(Washington) Donald Trump announced in a radio interview that he would go out Thursday with soldiers deployed on his orders in the streets of the capital Washington, in a decision deemed authoritarian by the opposition.
“I’m going to go out this evening, I think, with the police and of course with the army,” the American president Todd Starnes told the US president, without giving more details on the schedule and the place of this trip.
Donald Trump had announced on August 11 that his government took control of the maintenance of order in the federal capital in order to “clean” it, in his words.
In particular, there have been deployed soldiers of the National Guard, a reserve unit, to stop what he deems is a crime out of control.
Unlike the 50 American states, the municipality of Washington operates within the framework of a particular relationship with the federal state which limits its autonomy.
The Democrat mayor of Washington, Muriel Bowser, challenges the apocalyptic descriptions made of her city by the White House, while official statistics show a drop in violent crime.
This decision by Donald Trump fueled the reproaches of authoritarian drift formulated by the Democratic opposition.
The Republican President had already mobilized the National Guard in California in June, against the advice of the Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom, saying that he wanted to restore order in Los Angeles after demonstrations against muscular arrests of immigrants by the Federal Immigration Police (ICE).
This was the first deployment in this way against the will of a local governor since 1965.
