On Monday, President Trump took over the DC police and sent in the National Guard, pledging that “Scum will disappear” from the “LIBERATED” city. Of course, this isn’t the first time Trump’s deployed the National Guard to DC. He sent in the troops in June 2020 to clear Black Lives Matter protesters from Lafayette Park. But while that deployment was to repress an insurgent protest movement, this week amounted to Trump sending the military to do quality-of-life policing.
That’s because the proximate cause of Trump’s DC takeover wasn’t ominous urban violent crime at all. It was seeing unhoused people on his drive to the golf course. This time, the National Guard and federalized DC police won’t be fighting off protesters. Now, per Trump, they will be purging unhoused people and “getting rid of the slums.”
Trump is deploying the shock-and-awe version of a violent process that’s been rolling out in gentrifying cities around the world. As I wrote in Defying Displacement:
“In 2008, there were twenty-eight police reports filed for “disturbances” in Seattle’s gentrifying Central District. In 2016, there were 116. That was also the year that police started harassing one Harlem resident for playing dominoes with his neighbors on the sidewalk, something they’d done for decades before. The forcible eviction of street vendors served as the opening shots in a ‘government-led reconquista’ of the Lima, Peru city center for the upper classes. A former Atlanta cop reported that his department began the intensive policing of a Section 8 housing complex in a gentrifying neighborhood at the behest of its owners, who hoped to have enough tenants incarcerated that their property could be demolished and redeveloped. “It dawned on me that the entire system, the entire thing, was just a shitty mafia system,” he would later recount.”
Contemporary political and economic power remain concentrated in powerful “global cities” with astounding levels of inequality, crowding elites next to the newly displaced and dispossessed. It’s an explosive mix, one that inspired the U.S. Army Strategic Studies Group to report that “in the next century, the urban environment will be the locus where drivers of instability occur,” including “separation and gentrification. . . radical income disparity, and racial, ethnic and sub cultural separation.”
Trump, together with the bipartisan leadership of diverse American cities and the irredeemable ghouls engineering the likes of Atlanta’s Cop City have a solution: urban ethnic cleansing through police and military force. Military gentrification is just the fully developed form of all pro-displacement policing. It reveals gentrification as the violent settler-colonial project it always has been.
That’s why Trump’s DC takeover isn’t just the story of authoritarianism vs. liberal democratic norms. There didn’t need to be a federal takeover to build a pro-gentrification police brutality training camp in the Atlanta forest. While Trump is breaking precedent with his legal actions to take control of DC, there is a deep continuity between his use of military force to “cleanse” the city and the everyday policing operations deployed against unhoused people across the country.
Trump’s promise to incarcerate the unhoused is deeply chilling. It’s also not a far cry from Democrat Gavin Newsom’s executive order last year demanding the industrial-scale “dismantling” of California unhoused encampments.
While Newsom’s positioning himself as an anti-Trump wunderkind, both men agree on the urgent necessity of dispersing unhoused encampments through state violence. Only Trump, however, has the full force of the American federal government at his disposal.
The exercise of literal military force to clear an undesirable population from DC comes as Israel seeks to annex the entirety of the West Bank through military and paramilitary violence, an even larger-scale example of the same military gentrification drive. As the authors of Planetary Gentrification write, “the key actor in planetary gentrification is the state—neoliberal or authoritarian.” Gentrification isn’t just an economic by-product—it’s a conscious political project by state elites, one underpinned by the threat and exercise of state violence against the evicted and unhoused.
And in the United States, that threat now includes the use of military force. We have entered the era of military gentrification. We should prepare accordingly.
This post has been syndicated from In Struggle, where it was published under this address.