black elected officials hold majority of the seats on the D.C. Council. The District is also home to the largest employer of African Americans—the federal government. Neighboring Prince George’s County, meanwhile, boasts the largest wealth per capita of African Americans in the country.
Confederate revival
Trump’s social media rant against D.C. coincided with an announcement by the National Park Service that it will be resurrecting a Confederate statue in the District that was torn down during the 2020 George Floyd Rebellion. That statue honored Confederate Army leader Albert Pike. NPS claims that putting the statue back in place is part of the president’s executive order on the “beautification” of D.C.
Pike was a failed Confederate battlefield general whose soldiers were accused of atrocities against U.S. troops during the Battle of Pea Ridge. He also engaged in egregious acts before his time as a Confederate military officer. In 1858, he joined with other white Southerners to advocate the expulsion of freed former African slaves from Arkansas.
After the Confederate States were defeated, Pike fought hard against equality and suffrage for former slaves and claimed that “the white race, and that race alone should govern this country.” He even threatened to leave Freemasonry if it allowed African Americans to join.
According to sources inside the Ku Klux Klan, Pike was a founding member and also the secret society’s chief judicial officer. Many scholars have concluded he headed the Klan in Arkansas in the late 1860s. Chapters in Illinois, Kansas City, Oklahoma, Virginia, and New Jersey were even named after him during the Klan’s revival in the early 20th century. Some later reports dispute that Pike formally joined.
Given his history, Pike’s statue became a target during the 2020 protests against racist police violence. At the time, an irate Trump tweeted: “The DC police are not doing their job as they watched a statue be ripped down and burn. These people should be immediately arrested. A disgrace to our Country!”
D.C.’s lone nonvoting delegate in Congress, Eleanor Holmes Norton, swiftly denounced the decision to restore Pike’s statue and is introducing legislation to have the monument permanently removed, joining the anti-racist chorus. The D.C. Council has been urging its removal since 1992 and local activists had protested the only Confederate statue in the District for decades.
The movement to remove Confederate monuments around the country followed the 2017 fascist Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville, Va., during the first Trump presidency. It includes such incidents as Bree Newsome’s heroic act in 2015 scaling the flag pole in front of the South Carolina statehouse to remove the Confederate flag in the aftermath of the massacre of Black worshippers at the Emanuel AME Church by Dylann Roof.
This revival of a Confederate statue in D.C. is another aspect the white supremacist MAGA blitzkrieg of assaults on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), Black history, and the Smithsonian museums; attacks on higher education; the forced layoffs of thousands of Black federal workers, leading to a significant increase in Black unemployment; and the destruction of Black Lives Matter Plaza.
Though the Freemasons were responsible for the original statue’s erection in 1901, the Daughters of the Confederacy is the primary organization behind the propping up of most Confederate statues around the country. In the past, the Daughters hosted regular ceremonies at the site in D.C. on Pike’s birthday to promote the revisionist history of the Civil War and to promote reactionary, backward policies.
Trumped-up “emergency”
On Wednesday, Trump doubled down on his threat and said he is considering federalizing the Metropolitan Police Department, D.C.’s local police—which the president can do using emergency powers—and deploying the National Guard.
Trump posted on his Truth Social platform: “Washington, DC, must be safe, clean, and beautiful for all Americans and, importantly, for the World to see. If DC 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.”
This comes as Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) staffer Edward Coristine, the 19-year-old infamously known as “Big Balls,” was allegedly beaten by a group of teenagers on Sunday evening (though he was not taken to the hospital), and anti-immigrant Fox News Host Jeanine Pirro was confirmed as U.S. Attorney for D.C. over the weekend.
Billionaire Elon Musk took to X (formerly Twitter) to defend his former anti-federal worker partner and spewed racist lies, saying that Big Balls was defending a woman from being attacked by “a dozen young men,” another historic white supremacist dog whistle—claiming Black teens are out to assault white women, similar to the racist attacks on the Scottsboro Nine in the 1930s.
New U.S. Attorney Pirro has joined the fray, calling on the D.C. Council to reconsider some laws related to public safety, including the Second Chance Amendment Act, the Incarceration Reduction Amendment Act, and the Youth Rehabilitation Act. The changes she is pushing would surely increase D.C.’s mass incarceration and imprison Black youth at exorbitant numbers.
This is not Trump’s first threat to federalize the District, but will he actually follow through this time?
MAGA colonization of local affairs would seek to control African Americans, continuing the long history of denying statehood to the nation’s capital and removing Black people from political power.
While democracy is under attack in the United States, it is the responsibility of the forces of progress to demand the complete expulsion of Confederate monuments from public space and to promote working-class culture through the expansion of Black Lives Matter murals and street namings (including historic African American leaders and achievements) in addition to regular promotion of African American and working-class history in public schools and higher education.
The forces of progress must struggle toward a Third Reconstruction, which must include statehood for Washington, D.C., and an end to the criminalization of Black youth. The toppling of the Pike statue in the midst of a Black-led uprising against police violence was an expression of D.C. residents fighting for their sovereignty and control over their local affairs and public spaces.
Trump, the NPS, and Pirro have all given ample reasons for that fight to be stepped up.
As with all op-eds published by People’s World, the views represented here are those of the author.
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