The president’s targeting of D.C., L.A. and other Black-led cities isn’t a coincidence.
It’s rooted in a history of white supremacy.
By Erin Aubry Kaplan
The only coup d’etat in U.S. history happened in Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1898. The violent overthrow of the Black-led city by white locals was an explosion of their resentment of Black political and economic success that had been growing since the end of the Civil War. It reached a breaking point after an election that Republicans — then the party of racial inclusion — won handily. White supremacists, responding to the menace of “Negro rule,” as one North Carolina newspaper described it, rose up and drove out city leaders who were part of a multiracial coalition, killing and terrorizing Black citizens in the process, and installed unelected white leaders in their place.
The insurrectionists declared that their attack was essential for the preservation of law and order. But that was a ruse, a pretext for reasserting white supremacy by every means available, a violent and racist reordering that was anything but lawful. Though there was some condemnation of what came to be known as the Wilmington massacre, the perpetrators were never prosecuted. And the city of Wilmington was never the same.
President Trump’s takeover of the Washington, D.C., police is a direct descendant of that shameful episode, an outgrowth of a culture of white supremacy that has been revived and is now ensconced in the White House. The pretext this time is just as baseless: that D.C., a historically Black city with a Black mayor, suffers from endemic lawlessness, a place Trump described as rife with “crime, bloodshed, bedlam and squalor.” It’s a cartoonish lie.
In reality, crime in D.C. is down 26% since last year. But a pretext was needed to go after this uniquely vulnerable city, without a state and no voting representatives in Congress, where Trump took the unprecedented step of invoking the 1973 Home Rule Act to take control of the city’s Metropolitan Police Department for up to 30 days. A wholly nonexistent emergency became the basis of Trump’s activation of the National Guard and federal agents, who now prowl the city’s streets like beat cops.
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In 2025 it’s the federal government, not irate white locals, enacting the takeover. But the imperative to purge and seize control of a Black-controlled space is the same.
What should alarm all Americans is Trump’s use of the enormous power of the presidency to carry it out, openly and without any sense of deliberation or due process. Trump has cited the assault of a white protégé of Elon Musk by a couple of Black teenagers as evidence of D.C.’s crime emergency. But the real inciting event is the fiction, pushed by Trump since the 2020 mass protests for racial justice, that big cities with large populations of color are inherently dangerous and must be subjugated to restore law and order. What’s scary is how Trump is in a position to do just that.
It’s been noted many times in the last few years that many of the most populous American cities now have Black mayors, including Muriel Bowser in D.C., Karen Bass in Los Angeles, Brandon Johnson in Chicago and Eric Adams in New York. The trend has been celebrated as real racial progress but has also run into the headwinds of Trumpism, which equates Black presence with urban decay and decay in general. The takeover really began, and is still happening, in L.A., where Trump called in the National Guard and the Marines over the objections of Bass and other local and state leaders in response to protests over federal immigration raids that started in June. The occasionally violent protests were quickly portrayed in video clips as an emergency, used by the Trump administration to justify overriding state and local rule, in a brazen show of force and authority.
In D.C. and L.A. the administration’s determination to show Black and brown people who’s boss is the same. Not just boss, but savior: In June, Homeland Security chief Kristi Noem declared ICE was in L.A. to “liberate the city from the socialists and the burdensome leadership that the governor and the mayor have placed on this country,” echoing the same pro-coup language employed by white insurrectionists in Wilmington back in 1898. Trump repeated this language on Aug. 11 when he declared his federal takeover of police from a White House podium as “Liberation Day in D.C., and we’re gonna take our capital back.”
Of course, L.A. gets extra animus because Trump hates California for its resistance and refusal to capitulate to his policies, from declaring sanctuary cities to adopting stringent clean air measures. But its real sin, the one that necessitated federal intervention, is being too soft on people of color.
All this dates back to The Birth of a Nation, the seminal 1915 D.W. Griffith film released 17 years after the Wilmington massacre. That cinematic milestone was white supremacy agitprop that posited, among other things, that Black people were totally unfit to govern. It cast the Black equality experiment of Reconstruction as a dangerous failure, with Black men (mostly white actors in blackface) portrayed as dolts, predators and savages incapable of civilized behavior. The moral of its hugely popular story was that the North was on the wrong side of things, Black leadership was an oxymoron, and only white people (especially the Klan) could be trusted to keep real Americans safe. It’s this robustly racist message that Trump is sending now with his attempts to “liberate” a significantly Black city. When he threatened to expand the federal takeover to other supposedly crime-ridden cities, it was telling that he singled out Chicago, L.A., Baltimore and Oakland. Not only do they have large populations of color that voted decisively against him in 2024, they also have Black mayors.
If Trump was really concerned about crime in our nation’s capital, he wouldn’t have pardoned nearly 1,600 of his supporters who were charged for their involvement in one of the biggest single-day crime waves in D.C.’s history, the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection. If he cared about law and order he wouldn’t have granted blanket clemency to people who had been convicted or pleaded guilty to violent crimes, including the assault on law enforcement officers.
What a terrible miscarriage of public trust and common decency that a president who instigated an attempted coup in D.C., one that desecrated the Capitol building itself, is trying to engineer another coup in the same city. This one might look different, but they’ll go down as two closely related chapters in the country’s long history of white takeovers that Trump seems eager to advance. But D.C. has great symbolic weight. Because at the very moment he’s taking over the city’s law enforcement, Trump is starting his long-promised resurrection of Confederate monuments by bringing back a statue of Confederate general Albert Pike. For over a hundred years it was the only such monument in D.C., one of many around the country that was damaged or brought down by a nationwide movement, powered by Black Lives Matter, to stop publicly honoring the legacy of slavery and those who betrayed the Union.
Trump is trying to overthrow that movement, part of a broader effort to diminish and delegitimize Black power in ways that are becoming more and more blatant. The fact that he’s launching this pro-Confederate campaign in the nation’s capital while also usurping its local police authority is not coincidence, but a kind of consolidation. Call it “Rebirth of a Nation,” circa 2025, with a white supremacist movie fantasy being brought to life before our eyes, in real time. How the movie ends is still an open question.
Copyright 2025 Capital & Main
Erin Aubry Kaplan examines the persistent barriers to racial justice and opportunities for progress in an era of receding Black presence in Los Angeles and California.