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On Monday, President Donald Trump announced he was placing Washington, D.C.’s police department under direct federal control and deploying the National Guard to patrol the city. Local officials had not asked for it. Within days, troops in fatigues and federal agents in marked jackets were stationed in neighborhoods, helicopters circling overhead, armored vehicles parked within view of the Washington Monument. Mayor Muriel Bowser called it “unsettling and unprecedented.”

The move is typical Trump: a manufactured emergency wrapped in the theater of decisive action. It did not fix the root causes of crime, but it sent an image to millions of Americans that he was t

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