I lived in Washington, DC. The last thing it needs is a Trump ‘rescue’

If you’re wondering what in the hell Donald Trump was going on about regarding the nation’s capital this week, it’s because Washington, DC, is another one of those long-time fixations of the unhinged American right.

In the world of Fox News, right-wing radio and Republican political conventions, San Francisco is synonymous with gay people while DC is a dog whistle that signifies blacks, crime and corruption. When Trump announced a federal takeover of the city this week, putting its local police force under his control, he said he was rescuing it from “crime, bloodshed, bedlam and squalor – and worse!”

“Our capital city has been overtaken by violent gangs and bloodthirsty criminals,” claimed the Republican president.

But he was lying. The Democratic mayor of the overwhelmingly Democratic city, Muriel Bowser, pointed out that violent crime in DC was at its lowest level in more than three decades last year. Yet Trump is sending in the National Guard to crack down on crime and clear the city of homelessness.

It’s all a bit absurd. But, really, this is just Trump singing a very old tune that most Republicans can hum along to. Why? It’s just another volley in his time-tested tactic of throwing red meat to his base to distract them from thinking twice about, say, his friendship with Jeffrey Epstein or his on-and-off bromance with Vladimir Putin.

The bad news is that his move is probably legal. DC is a political anomaly. It’s not a state, but it’s not inside a state, either. It was created by land taken from Maryland; Congress gave itself the power of governance over the area and has a standing committee to control its budget.

DC has always been the butt of jokes. JFK famously quipped that it was a city of “southern efficiency and northern charm”. But DC has grown and is now at the centre of one of the largest (and wealthiest) metropolises in the US. It has a population bigger than several states; campaigners for statehood are quick to point out that, with the full federal workforce on hand on a typical weekday, it’s bigger than several more.

Yet DC was given no senators; Congress grudgingly gave it three presidential electoral votes in 1961, and a single member of the House of Representatives in 1971, but only as a “non-voting delegate”.

DC’s reputation as crime-ridden is at once true and not true. To the south and east, there are intractably poor and unemployed neighbourhoods, racked by drugs and largely populated by African Americans. The city has only recently recovered from the damage the black middle class suffered when rioters destroyed a number of commercial strips after the assassination of Martin Luther King jnr in 1968.

The rest of the city – called “North West” – is the part frequented by government employees, lobbyists and tourists. Some of these parts are virtually crime-free. You don’t see many muggings outside the FBI headquarters. I lived in an enclave tucked in between the National Portrait Gallery and the National Archives, just off the National Mall. My friends and I could wander home down the Mall from the Kennedy Centre at all hours with no concern at all about safety.

My crime-related memories from those years include a Democratic representative, Patrick Kennedy (yes, one of those Kennedys), being high on drugs and running his car into a Capitol barrier in the wee hours. He was escorted home and eventually given probation. I daresay no African American DC resident would have had a similar action disposed of that way. Another crime: A Homeland Security official was caught with child pornography. But I have no memories of friends being mugged or burgled.

DC does have problems, many of its own making. Famously, long-time mayor Marion Barry was nabbed by the FBI while smoking crack with a sex worker in a hotel in 1990. He was removed from his position, only to re-emerge and be returned to office. In the decades since, the occasional reform mayor has worked hard, but the corruption and fecklessness of the city’s political class sometimes seems intractable.

All that said, Trump’s deranged rants this week are misguided even by his standards. In the past 10 or 15 years, the city has made great strides; The New York Times reported on Tuesday that incidents of violent crime had dropped by half in the district since 2011. But Trump knows his lies will inflame his base’s long-held prejudices.

So what will happen? We’ll see FBI agents and the National Guard providing local police protection they are not trained to provide in a largely black city that has been doing fine on its own. Trump’s intervention promises more of the chaos and distraction he has used so effectively to distract attention from his most dangerous policies. The losers? As is too often the case in America these days, the poor and the disadvantaged – those who can least afford it.

Bill Wyman is a former assistant managing editor of National Public Radio in Washington. He teaches at the University of Sydney.

Get a note directly from our foreign correspondents on what’s making headlines around the world. Sign up for our weekly What in the World newsletter.