Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. Donald Trump has hit on a reliable second-term policy formula: Declare a crisis, and take advantage of the legal leeway to seize vast, unprecedented powers. That strategy has enabled him to renegotiate global trade deals, imprison and deport people without due process, and deploy the National Guard to Los Angeles. Now, it’s Washington, D.C.’s time in the barrel, with Trump taking control of the District’s police force (now under the supervision of Attorney General Pam Bondi) and once again deploying the National Guard under the pretense of an emergency. On Monday, the president invoked the 50-year-old District of Columbia Home Rule Act for the first time, claiming he was taking “a historic action to rescue our nation’s capital from crime, bloodshed, bedlam, and squalor and worse. This is liberation day in D.C. and we’re going to take our capital back.” The incident that appeared to set the troops in motion was a group of 15-year-olds beating up Edward “Big Balls” Coristine, a photo of whose bloody nose Trump shared on Truth Social last week. It’s hard to know where Trump’s cynical opportunism shades into the reality that, as my colleague Ben Mathis-Lilley notes, his brain stopped processing new experiences in the 1980s. But on one subject Trump is correct: D.C. has a homelessness crisis. The District’s January point-in-time count recorded more than 5,000 homeless people in the city. It’s a 9 percent drop from the previous year, but affirms D.C.’s status as a city with one of the country’s highest rates of homelessness. Trump’s takeover of the District seems unlikely to have a significant effect on crime—the deployment isn’t big enough to blanket the city’s high-crime neighborhoods with soldiers, and the military won’t be solving cold cases—but it could prove a test for the president’s recent executive order that encourages the forced removal of homeless people from the streets. In the case of Washington, Trump posted photos of homeless people to Truth Social on Sunday, writing: “The Homeless have to move out, IMMEDIATELY. We will give you places to stay, but FAR from the Capital.” (That produced an all-timer headline in the Guardian: “Trump Orders Homeless People He Passed en Route to Golf Course to Leave Washington DC.”) The conflation of crime and homelessness is not new and it is not confined to Trump, or even to city-hating conservatives. The irony is that homelessness is a disease of affluence; the cities with the most homeless people per capita are the country’s most expensive places to live: San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles, Boston, Portland, Washington, Seattle. Because those high-flying urban housing markets were made possible by the great urban crime decline, you could even argue that homelessness is a product of low-crime cities. It was precisely the arrival of wealthier residents like Coristine, who felt safe hanging out downtown at 3 a.m., that displaced longtime, low-income tenants. And that adds a particularly tragic undertone to the coming persecution of the capital’s homeless people: Studies show that most homeless people were residents before they lost their homes. Surely most of them have lived in D.C. for longer than Donald Trump has. Trump’s slandering of major cities, their elected representatives, and their residents is a political tactic that goes back to his first term, but has gained purchase in conservative circles since the racial justice protests of 2020. It seems to have no relationship with actual crime data (which show crime is down in D.C., and down to 50-year lows in some big cities), but instead draws its power from videos of people fighting and other tabloid ragebait, which can generate multiday news cycles for conservative influencers—Coristine’s attack being just the latest example of this. If Big Balls was Washington’s Franz Ferdinand, the ongoing homelessness crisis was the entangling alliances—the conditions that set the stage for Trump’s attack on cities. It is impossible to overstate the influence of homeless people on modern Republican thought. Chris Rufo, now famous as the GOP’s ideas man on race, gender, and universities, cut his teeth on homelessness policy and even ran for Seattle City Council on the issue in 2018. Many California tech figures became similarly fixated on homelessness. One of them, Joe Lonsdale, moved to Austin and funded a research institute dedicated to harsher treatment of homeless people. Elon Musk recently offered his view on the subject: “In most cases, the word ‘homeless’ is a lie. It’s usually a propaganda word for violent drug addicts with severe mental illness.” Liberals have also spent a lot of time thinking about homelessness, and Democratic politicians have in some cases been reluctant to recognize the scale of the challenge and the resources required to solve it: a lot more housing, and fast, coupled with a vastly improved support network. But they are also dogged by being the party that believes that government can solve problems. Donald Trump does not care about solving anyone’s problem but his own, and so his answer to people who cannot afford to live in the city is simply to exile them. They’ll still be homeless. But they won’t be on the road to Trump National Golf Club.