Pretextual

Trump told reporters on Wednesday evening that he is considering taking over the D.C. police force and sending in the National Guard after a former DOGE staffer was hurt in an attempted carjacking.

President Trump's dislike of large metro areas is well known. And unsurprising, given that urban areas tend to be more liberal than the median American, and the animosity between the President and Blue America is mutual. And the fact that the President is considering federalizing the District of Columbia is also unsurprising, given how he often seeks to score points with is more rural base of voters by appealing to their animosity towards urban dwellers. The fact that this feels like the petty act of a man who enjoys picking on people is also just par for the course, but something of a sideshow in the bigger picture.

As the NPR article notes, Republican lawmakers have learned that bashing the city of Washington D.C. (as well as the concept of D.C.) plays well to the voters in their home districts, much more so than making life difficult for people in, say, rural Nebraska plays in Philadelphia or Los Angeles. In part because while rural voters may see urban voters as deliberately perverse, urban votes tend to see rural ones mostly as dupes.

There is something of a problem with this cleavage in the American electorate, if, for no other reason, President Lincoln's admonition that "a house divided against itself cannot stand." (To be sure, however, the United States has been doing a remarkable job of standing, given how divided against itself it's been throughout its history.) President Trump is perhaps one of the few prominent American politicians who has openly taken sides in the urban-rural divide. And this may have something to do with the fact that it's also a racial divide. While there are non-White people in rural communities across the United States, there appears to be a common perception in Red America that the Black and Hispanic people who gravitate to the cities are a problem that needs to be dealt with. In the tripartite structure of Right-leaning populism in the United States, they are the Undeserving Others, and what they have rightfully belongs to the People. In the United States, resentment is often answered with resentment, and as the President fans the resentments of his base as a means of demonstrating his loyalty to them, his acting on those resentments fuels, in turn, the resentments of that segment of population that dislikes him and the people who voted for him. And to the degree that each side sees the resentment of the other as somewhere between unjustified and willfully unjust, their own resentments grow.

The President has a talent for making a political asset from these resentments, and using them to his own ends. His ability to control them seems to be less sure, but he's managing it (if only just at times) thus far. But sooner or later, the temptation to keep stoking them will lead to a boiling over. Democratic pushback tends to be tempered by the fact that the Republicans control the levers of national government. When that changes, it will be worth watching how things shape up closely.