Joined by personnel from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), Customs and Border Protection (CBP), the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and the Secret Service, the president now has 800 National Guard troops keeping the peace in the nation's capital.
Lieutenant Randy Sutton (Ret.), who predicted this, says the federal presence is needed there because the city's leadership is totally incompetent.
"She's an empty suit," he says of Police Chief Pamala Smith. "Watching her is an embarrassment to law enforcement."
According to Smith's biography, she previously served as the department's first chief equity officer, where she "led the department's efforts on diversity, equity, and inclusion."
She made headlines recently for not understanding a reporter's question about the department's current "chain of command."
"What does that mean?" was her response.
Matt Walsh of The Daily Wire, who likens that to "a cook who's never heard of the word 'kitchen,'" also makes note of D.C. Attorney General Brian Schwalb's words when he was pressed for solutions to crime in the capital in the past.
"We as a city and a community need to be much more focused on prevention and surrounding young people and their families with resources if we want to be safer in the long run," he said last year. "We cannot prosecute and arrest our way out of it."
Sutton reiterates that one of the biggest problems in D.C. is the soft-on-crime leadership.
"They fail to believe that there should be accountability for crime," he summarizes. "That's the long and short of it."
Fox News says Trump's decision to federalize the D.C. police department follows a number of high-profile attacks and killings in recent weeks, including the fatal shooting of a congressional intern in June, the fatal shooting of a pair of Israeli embassy staffers in May, and a brutal attack on a former Department of Government Efficiency staffer earlier in August.
The president called it "Liberation Day in D.C.," adding, "We're going to take our capital back."
"We're taking it back under the authority vested in me as the president of the United States. I'm officially invoking section 740 of the District of Columbia Home Rule Act … and placing the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department under direct federal control," he said Monday.
