Does DC Have a Vichy Mayor?

Washington, DC, Mayor Muriel Bowser has undergone a rapid transformation over the past three weeks. What began as capitulation to Trump’s military occupation of the city has now become something confused, unclear, and perhaps even ominous. The regime’s criminalization of DC’s residents is no longer—as her defenders claim—something being imposed on Bowser by racist, sexist Donald Trump. This now appears to be something that she is, to quote The Washington Post, “welcoming.”

Despite Bowser’s objections to this framing—earlier this week, she excoriated the Post at a press conference for using “welcoming” in their headline, a word she says she didn’t use—and despite her insisting that she was “outraged over the intrusion on our federal autonomy,^[2]” her actions speak louder than her words. First, the Democratic mayor credited the surge in federal law enforcement for reducing crime in the city—a misleading, right-wing narrative that ignores the fact that crime always drops with the start of the school year and that every trend line since 2023 has shown crime dropping in the city.^[3] Then, on September 2, she issued^[4] an order^[5] to continue coordinating with federal law enforcement “to the maximum extent allowable by law within the District” even after Trump’s emergency order expires. That doesn’t sound like “outrage.” That sounds like consenting to a new reality.

And now, given the chance to fight back, Bowser is standing aside. In a press conference after DC Attorney General Brian Schwalb—who does not work under Bowser—sued the Trump administration to stop the deployment of the National Guard in the city, Bowser was evasive, refusing to respond to reporters unequivocally as to whether she supports the lawsuit—which is odd, given her previously stated “outrage.” Sure enough, according to a source very familiar with the decision-making process that went into the lawsuit, it was written and issued independently from Bowser’s office. Even after a federal court ruled last week that Trump broke the law by sending troops into Los Angeles, Bowser won’t back the the attorney general’s move.

So Bowser may insist that she is not “welcoming” an indefinite occupation. But let’s look at what she has, through her actions, already welcomed. She has welcomed the death of home rule. She has welcomed the crippling of the local economy, which has lost billions as people choose to stay home rather than deal with checkpoints or a sneering South Carolina National Guardsman with live ammo on their way to dinner. Because of this, we are now seeing a sharp reduction in shifts for servers and cooks and lost wages. She has welcomed a youth curfew for our commercial areas that now, with everybody staying home, look like ghost towns.

Thanks to all that Bowser is welcoming into the city, parents are afraid to go to work and children are afraid to go to school. The number of parents keeping their children out of school to avoid the risk of the state abducting their kids is horrifying—and half-empty classrooms are a symbol of this terror. (Of course, the education secretary has said nothing about this. If there is a hell below, Linda McMahon—who thinks AI is a steak sauce^[6]—needs to invest in a lot of sunscreen.) One high school is even canceling an annual Hispanic Heritage parents-and-students picnic and soccer game because they fear it will become a ripe ICE target.

That’s not all. Mayor Bowser may rankle at the word “welcoming,” but how else do you describe her silence as federal police and ICE are openly and systemically engaged in racial profiling? This unconstitutional practice is so pervasive that white resisters have taken to wearing Mexican flag decals on their cars in order to bait ICE into puling them over, which wastes ICE’s time and may save people from federal abduction and a slave/torture prison in El Salvador or South Sudan. For the authorities, there is no Constitution in the streets of DC.

By cooperating with a military occupation and emboldening the Metropolitan Police Department, Bowser has stoked fear in the US-born Black community^[7] as well. The MPD, with their long-standing issues of racialized brutality, are truly now off the leash. Trump and his white-supremacist lickspittles, like Nazi prawn Stephen Miller, delight in saying that “the Blacks” now love them because they feel safe under their watch. This is not only a lie; it is deeply offensive: an argument echoing the philosophy of an 18th-century plantation master. It does not make a lick of sense in a city where, according to The Washington Post, 80 percent^[8] of the people want them gone.

Bowser’s defenders—and they are dwindling before our eyes—are now raising the specter of some kind of blackmail, trying to guess what Trump might “have on her.” Bullshit. That line of inquiry amounts to tired excuse-mongering for a Mike Bloomberg–trained centrist mayor who seems to be—as centrists often do—slouching toward the side with the guns. The other excuse they claim is that, without statehood, Bowser has no choice but to take this posture. Also bullshit. It’s true that the federal government can proclaim a 30-day state of emergency in DC. But Bowser had grounds, as AG Schwalb is showing, to challenge the emergency declaration in court: Because violent crime in the city has hit a 30-year low^[9], there is no actual emergency—or at least there wasn’t one until the Tennessee National Guard started patrolling the streets with live ammo.

Bowser could be approaching this in a way that protects her constituents and resists authoritarianism. She could be holding press conferences every day, highlighting the military occupation’s effects on residents and the local economy. She could be saying that she stands with both the protesters and the Democratic politicians that have shown some spine, like Baltimoree Mayor Brandon Scott, who is running a city where violent crime has dropped to a 50-year low. Even if Bowser had been overrun in the courts, she could still have drawn a line in the sand that the federal occupation of cities, absent a real emergency, is an authoritarian, unconstitutional power grab, nearly unprecedented in US history, and must be resisted at all costs. Instead, when the military took over Union Station—probably because when Stephen Miller, JD Vance, and Pete Hegseth wanted to gladhand and grab a fascistic photo op with the soldiers, they were heckled mercilessly—there was no word from Bowser on the Trump regime’s proclaimed triumph in the battle of Shake Shack^[10].

Historically, being the mayor of DC is a dead-end gig. Former populist mayor Adrian Fenty’s ditching the town to chill on yachts with Steve Jobs’s widow^[11], Lauren, is probably the best any of them have done climbing the ladder. The hyper-ambitious Bloomberg acolyte Muriel Bowser clearly has greater ambitions, and she is willing to climb over the bodies of her constituents to get there. (Anti-Zohran speaker at the DNC? Ivanka or Melania’s new “friend” for public appearances? New VP of the Trump Organization?) In the process, she is undercutting the people actually doing the work to make this nightmare end.

What is clear is the importance of a broadly built Free DC demonstration on Saturday, September 6, at 11 am, in Malcolm X (or Meridian) Park. The stakes are high to show the city and the world that Bowser is not the voice—or at least not the sole voice—of DC.

Don’t think of it as a local protest. Everyone should come: Because if we don’t fight back, your city will be next.

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