After Donald Trump won the presidential election, Washington, DC, Mayor Muriel Bowser flew to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate to see him.
When Republicans pressured her over the giant “Black Lives Matter” lettering she installed in front of the White House during Trump’s first term, Bowser agreed to remove it. Her reasoning: The city had bigger fish to fry, particularly on managing the federal job cuts Trump has enacted this year.
Now, as Trump federalizes the police in the capital and deploys the National Guard, Bowser faces perhaps the biggest test to date of her leadership and her ability to navigate the White House.
Bowser’s comments in response to the announcement illustrate how she’s often trying to communicate multiple messages at one time.
Describing Trump’s executive action as “unsettling and unprecedented,” Bowser on Monday blasted the city’s lack of full autonomy without personalizing that frustration or criticizing Trump directly.
“I can’t say that given some of the rhetoric of the past that we’re totally surprised,” she said.
Minutes later, she suggested the federal intervention may work to the city’s benefit and told reporters she didn’t have the legal authority to stop Trump’s plans.
“The fact that we have more law enforcement and presence in neighborhoods, that may be positive,” she said.
But Bowser struck a stronger tone during a virtual conversation with community leaders on Tuesday.
Asked what residents can do, Bowser said, “This is a time where community needs to jump in and we all need to, to do what we can in our space, in our lane, to protect our city and to protect our autonomy, to protect our Home Rule, and get to the other side of this guy, and make sure we elect a Democratic House so that we have a backstop to this authoritarian push.”
The following day, she responded to a question about her relationship with Trump saying, “I’m the mayor and he’s the president. I mean, that’s always been our relationship, and the DC mayor and the president of the United States will always have probably more interaction than any city in the rest of our country. So, we’re going to keep doing our job.”
Christina Henderson, a member of the DC council, suggested she empathized with the difficult balance Bowser is trying to strike. She noted that only in 1973 did Congress allow DC residents to elect a mayor, council members and neighborhood commissioners, but prohibited the council from enacting certain laws and the city from having voting members in the US House or Senate.
“You do not want to be the mayor that loses home rule and that there is no mayor after you,” Henderson said.
Asked if she planned to push back harder in the wake of an unprecedented undermining of her authority, Bowser said Monday, “My tenor will be appropriate for what I think is important for the district and what’s important for the district is that we can take care of our citizens.”
Anti-Trump sentiment is fierce in activist spaces across the city, which former Vice President Kamala Harris won last year with 90% of the vote.
At a demonstration this week, the Free DC project, a movement grounded in demanding DC statehood, denounced the Trump administration’s actions. Organizers accused Trump of trying to provoke violence and compared immigration arrests to kidnappings.
“Black Washingtonians have long recognized that community violence cannot be solved through state violence,” said Free DC’s organizing director Nee Nee Taylor, questioning the effectiveness of policing over investing in social programs to uplift the most vulnerable.
“We will not be idle as oppressors’ structures try to harm our communities and take power,” she added.
