Night two of Donald Trump’s takeover of the District of Columbia was met with a fair share of social media mockery from some residents of Washington, D.C., who took to Reddit, Twitter and other social media sites to vent.
While videos and photos of agents patroling the cities swankiest (and safest) areas drew much of the attention, one video circulated on a pair of D.C. subreddits over Monday and Tuesday evening showed a group of armed federal agents confronting a group of younger Black men as they were hanging out on the porch of one the young men’s homes.
The agents in the video confront the group over alleged marijuana smoking — which is legal under D.C. law but only when inside a private residence.
“Tell your boys...don’t be smoking outside, don’t be drinking outside. Because Donald Trump is tired of it,” one U.S. Park Police officer tells the group says in the video.
One of the men replied, “My favorite part is that ‘Donald Trump doesn't like to see it’.
“Well, I'm not particularly fond of gauche amounts of gold or overweight people wearing skin-tight golf wear. So we're even I suppose,” he snarked.
On Monday, the president announced at a White House press conference that he was deploying D.C.’s detachment of the National Guard and taking over control of D.C.’s Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) from city leaders, citing crime that he and his officials claim is out of control in the District. City leaders deny this.
Photos and images of agents in the wealthy neighborhood of Georgetown and down by the wharf area drew some of the most intense heckling.
“Georgetown? Did they bust somebody for pairing Chardonnay with a steak?” wrote Robbie Sherwood, communications director for the Arizona House Democrats, on X.
“They ain’t gonna find anyone but a millionaire walking their Shih Tzu,” another DC denizen tweeted.
“I still travel to DC, about 6 times a year, meeting friends for dinner in Georgetown is par for the course- and always enjoyable. Taking DEA/FBI agents off drug/CI/white collar cases, etc. for performative B.S. is an obscenity,” Luis Moreno, a former U.S. ambassador to Jamaica, tweeted.
Reason reporter Billy Binion pointed out: “This is laughable. There has been *one* violent crime reported in Georgetown since January.
Arrests on the first night of Trump’s semi-federalization of DC totaled under three dozen, compared to the hundreds of officers and agents deployed around the city.
That disproportionate ratio could swing further out of whack once the full deployment of DC’s National Guard detachment is carried out.
Little sympathy emerged online for Mayor Muriel Bowser, a Democrat who continues to tread a fine line between pushing back against Trump and Republicans’ criticism of her administration and leadership of the city and a desire to not provoke further repudiation from the federal government.
As many residents aimed their insults at the White House and the geared-up agents strolling along the Georgetown waterfront, a few remarked that the Democratic mayor had seemingly “abandoned” the city to its fate.
Bowser, at a meeting Tuesday, took a slightly stronger tone as she warned residents and businesses.
“This is a time where community needs to jump in and we all need to, to do what we can in our space, in our lane, to protect our city and to protect our autonomy, to protect our Home Rule, and get to the other side of this guy, and make sure we elect a Democratic House so that we have a backstop to this authoritarian push,” she said.
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