One year ago today, Donald Trump launched a federal takeover of Washington, D.C. intended to soft-launch martial law and pacify a city with a deep revolutionary history. It has made D.C. into a microcosm of what’s at stake across the U.S. as the working class rises to confront the far-right agenda of the billionaire class.
Racist terror in the nation’s capital
On August 11, 2025, Trump used executive orders to exploit a loophole in the District of Columbia Home Rule Act, which grants the city of 700,000 people a large degree of autonomy, in order to place the Metropolitan Police Department under the control of the federal government. He also deployed thousands of National Guard troops into the city and upwards of 500 federal law enforcement officials.
Their purview was nebulously defined as “making D.C. safe and beautiful,” interpreted as widely as setting up terrifying road checkpoints and destroying every homeless encampment in the city, to re-mulching the city’s federal park lands and repairing derelict fountains.
In the year since, more than 20,000 people across the DMV have been disappeared by ICE, tearing deep holes in the fabric of the D.C. metro area’s diverse society. More than 4,600 National Guard troops can be seen on any given day conducting armed patrols in the streets, parks, and Metro stations across the city, turning the presence of armed soldiers and vehicles into a terrifyingly “normal” sight.
The racist campaign of the far-right has only deepened, expanding to include so-called “teen takeovers.” As Black and brown youth congregate in the streets of gentrified neighborhoods their families once called home, the National Guard has adopted an increasingly active role in social pacification.
Youth have been attacked, detained, and brutalized by soldiers with the blessings of the Trump administration and its allies, including U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro. Even supposed Trump critics like New York Times journalist Maggie Haberman cautioned liberals not to push back too hard on Trump’s claims about crime in D.C., helping blunt any kind of meaningful Democratic resistance to his agenda in the district.
The federal deployment in D.C. costs taxpayers more than $1 million a day, and now that it has been extended to 2029, is expected to waste more than half a billion dollars. Aside from some limited rhetorical posturing, the D.C. government has done little to stand up to this power grab—rather, Mayor Muriel Bowser has embraced the deploying of federal police to the city and used it to demand an even bigger budget for MPD.
Much of this politics is not new, Bowser and the Democrats who dominate D.C. politics have pushed the same narratives and the same solutions for years. The occupation is just a more extreme iteration of the same policies that villainize and victimize Black and brown youth, blaming them for the problems created by poverty, police violence, gentrification that breaks up communities, and the pervasive racist demonization that is deeply alienating.
For years, Bowser’s pro-police and pro-incarceration agenda has presented the same solution for every problem, leading to overflowing youth detention facilities, a city jail where multiple inmates die each year, and a police budget swollen to $688 million. Even before Trump’s takeover, D.C. had more police officers per resident and spent more on police per resident than any other city in the country.
This crisis has proven not just that statehood for D.C. is necessary in order to protect the autonomy that past generations fought for and won, but it also proves the absolute necessity of ending the capitalist system and the rule of the billionaire class that will never stop in its drive to crush the rights of this Black, working-class city. The occupation of D.C. is intended to pacify D.C. They have turned the city into a testing ground for the kind of martial law they want to impose on the entire country.
Statehood and revolution
This naked power grab is only possible because the District of Columbia lacks the autonomy guaranteed to states by the United States’ federal structure. D.C. is better regarded as a territory or even as a colony—a comparison that extends to the protracted struggle for statehood and the racist opposition to giving a historically majority-Black city further control over its own destiny.
Only in 1973 did D.C. win Home Rule and the right to elect its own Mayor and Council, although Congress has retained key authority over the city’s budget and the right to repeal laws passed by the D.C. government—a power it has used repeatedly to upend progressive and sometimes even politely liberal ordinances.
The fight for D.C. statehood was born of the Black liberation movement that smashed Jim Crow apartheid and won Home Rule, alongside other progressive reforms like strong protections for tenants, youth summer jobs programs, and some of the first LGBTQ rights protections in a major U.S. city. The D.C. Statehood Party was founded in 1971 and led by socialists like Julius Hobson and Hilda Mason, who connected the issues of self-determination for a Black, working class city with the fundamental struggle against the capitalist system itself.
Today, the need for D.C. statehood is all the more apparent. Unlike state governors, Mayor Bowser has no authority to order the D.C. National Guard back to its barracks or to prevent the deployment of other states’ Guard units in the city, and Congress has taken free license to trample on more and more D.C. laws each year.
With zero consultation with the affected community, the U.S. State Department is spending $300 million building a new central headquarters for ICE in Congress Heights, a highly oppressed working-class Black neighborhood with a life expectancy 30 years lower than the affluent, majority-white neighborhoods of Upper Northwest. Statehood won’t solve all of D.C.’s problems, but it would give the District’s 700,000 residents new leverage with which to advance the class struggle deriving from and aimed at the root of those issues.
Confronting the far-right’s agenda
In D.C. as across the country, we have seen a renewed interest in socialism and socialist ideas. As the conditions of life become more intolerable for the working class and oppressed groups, as the system’s bottomless appetite for war and environmental destruction becomes more and more impossible to ignore, and the powers that be show their closed-mindedness about any kind of solution, the limits of the present system become ever more clear.
The working class has begun to pose the question: “if not this, then what?” The answer is socialism: a system where the working class run society, not the billionaires, and restructures it to meet the needs of the people and the planet, not the hunger for profit by a tiny minority of the ultra-rich.
It is not enough to elect the right people into office, because this is ultimately a struggle bigger than the purview of any official or governmental entity—it is a question of classes and class power, of who the state and government work for. The ruling class keenly understands what’s at stake—that’s why they are pouring money into police forces, paramilitary groups like ICE, and attempting to soft-launch martial law as they have on the streets of D.C.
They remember this city’s Black, revolutionary history, and they fear it. Because they know their pro-billionaire political program is deeply hated by the working people of this country. Racist terror against Black and brown communities, demonization and persecution of transgender people, pushing endless costly and destructive wars overseas, tearing up every corporate regulation and every environmental protection, all while privatizing social programs and government assets so that the ultra-rich can get even richer off it.
If we don’t stand up to this program, it will succeed. But if we fight it, if we unite as a class and utilize our power as working people to shut this system down—we can stop it. Six months ago we saw what can actually stop Trump’s far-right agenda. In the streets of Minneapolis, the working class flexed its muscles in a general strike that showed where the real power in society lay: in the hands of the working people who make it run, day in and day out.
Historically, general strikes have been the first step toward more lasting political change, from the general strike of the enslaved that tore down chattel slavery in this country to the general strikes that spelled the end of monarchies and dictatorships in Imperial Russia, Iran, Portugal, and more.
The system cannot function without our consent—what lay between us now and the day when we as a class refuse to let things go on like this any longer is organization.