Opinion | Trump and Republicans are threatening to curb democracy in D.C.

In the District of Columbia, the federal government already influences everything from city council spending to the location of the city government’s office buildings. Republicans have now endorsed even greater federal control over the city and its 680,000 inhabitants as part of their 2024 platform. Apparently, former president Donald Trump isn’t kidding when he promises, frequently, to “take over the horribly run capital of our nation.”

Assuming that Mr. Trump could pass the appropriate legislation, a takeover could be perfectly constitutional, given Congress’s unique authority over the District. But it would also be rankly undemocratic, reverse one of the civil rights movement’s signal achievements and, on a practical level, make life in D.C. worse.

For a taste of what Republicans might have in mind for a Trump-led takeover of D.C., consult the nearly 50 bills to change laws in the District — on subjects as diverse as sports team logos and local election laws — that GOP lawmakers have proposed in recent years. One would ban abortion in the city; another would repeal home rule entirely. The platform outlined at the Republican National Convention this month justifies federal control in the name of restoring “Law and Order in our Capital City.” And, to be sure, crime in the District spiked during the pandemic (as it did in most other cities), partly because of the city’s own missteps. In fact, the D.C. Council tried to impose a sweeping criminal code reform that critics, including Mayor Muriel E. Bowser, argued would have made it harder for authorities to restore public safety.

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In the end, though, democracy worked, as it has in the past. Voter concerns about rising rates of carjackings and homicides pushed the council to shift gears, enacting anti-crime legislation Ms. Bowser, a Democrat, also supported. Courts increased the use of pretrial detention for potentially violent defendants, police cracked down on open-air drug markets, and the city hired more officers.

Crime is now easing, despite notablecounterexamples, such as a carjacking this month near Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s home. Many cities have seen crime rates decrease this year, but D.C.’s was among the largest drops.

Perhaps the biggest success has been the decrease in carjackings, which disproportionately skyrocketed during the pandemic. The most recent monthly carjacking figure is the lowest since September 2022.

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True, it is impossible to know whether the council would have course-corrected as swiftly or as forcefully without the threat of potential federal intervention looming, as it always does, over the heads of local leaders. But President Biden has generally opposed meddling in the District’s affairs, suggesting that a light federal touch to city management is enough to dissuade D.C. officials from adopting radical policies. Even then, it is likely that democratic pressure would have succeeded, anyway. Local backlash to rising crime rates would have prompted action with, crucially, the support of the local community being policed.

Mr. Trump’s threats would instead force local representatives to focus on pleasing Congress rather than their constituents, which is often not the same thing. This, indeed, is the point: Even if the District had not rebounded, its people, like all other Americans, have an inherent right to rule themselves, even if it means their leaders sometimes make mistakes. This principle, enshrined in the nation’s founding documents, needs no further justification. But if Republicans need one, it is that democratic systems, for all their messiness, tend to self-correct in ways that top-down systems do not. Congressional Republicans might relish the prospect of ruling D.C. because legislating for the city is a good way to score points with their own constituents back home — while facing none from the disenfranchised people their actions actually affect.

Though not quite the “killing field” of Mr. Trump’s hyperbole, D.C. has a long way to go to become as safe as it should be. Crime rates are still above pre-pandemic levels. But the District is responding. Fighting crime requires knowing an area’s history and communities. The recent reclamation of public spaces as drug-free zones, for instance, was a revival of an older, proven D.C. policy. Solving the crime problem will also require courts and prosecutors taking up more cases and city welfare agencies doing their jobs better. The strategies federal interveners might use, in contrast, are likely to be more blunt — as evidenced by the Republican desire to deploy the National Guard in D.C.

As the Trump allies who produced the Project 2025 document wrote, “the principles of federalism should be upheld; these indicate that states better understand their unique needs.” The same principle applies in D.C., and there should be no special exception to it.

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