President Trump said he plans to go out on patrol with the Metropolitan Police Department and National Guard troops around Washington, D.C., on Thursday night amid a federal crackdown on crime, The Hill reports.

Said Trump: “I’m going to be going out tonight, I think, with the police and with the military, of course. So we’re going to do a job.”

ABC News: Trump says he will go out with police, military to patrol DC Thursday night.

Washington Post: “As Trump ramps up the military presence in Washington — and hints that he may move to take over other cities — his crackdown punctuates a frequent Republican message that American cities embody chaos, lawlessness and immorality, despite widespread recent drops in violent crime.”

“With cities increasingly liberal and rural stretches ever more conservative, Republicans have a growing incentive to attack urban areas as the epitome of all that is wrong with America.”

“Vice President JD Vance and other Trump administration officials suggested Wednesday that the federal takeover of policing in D.C. could serve as a test case for other cities across the country as they tried to amplify the issue,” the Washington Post reports.

Roughly 8 in 10​​ Washington, DC, residents oppose President Trump ordering the federal government to take control of the city’s police department as well as his deployment of the National Guard and FBI to patrol the city, a new Washington Post-Schar School poll finds.

A slim majority — 51% — of likely voters nationally oppose President Trump’s takeover of the Washington, DC, police force, according to a new Data for Progress survey.

Politico: “The federal officer who arrested the mayor of New Jersey’s largest city outside an immigration detention center in May suggested that he was making the arrest at the direction of the Justice Department’s No. 2 official, Todd Blanche, according to law enforcement body camera footage described in a new court filing.”

David Graham: “What exactly is their mission and training, though? National Guard troops prepare for civil unrest, which is why they’re frequently called up when major protests break out. But D.C. isn’t seeing big demonstrations—certainly not before Trump’s takeover, and not really since, either, despite some smaller protests by residents.”

“As for the mission, that’s even more obscure. Last Monday, Trump said that the plan was to “liberate” D.C. from crime. Depending on who you believe, the takeover was triggered by the president’s desire to change the subject away from Jeffrey Epstein, a reflexive reaction to a Fox News segment about D.C., or anger about an attempted carjacking involving a former DOGE staffer. But Trump cited no acute emergency, and he hasn’t explained what the goal is. With no stated objective, there can be no end point. (It can’t be that crime ceases to exist, an impossible goal.) That raises the scary prospect that it could just go on forever—or slide into martial law around the country.”

“The governors of Mississippi and Louisiana said on Monday that they would deploy hundreds of National Guard troops to Washington, joining three other Republican-led states that have recently heeded President Trump’s request to fill the nation’s capital with troops,” the New York Times reports.

“The five states are collectively sending about 1,000 troops to Washington, where there are already 800 deployed troops from the D.C. National Guard, which the president can call out directly.”

“President Trump’s MAGA movement sees his D.C. crackdown as being about more than just crime — it’s an opportunity to deal another setback to liberals by expanding the movement in urban areas,” Axios reports.

“Despite the protests over Trump’s stunning show of force on D.C.’s streets, MAGA’s most vocal voices believe that if the anti-crime push is successful — and Trump is certain to declare it so — it could win converts in cities and help expand the movement’s rural base.”

Playbook: “Right-wing social media is savoring clips of law enforcement taking action in the capital.”

Ron Brownstein: “President Donald Trump is moving systematically to tighten his grip on Democratic-leaning big cities — the geographic center of resistance to his agenda — by undermining their autonomy and eroding their political strength.”

“Those militant goals are the common thread that links the high-profile initiatives Trump has launched in recent days to seize control of law enforcement in Washington, DC; pressure red states to draw new congressional district lines; and potentially pursue an unprecedented ‘redo’ of the 2020 census.”

“These new efforts compound the pressure Trump is already placing on major cities with an agenda that includes aggressive immigration enforcement; cuts in federal research funding to universities central to the economy of many large metros; and threats to rescind federal funding for jurisdictions that resist his demands to impose conservative policies on immigration, education, homelessness and policing.”

“Attorney General Pam Bondi on Thursday night rescinded Washington policies that restrict the local police from aiding in immigration enforcement as she moved to tighten the Trump administration’s grip on law enforcement in the nation’s capital,” the New York Times reports.

“The two-page order from Ms. Bondi also declared that Terry Cole, the head of the Drug Enforcement Administration, who had already been overseeing the federal takeover of the city’s police department, was now the ‘emergency police commissioner,’ with ‘all the powers and duties’ invested in the city’s police chief, Pamela A. Smith.”

Washington Post: Muriel Bowser and D.C. attorney general reject push by Bondi to name emergency police commissioner.

“City officials and advocates warned people living in homeless camps to head to shelters or risk arrest in the federal sweeps that were expected to begin Thursday evening as part of President Trump’s takeover of law enforcement in the capital,” the New York Times reports.

“I think the most important thing is that people see themselves and their struggles in your campaign… And I think the larger struggle for us as Democrats is to ensure that we are practicing a politics that is direct, a politics of no translation, a politics that when you read the policy commitment, you understand it, as how it applies to your life.”

— Zohran Mamdani, in an interview with Time.