The mayor of DC, Muriel Bowser, changes his tone on Trump while repression is getting closer
After Donald Trump won the presidential election, Washington, DC, Mayor Muriel Bowser flew to Trump’s Mar-A-Lago domain to see him.
When the Republicans put it pressure on the giant lettering of “Black Lives Matter” which she installed in front of the White House during Trump’s first term, Bowser agreed to remove it. His reasoning: the city had larger fish to fry, in particular on the management of federal job cuts that Trump promulgated this year.
Now, while Trump federalizes the police in the capital and deploys the National Guard, Bowser may face the biggest test to date of his management and his ability to sail in the White House.
Bowser’s comments in response to the ad illustrate how she often tries to communicate several messages at the same time.
Describing Trump’s executive action as “disturbing and unprecedented”, Bowser afflicted the city’s lack of total autonomy on Monday without personalizing this frustration or criticizing Trump directly.
“I cannot say that given part of the rhetoric of the past, we are totally surprised,” she said.
A few minutes later, she suggested that federal intervention could work for the city and told journalists that she did not have the legal power to stop Trump’s plans.
“The fact that we have more application of the law and presence in the neighborhoods can be positive,” said Bowser.
In comparison, the leader of the minority of the room, Hakeem Jeffries, said that Trump had no credibility in the space of public order.
“The crime scene at DC most damaging to the Americans of everyday is at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave,” published Jeffries, referring to the Address of the White House.
Other democrats such as the mayor of Los Angeles, Karen Bass, who treated Trump’s deployment of the National Guard in his own city, also rejected the actions of the president.
“For me, everything resisted of being a blow and I don’t think you should use our troops for political waterfalls,” said Bass.
Christina Henderson, member of the DC council, suggested that she sympathized with the difficult balance that Bowser tries to find. It noted that in 1973, the Congress enabled the residents of DC to elect a mayor, members of the council and district commissioners, but prohibited the Council from promulgating certain laws and the city to have voting members in the American Chamber or in the Senate.
“You do not want to be the mayor who loses the rule at home and that there is no mayor after you,” said Henderson.
When asked if she planned to repel stronger following an unprecedented sapper from her authority, Bowser said on Monday: “My tenor will be appropriate for what I think is important for the district and what is important for the district is that we can take care of our citizens.”
But Bowser took a stronger tone during a virtual conversation with community leaders on Tuesday.
Asked what residents can do, Bowser said: “This is a time when the community must jump and we all have to do what we can in our space, in our way, to protect our city and protect our autonomy, to protect our rule of origin, and arrive on the other side of this guy.”
The city’s veteran journalist Tom Sherwood, political analyst of the public radio station DC Wamu, says that Bowser tries to be strategic.
“I believe that the mayor has done everything she can do to take care of President Trump’s meteorological attitude,” said Sherwood. “The image of the president is that the district is a liberal city, mainly black, which does not care to fight crime, and this therefore left the mayor and the DC council as main targets for him.”
The anti-Trump feeling is fierce in the militant spaces of the city, which the former vice-president Kamala Harris won last year with 90% of the votes.
During a demonstration this week, the free DC project, a movement based on the demanding DC request, denounced the actions of the Trump administration. The organizers accused Trump of having tried to cause violence and to compare the arrests of immigration to the abductions.
“Black Washingtonians have long acknowledged that community violence cannot be resolved by state violence,” said Free DC organizing director Nee Taylor, calling into question police efficiency in social programs to raise the most vulnerable.
“We will not be inactive because the structures of oppressors try to harm our communities and take power,” she added.
When asked if she was disappointed Bowser did not reflect intense perspective as we can see and heard members of the community in the streets of the city, Taylor said that she thought that the mayor did everything she can and that she occupies a different role.
“I think she is resistant to the best of her abilities, since DC is not a state,” said Taylor.
