Back in June, I was staying with a friend in Washington D.C. When I got back to his apartment, a man asked me if I had seen the fight minutes before at the nearby Metro station. Apparently, a knifing melee involving about 20 young people had broken out. “Wow. Things have gotten rough around here, haven’t they?” I asked. He looked tired and responded: “Most of the time, it’s ok. I did get punched two weeks ago, though.”

This week Donald Trump made a welcome suggestion in a cabinet meeting that the federal government “could run D.C.,” and that “we’re thinking about doing it”. My reaction was: it’s about time.

On 30 June, a University of Massachusetts senior who was in the city for a congressional internship was shot dead. At the same scene, a woman and a 16-year-old boy were also found suffering from gunshot wounds. Earlier, on 21 May, two Israeli embassy staff were murdered outside the Jewish Museum, an incident complicated by D.C. police initially responding to the wrong location. These tragedies come amid a backdrop of the city’s police department currently being understaffed by 20%.

Mayor Muriel Bowser’s administration regularly beats its chest over year-on-year reductions in violent crime numbers (in line with post-Covid reductions elsewhere), even as D.C. continues to push 200 murders annually, fails to prosecute cases of unlicensed firearm possession, and is unable to put on a city-wide festival without it devolving into an orgy of violence. Just this past week, Bowser extended a citywide youth curfew through the end of the summer after mobs of young people spent the 4 July weekend shooting illegal fireworks at cars and into apartment buildings in the Navy Yard area.

As Americans who send our fellow citizens to Washington to serve in the federal government and welcome foreign statesmen and diplomats to visit us, the disturbing regularity of these incidents — murders, muggings, all-around chaos — should not only alarm us. It should make us feel guilty. It is our responsibility as Americans to keep our public servants safe. If the current elected city government is unable to provide basic security in the nation’s capital, it is incumbent upon all Americans to intervene.

Two years ago, I wrote an article for UnHerd arguing exactly that. In 1973, Congress granted Home Rule to the District of Columbia on the assumption that city residents could be trusted to govern the capital region — the joint property of all Americans — responsibly. With the current city government having conclusively shown it cannot be trusted, it’s past time for Home Rule to be taken away.

Vitally, it is Congress that has the prerogative to suspend Home Rule, not President Trump himself. If Trump successfully lobbies Congress to suspend it, Congress can (and should) then hand administrative authority of D.C. over to the executive. Given the second Trump administration’s legal deftness thus far, the President likely knows that an executive order will not do the job here. One can hope that in the heady post-Big Beautiful Bill days of Trump-Congressional collaboration, the administration sees that federal action to protect D.C. is not only necessary, it’s politically feasible as well.

There is one unfortunate indication, however, that President Trump’s words might have been mere bombast. Last week, Trump made a very similar statement at the same meeting about taking over New York City, reacting to the surprise Democratic mayoral primary win of socialist Zohran Mamdani. To say nothing of the legal problems with federal receivership over non-federal property (cities in receivership are typically taken over by state governments, as happened in Michigan’s 2013 receivership over Detroit), the political welfare of New York City lies outside President Trump’s governing mandate. New York, a self-governing city in a self-governing state, derives its governing authority from the consent of New Yorkers, not the federal government. Whatever New York’s symbolic importance to the country, its people are free to ruin their city with government-run grocery stores if they wish. Trump neither should, nor can, do anything about it.

Washington D.C., however, uniquely among American cities, is federal property. Its governance reflects on all Americans. It’s time for Trump, Congress, and our whole federal government to make it a capital we can be proud of.