President Donald Trump, who was found guilty on 34 felony convictions in 2024 but faced no penalties, now wants to change the law in Washington, D.C., to charge minors as adults.
Earlier this month in a post on Truth Social, he explained that “local ‘youths’ and gang members” commit crimes against innocent citizens “knowing that they will be almost immediately released.” The president suggested we should “lock them up for a long time, starting at age 14.”
At the end of the paragraph-long post, he said, “Perhaps it should have been done a long time ago, then this incredible young man, and so many others, would not have had to go through the horrors of Violent Crime. If this continues, I am going to exert my powers, and FEDERALIZE this City. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”
Two 15-year-old suspects have been arrested in an attempted Washington, D.C., carjacking in which 19-year-old former DOGE worker Edward Coristine was beaten up. (Photo via @realDonaldTrump/Truth Social)
He included a photo of the “young man” he referenced in the paragraph, bloodied and sitting on the ground. The man is 19-year-old Edward “Big Balls” Coristine, a former DOGE staffer who now works for the Social Security Administration.
Coristine allegedly was attacked by teenagers around 3 a.m. on Sunday, Aug. 3, while attempting to stop a carjacking. Metro police arrested two 15-year-old suspects who were fleeing the scene.
Former special government employee Elon Musk, who headed DOGE, took to X to further defend Coristine, whom he said was attempting to defend a woman being carjacked by the teens.
Although Musk and Trump displayed a messy and public breakup earlier this year, he agreed with the president, saying, “It is time to federalize DC.”
And that they did. A federal takeover began late at night on Monday Aug. 11, after Trump declared a “crime emergency” in the nation’s capital. The executive order falsely claims crime has been rising in D.C. and now “urgently endangers public servants, citizens and tourists” and “has had a dire impact on the federal government’s ability to operate efficiently.”
Because of this alleged rise in crime, the order declares a “special emergency condition” which requires the mobilization of the Metropolitan Police Force for “federal purposes.” The administration attempted to replace the city’s police chief with federal employee Terry Cole, head of the Drug Enforcement Administration, although D.C. Attorney General Brian Schwalb quickly filed a lawsuit to prevent this power shift.
Notably, this was a move right out of Hitler’s playbook.
When Adolf Hitler was elected chancellor of Germany in 1933, a key reason he was able to become dictator was by utilizing federal force to take over Germany’s police forces, which were previously overseen by state and city governments per the democratic constitution of the Weimar Republic.
Region by region, the federal government took over police forces under the authority of SS (Schutzstaffel) “Protection Squads” led by Heinrich Himmler, who centralized the police force and embedded Nazi ideology into their role. This effectively worked to “free the police from the constraints of the Weimar Constitution,” allowing members to remove or murder those identified by the regime as political enemies.
Along with other methods of federal overreach, this extra-constitutional policing is what made the Holocaust possible.
The Holocaust Encyclopedia explains, “Nazi leaders justified this extra-legal chain of command and the policies initiated under its authorization by the national emergency decrees following the Reichstag Fire in 1933 and, after 1939, by the intensified emergency created by the war.” These were dramatizations, making these events seem much more violent and dangerous to the public than they were. They were then used by the federal government to suspend civil rights to prevent a revolt of the citizens.
Reichstag fire (Wikipedia)
For instance, the Reichstag (German Parliament) building caught fire for unknown reasons, although the German Supreme Court found Marinus van der Lubbe, who was seen fleeing the scene, guilty of arson. No one was harmed in the fire, but the building was destroyed.
Although it’s unclear if Lubbe was a communist — or truly responsible for the fire — Hitler blamed communists for the event, claiming they were planning other violent acts.
The Holocaust Encyclopedia notes, “The Reichstag Fire Decree permitted the regime to arrest and incarcerate political opponents without specific charges, dissolve political organizations, and to suppress publications. It gave the central government the authority to overrule state and local laws and overthrow state and local governments.”
Comparatively, leaders in D.C. say Trump’s claims about the rise in violent crime rates over recent years are factually inaccurate and simply justify the use of federal force in the city.
In fact, statistics show crime spiked in 2023 but has significantly declined over the past two years. In turn, D.C.’s current rates of violent crime are lower than they have been since 1966. Looking at juvenile crime, young people are only responsible for about 7% of arrests in D.C. — a statistic comparable to other cities of similar sizes.
Further, the causes of juvenile crime are typically rooted in factors like poverty and homelessness or other socioeconomic factors that would disrupt the behavioral health and well-being of a young person. Responses to juvenile offenders often attempt to resolve these underlying factors that cause the behavior, rather than simply arresting them as one would an adult.
D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser spoke publicly about the federal takeover, citing crime statistics contrary to Trump’s claims. Still, the Department of Justice has begun a federal investigation into whether the Metro Police Department has manipulated crime data. Although Metro Police will cooperate with the investigation, Bowser maintains any allegations of data manipulation are false.
“We know that crime has gone down in our city, and it has gone down precipitously over the last two years because of a lot of hard work, changes to our public safety ecosystem, including changes to the law, and we know those facts don’t comport to what some people are saying.”
You can read all this for yourself. See Trump’s full executive order titled “Declaring A Crime Emergency in the District of Columbia” on the official White House website. An English translation of the Reichstag Decree, “The Decree of the Reich President for the Protection of the People and the State,” is available on the Holocaust Encyclopedia website.
Mallory Challis is a third-year master of divinity student at Wake Forest University School of Divinity and is a former Clemons Fellow with BNG.
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