The best counteraction to Trump’s authoritarianism is a new commitment to ensure a complete representative democracy in Washington.
Members of the National Guard patrol at the National Mall on August 26, 2025 in Washington, Colombia.
(Alex Wong / Getti Image)
The Colombia area is not a state. It is a legally mysterious, insufficient and officially rejected creation of a federal government that has history of neglect the needs and potential of the country’s capital. Now Donald Trump has fully used this fact to flood Washington with strongly armed soldiers and masked federal agents.
Trump admits that his transition to law enforcement agencies to DC is caused by unresolved Americans. “They already say, ‘he’s dictator,” “Trump – Note Last week, after a military splash began. The President claimed he was just trying to fight the violation. “The place goes to hell and we must stop it,” he said. “So, instead of saying” he is a dictator, “they have to say,” We’re going to join it and make Washington safe. “
But the statement of Trump’s crime is wrong. “There is no crisis in the DC,” a former DC police officer, who teaches at Georgetovna Law School, Rosa Brooks, a former DC police officer, who now teaches at the Georget Faculty, Georgetown, “” said NPR. Brooks abandoned the authoritarian work of the president, saying: “This is the police territory, the state territory of the Banana Republic.”
Unfortunately, there is a significant history of federal administrations and republican congresses that are part of the Bonanavag Republic’s State Territory when it comes to DC.
Frederick Douglas acknowledged that a crisis of democracy was 135 years ago in the country’s capital. The great cancer and the social reformer who taught that “the authorities recognizes nothing without demand. It has never done and will never be” – it was the same as the time when it came to DC, as in many other fields. He spent the last years of his life while working with a pioneering group of voting rights, The Association of the Requirement on the District of the Districtto make a promise and protection of democracy in DC.
Douglas attended the meetings and rallies of the group and asked: “What did the residents of the area make them to be expelled from the privileges of the vote?”
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Several democratic reforms, for which Douglas acted during his excellent life were achieved in the century after his death. Today in Washington there is the elected mayor and city council, as well as the opportunity to throw ballots (and choose voters) In the presidential election.
However, 130 years after Douglas died, the citizens of the District of Colombia are still blocked from the choice of Congress members.
The refusal in the full franchise to the citizens of the country’s capital is just one example of the Patchworks approach to the voters in the US, where Americans living in the Commonwealth, territories and possessions lacking full rights to a congressional office And, in most cases, the right for the president. Even in the States of Voting, the voting is poorly determined, and the voting law, which was already so weakened by the Supreme Court, is under further legal attack, which is in the current jolt of the Texas Republicans, which is so widely illustrated.
However, the Colombia district has perhaps the most difficult relationship with the rights of any jurisdiction of the United States. While the residents of the area can vote in the presidential election, they have no right to choose voting representatives to the House or Senate. DC delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton, a veteran activist statue that now stands in the American Capitol, remember When he was dedicated to ten years ago, “there was too little confession that, as a resident of Colombia, three Republican presidents appointed Douglas to three local positions: to the then Upper House of the DC Council, parts of the government, which are considered in the Republican Congress and the president during the reconstruction Courts and Local Courts of the Federation.
Norton and others know that today, although the DC has elected local authorities, the power of this government – and thus to determine Washington residents – were often restrained by republican congresses. And now it is abolished by the authoritarian republican president.
Citizens of the district, who have a population, is more than Vermont and Wyoming – organized, agitated and spent on statehood for decades.
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But the cause of statehood – and the main democratic respect – was thwarted since the Congress members refused the request of a great radical senator from Southern Dakota, Richard F. PettygrCalled after Douglas’s death in 1895, “that, out of respect for his memory, his remains are allowed to lie down in the state of the national capitol between the hours 10 and 4pm tomorrow.”
Today, Republicans Congress create a major barrier for the statehood of permanent current. They like to note that Douglas was a republican. But it was on the day when Douglas saw GOP as a progressive force that demanded an extension of the franchise.
In recent decades, the Democratic Party has made demand a standard part of its platform. But, too often, the Democrats did it in the growth and half of the heart. What is missing is a sense of relevance.
The militarization of Trump for law enforcement in the city establishes this relevance now in the future. While the Republican Congress, erected in Trump, is not going to do the right things, the Democrats must make it clear that part of the wider Renaissance to vote, which should monitor the years of Trump-state DC will head their agenda.
The dream of voting has been postponed since Douglas wrote about the district as “one place where there is no government for people, people and people. Its citizens obey the leaders who have no choice. They obey the laws they did not have a voice.”
If the long arc of the moral universe bends to justice, as Reverend Martin Luther King -Jr. preached during his lifetime, then, of course, the heritage of this horrible moment for the American democracy should become a DC state state.
At this point, the crisis we need the only, progressive opposition to Donald Trump.
We begin to see how we start to develop on the streets and ballots all over the country: from the Candide company in Mary’s New York Mammani, focused on accessibility, community that protect their neighbors from ice, to senators who oppose weapons.
The Democratic Party has an urgent choice: will it accept a policy that is fundamental and popular, or will continue to insist on the loss of elections with the elites and consultants who brought us here?
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Thank you for helping us take Trump and create a fair society we know.
With respect
Bhaskar Sunkara
President, Nation
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