The two and a half weeks since President Donald Trump’s takeover of the Washington, DC, police department have mixed the disturbing and the comical. Combined with the spectacle of the National Guard picking up trash, there’s been a lot of law enforcement activity aimed at unauthorized immigrants. But many residents, though annoyed at Trump’s move, are going on with their lives as usual.
Indeed, what most disquiets me about the Trump administration’s actions here isn’t really what’s happening now — it’s what might happen a few years down the road if the administration keeps going down the path of centralizing law enforcement authority.
And, if recent news developments are any indication, they very much intend to go further down this path.
For instance: NBC News reported last week that FBI director Kash Patel was changing the FBI’s mission to be more focused on violent crime, instead of the complex investigations that have long been its main focus. “They are effectively making the FBI a national police force,” an anonymous senior agent said.
“National police force” is a significant phrase. It’s something we don’t really have in the United States. Certain federal agencies, like the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration, and the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement have specific law enforcement missions, but policing is a state and local endeavor here.
Another example: A new executive order that Trump signed on Monday calls on various federal agencies to establish a “specialized unit” focusing on public safety and order. That unit could be deployed “in other cities where public safety and order has been lost.”
The order also calls for a new online portal, through which Americans with law enforcement or other experience can apply for jobs at federal agencies to support Trump’s “policy goals” of safety and order in cities.
But given the Trump administration’s intense focus on personal and political loyalty in hiring (and purging existing officials), we can expect many of these hires to be hardcore MAGA types. And Trump superfans are probably more likely to apply to these positions in the first place.
Law enforcement officers have long been pro-Trump in general terms, but such a viewpoint is hardly uniform, and many officers are apolitical. They’ve also operated within longstanding institutions with their own procedures, processes, and lines of authority.
So, any indication that the Trump administration is trying to build out new law enforcement units — staffing them up from scratch — seems ominous. Will they hire people who are committed to the rule of law — or ones who are personally committed to Donald Trump? Similarly, Trump officials seem to want to get city police forces gradually more used to the idea of following the feds’ lead or working alongside the National Guard.
None of this can be done overnight, and none of it will matter all that much overnight. But if there’s a sufficiently committed effort from the administration to change these longstanding norms and to build out something like a MAGA-loyal internal police force, the next national crisis — think civil unrest like the summer of 2020 or Trump’s own attempt to steal the presidential election later that year — could play out much more darkly.
The rule of law remains our best guardrail against authoritarian repression. But what about situations where the law is left behind?
Many of the guardrails against presidential centralization of power have proved quite flimsy in Trump’s second term. But the courts and the law have broadly continued to function.
That’s why we see embarrassments for the administration like the grand juries in Washington, DC, and Los Angeles rejecting politicized, overzealous indictment attempts. Trump may want to lock up his political enemies, but there are many obstacles in his way — from grand juries to trial judges, juries, and appellate judges.
Sometimes, though, chaotic and messy situations arise where the rule of law matters little as compared to the rule of power, or where officers on the ground are torn between what the law requires and what the president demands.
In 2020, when Trump tried to steal the election claiming voter fraud, officials at the Department of Justice and the FBI largely spurned his attempts, viewing them as factually and legally baseless. Congress, state legislators, and the courts basically all spurned him, too, as did General Mark Milley.
But when the mob breached the Capitol on January 6, 2021, none of that mattered for a few hours. Trump had found a group of people willing to do his bidding — and to try to steal the election for him.
That was largely a mob of ordinary people. What if, though, Trump had a squad of MAGA-loyal law enforcement or military officials who he knew were loyal to him personally? Wouldn’t he have tried to use them? And will he believe the 2028 election result is legitimate if it doesn’t go the way he wants?
The civil unrest and riots of the summer of 2020 are other messy and chaotic situations that could have gotten far more ugly if a hardcore MAGA-loyal law enforcement body had existed to confront protesters.
This is why any movement — even baby steps — toward establishing an internal, MAGA-loyal national police force responsive to Trump’s commands seems so ominous to me. It’s something that hasn’t existed in the US for good reason. And if it did exist, we could see some very dangerous things happen here.
