Donald Trump isn’t just looking to remake the federal government. He has his sights set on the city of Washington, too.
In his first few weeks in office, the president has moved to drastically alter the fabric of the nation’s capital.
He ordered thousands of Washington-area federal workers to return to the office — some of whom his administration is moving to lay off. He injected himself and his allies onto the board of the John F. Kennedy Center to recast “woke” performing art culture. And the city’s mayor said she has been briefed on a pending executive order on topics like public safety and homeless encampments in the city.
The flurry of actions drives home that Trump has a dark view of his adopted, part-time home — possibly influenced by the fact that more than 90 percent of its residents supported his opponent in the 2024 election. He called the District a city of “filth” and “decay,” an insult reminiscent of ones he has hurled at other major cities he has feuded with like Baltimore or New York.
Trump has cast his departure from Washington in 2021 as a pivot point for the city. He rarely returned to Washington during his four years out of power — with a notable exception being an August 2023 trip from Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport to a D.C. federal court, during which he pleaded not guilty to four counts to overturn the 2020 elections.
It was “very sad driving through Washington, D.C. and seeing the filth and the decay and all of the broken buildings and walls and graffiti,” Trump said on the tarmac just before leaving the D.C. area. “This is not the place that I left. It’s a very sad thing to see.”
D.C. is rebounding from the pandemic, which battered the region’s economy that is supported by in-person work from federal employees, ushered in a since-diminished spike in crime and exacerbated the city’s homelessness crisis.
The president and Congress have the authority to undercut the District’s political machinery by rejecting any bill the local administration puts forward and proposing their own. And Trump’s congressional allies have already moved to disrupt the power balance in the District through legislation introduced earlier this month that could undo a 1970s-era law that allowed the nation’s capital to largely govern itself.
Republicans have made similar threats to undermine the D.C. government during Mayor Muriel Bowser’s decade-long tenure. But they were toothless because of Democratic opposition in Congress or the White House.
Even when Republicans gained control of the House and Senate during Trump’s first term, he didn’t follow through on his threats, including one that would have overridden D.C. governance by temporarily overtaking agencies like the Metropolitan police. Trump also relied heavily on executive orders to go after immigrants from sanctuary cities like D.C., but those were not targeted specifically to his then-home city and were mostly rescinded by former President Joe Biden.
This time, a reenergized Trump armed again with a Republican majority in Congress has said he would tighten his grip on D.C.
The White House did not respond to a request for comment for this article.
If Trump and congressional Republicans dip into city affairs, they would drastically shift the relationship between the Bowser administration and the federal government, which has largely stayed out of local politics in recent years.
About two years ago, Congress stymied local efforts to decrease crime penalties, marking the first time in three decades that Capitol Hill officials have successfully flexed this muscle. Congress has also repeatedly passed a rider blocking commercial sales of recreational marijuana in the District.
Republicans on Capitol Hill have justified the local government takeover by skewering the Bowser administration for a recent surge in crime that they say she has mishandled. Homicides surged during the pandemic to a decades-long zenith of 273 cases in 2023, though this figure dipped by 32 percent in 2024, according to D.C. police data.
“The radically progressive regime of D.C. Mayor Bowser has left our nation’s Capital in crime-ridden shambles,” Rep. Andy Ogles (R-Tenn.), one of the co-sponsors for the latest congressional push to defang D.C.’s government, said in a press release. “Bowser and her corrupt Washington City Council are incapable of managing the city.”
Bowser and the council have grown tougher on crime since Trump’s first term. Last March, as the city reeled from a spate of carjackings and homicides, the local government passed a crime omnibus package that imposed harsher penalties for crimes like retail theft and illegal gun possession.
“We will not tolerate violence and we will not tolerate criminal activity that disrupts our sense of safety and our ability to build thriving neighborhoods,” Bowser said in a statement following the passage of the bill.
Bowser has tried to further soothe Trump and other Republicans by focusing on “shared priorities for the president’s second term,” like bringing the D.C. region’s federal workforce back to underutilized federal buildings and developing more green spaces and infrastructure, she said in December.
Now, as the city attempts to maintain diplomacy with Republicans, the largely Democratic D.C. Council has to get creative to pass their agendas.
Before Republicans took control of Congress and the presidency on Election Day, the city council was about to pass a pair of bills that would have required insurers to study reparations and fully cover vasectomy procedures. Weeks after the GOP assumed control of Congress and the presidency, the council changed the name of the vasectomy bill to the “Insurance Regulation Amendment Act” as part of a preemptive effort to dodge ire from Republicans, who had launched a national crusade against reproductive rights.
“When we had a fight over the revised criminal code, the Council lost control of the messaging,” Council chairman Phil Mendelson told The Washington Post. “Lesson learned. We need to be sensitive to messaging.”
For her part, Bowser still appears optimistic about her relationship with Trump — who she met with at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida in December — even as the president further derides her city and leadership.
“I agree with the president-elect on this point,” Bowser said in December. “We want to make our nation’s capital the most beautiful capital in the world.”
