On Monday, US president Donald Trump declared a ‘crime emergency’ in Washington DC, the capital city of America, using this as a pretext to send in the National Guard and seize control of the city’s police force.
At a White House press conference, Trump said he was taking ‘a historic action to rescue our nation’s capital from crime, bloodshed, bedlam, and squalor and worse’ adding: ‘This is liberation day in DC and we’re going to take our capital back.’
800 National Guard troops will take control of Washington in the coming week while the police will be given the licence to ‘do whatever the hell they want’ as he painted a picture of Washington ‘overtaken by violent gangs and bloodthirsty criminals, roving mobs of wild youth, drugged-out maniacs and homeless people, and we’re not going to let this happen anymore.’
In fact, data from the Washington Metropolitan Police Department shows that violent crime in the city declined by 35% in 2024 and has fallen a further 26% so far this year.
The homeless were singled out by Trump in particular, in a post on social media that said: ‘The homeless will have to move out. IMMEDIATELY. We will give you places to stay but FAR from the Capital’ (emphasis in the original).
Again, official figures shatter the myth Trump peddles about hordes of homeless roaming the streets of Washington.
According to the Community Partnership organisation, that works with the homeless, only about 800 are considered to be unsheltered out of a population of about 700,000 people.
But as always with Trump and the US ruling class, facts are ‘fake’ unless they fit in with the agenda of dumping the pretence of a bourgeois democratic society – where the power of president is constrained by legal ‘checks and balances’ – and moving towards establishing a police/military dictatorship over the American working class.
Last July, the US Supreme Court, with a majority of judges appointed by Trump himself during his first term as president, ruled that Trump and any future president of the United States will enjoy ‘absolute immunity’ for ‘official acts’ even treason or murder, carried out while in office.
Many in the US have ascribed this move by Trump for a military takeover of Washington as an attempt to distract attention away from the scandal that has erupted amongst his most avid supporters over his refusal to release government documents on Jeffrey Epstein, the late convicted paedophile financier.
Trump will need more than a distraction as US capitalism dives headlong into recession and drowns under a massive national debt of around $37 trillion.
The effects of Trump’s tariff war on the rest of the world have started to impact on US workers, who are starting to suffer the consequences.
Last week, the investment company Moody’s described the US as being ‘on the precipice’ of recession.
US manufacturers shed 33,000 jobs in 2025, while the Bureau of Labour Statistics was forced to revise down its job estimates for May and June by 258,000 jobs.
The once mighty US capitalist system is in the grip of a historic crisis which it is attempting to resolve through tariff wars against its capitalist rivals and preparing for a class war to the finish against the working class at home.
The powerful US working class will never accept being driven back to the years of the Great Depression of the 1930s.
This crisis, and the dangers it poses to the American ruling class, has accelerated the collapse of bourgeois democracy in the US and the turn towards dictatorship to wage a class war necessary to impose this crisis on the backs of workers and youth.
The working class across the world must take warning from these developments that are not confined to the US – as can be seen in Starmer’s Labour government turning to the police and courts to try to stifle opposition to its complicity with Zionist genocide in Gaza.
The only way to resolve this crisis is for the working class internationally to use its strength and take action by seizing power and replacing the capitalist state with a workers state and socialism.
This is the way forward.
