Dispatch from Occupied DC

      I’ve lived here long enough to remember when Washington, DC often was described as a sleepy southern town. Now it’s starting to resemble a banana republic capital after a military coup.

       Armed masked thugs working for ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) are arresting mostly black and brown people with impunity on city streets in broad daylight. Screw reading your rights, fuck due process. It’s a disgusting show of political theater that is supposed to combat what our pustule of a president calls the unfettered crime wave in the “hellhole” nation’s capital.

       In addition, Trump has taken over the DC police force (we’re the federal city, remember) and ordered in National Guard troops to protect us all from rampaging mobs of undocumented criminal Latinos and bloodthirsty homegrown Blacks. (Never mind that before all this, overall crime in DC was the lowest it had been in decades.)

       Mind, the political theater is playing only in selected locations. There are National Guard checkpoints in the dicier areas of downtown DC, but elsewhere, around the National Mall for example, guardsmen are spending (wasting) their time picking up garbage.

       We haven’t seen troops, much less masked ICE thugs, in our (whiter, wealthier) northwest DC neighborhood, but what has now become Trump’s personal paramilitary has been doing just fine grabbing Latino food delivery guys off their motorbikes, and creating shitstorms of fear at big box stores in and around the area, where day laborers gather for pickup work. (Remember: Trump said he was doing this to go after bigtime drug dealers and other major criminals. Instead, this bag of guts has targeted mostly law-biding, if occasionally undocumented, folks just trying to eke out a living to support their families.)

       [Sideshow: the great felony sandwich throw. During one recent set-to with the law downtown, Sean Charles Dunn, a DOJ employee, confronted the cops, called one a fascist and shouted, “Why are you here; I don’t want you in my city!” He hurled his Subway sandwich at the cops and was arrested and charged with felony assault. Tellingly, a federal grand jury refused to indict him. He was, however, immediately fired from his job—but he now lives in DC lore.]

© Erica Wissolik

       This all began last month as the Orange Pustule prepared to play Neville Chamberlain to Vladimir Putin's Hitler, pressuring Ukraine to cave before the murderous Russian dictator during an unforgivable “summit” meeting—on U.S. soil no less. Our nominal president also was trying to grab headlines and eyeballs by fomenting a simultaneous putsch in Washington.

       What got Pustule's panties in a twist was when one of his Nazi DOGE boys, the 19-year-old incel dubbed "Big Balls," nearly had his car hijacked and was beaten up by children. Mercy!

       I'm the last to say DC is an oasis of peace and harmony, especially in some of its poorest neighborhoods. But sweet-Jesus-in-a-hand truck, as an ex-Bronx boy who spent four years at CCNY in the middle of Harlem and never had anyone look at his white face even sideways, I think I know dicey neighborhoods when I see them.

       Give me a fucking break.

       This move, besides being an unsubtle dog-whistle to his base about DC's large Black population, is yet another desperate attempt by Trump to try to turn attention away from all the other stuff—like a tanking economy, a Russian dictator playing him like a fiddle, and, of course, the Epstein files—that ain't going away.

       And, as Feds with guns take over the streets of my adoptive city—and as Trump insists he merely is upholding the rule of law—I say merely this: If that fat SOB actually cared about the rule of law, he should have personally unleashed the National Guard back in 2021 to protect the Capitol from the real thugs and killers: the bastards who overran our Capitol on Jan. 6th.

       But of course he didn’t. In fact, one of Trump’s first acts after being sworn in again was to pardon the Jan. 6th insurrectionists, thereby confirming his own role as a traitor to his country.

       And the hits keep coming: recently the Pentagon informed the family of Ashli Babbitt, an Air Force veteran who was shot dead by police as she tried to break down the door leading to the House chamber on Jan. 6th , that she now could be buried with full military honors. Never mind that the actions of Babbitt, who by her public writings had become a conspiracy-spouting QAnon crazy, all but shat on her oath to preserve, protect and defend the United States. In fact, the Trump White House OK’d a five million dollar payout to her family to make their wrongful death lawsuit go away.

       So, it also should not surprise that, in the aftermath of that big payday, lawyers representing the rest of the Jan. 6th insurrectionists now are seeking monetary damages from the government for their clients’ so-called false arrest and convictions.

       Give me strength, or at least a stiff Scotch, in the face of all this bullshit.

       A prediction:

       If the Trump-deranged fuckwads in the DOJ (I am looking at you, U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro—please try to stay awake) give even the time of day to this disgusting effort to further pervert justice, I predict even more fence-sitting voters finally might become outraged enough to tell Trump that it’s over. It's bad enough that our Depends-wearing president pardoned these bastards; if he OKs a plan to give them compensation for their fatal criminality it is even more evidence of his cowardice, cruelty and treason.

       I long have said that Trump is sui generis, one of a kind, for his ignorance, cruelty, treason, perversion and sloth. With the GOP now his personal malleable cult, I believe there is no reason to support someone who represents, now more than ever, an existential threat to this country. Because of that, I believe it is fair to say that any vote for any Republican in the upcoming midterm elections is a vote against America.

       Make no mistake: we are at a terrible crossroads. Next year's midterm elections will determine whether we survive as a democracy.

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Frank Van Riper is a Washington-based photographer, journalist and author. As a reporter he covered the Watergate scandal for two years—from break-in to Richard Nixon’s resignation—for the New York Daily News. He was a 1979 Nieman Fellow at Harvard and holds the 1980 Merriman Smith Award (with his colleague, the late Lars-Erik Nelson) from the White House Correspondents Association.