D.C. Can't Vote Out Trump. It's About to Try Anyway

On June 16, District Democrats will choose the first new mayor Washington has had in 12 years. Muriel Bowser declined a fourth term, leaving an open seat that seven candidates are running to fill under the city’s first ranked-choice primary.

But the figure who has shaped this race isn’t on the ballot. Donald Trump is.

This week he made it official. Asked what he would do if Janeese Lewis George wins, the president said he “wouldn’t like it” and floated taking Washington back to “run it on the federal basis.” He suggested he would move to repeal home rule itself. Five days before the primary, the man who has loomed over this race stopped looming and stepped into it.

Consider what he has done since January 2025. His federal workforce purge gave the District the highest unemployment rate in the nation last year. In August, he seized control of the police, deployed the National Guard, and invoked a never-used provision of the Home Rule Act to do it.

Federal agents move through our neighborhoods, and a U.S. attorney is threatening to prosecute parents of unruly teens. Who runs this city feels less settled than it has in 50 years.

I have lived here for two decades, through five mayors, and I have never voted for Muriel Bowser. But I’ll say the unfashionable thing: her management of Trump was a master class in governing without power.

Her attorney general sued to block the takeover and won a partial retreat, then signed a deal to keep coordinating with the same agents, because the alternative was losing home rule outright. Students booed her at Howard last month for exactly that restraint.

The two front-runners offer opposite answers to the Trump problem. Janeese Lewis George, a self-described democratic socialist who has modeled her campaign on New York’s Zohran Mamdani, runs on defiance. Kenyan McDuffie, a former at-large council member, runs on competence.

George leads by double digits in a Washington Post-Schar School poll. In a city this angry, defiance sells.

But defiance makes promises arithmetic can’t keep, and George’s housing plan is the tell.

She has pledged to build 72,000 units in five years — double Bowser’s pace — and to finance part of it by tapping the city’s pension funds. “Billions of dollars,” she said at a recent debate, to “leverage” into construction.

The city’s police union called it an automatic disqualifier, and not only because retirees’ savings shouldn’t ride on a mayor’s building targets.

The real problem is the math. Pensions exist to earn returns. D.C.’s affordable housing loses money.

According to CohnReznick’s 2025 affordable housing study, the District’s tax-credit properties carry a median debt-coverage ratio of 0.81 — the lowest in the nation and the only one below water. The typical building doesn’t earn enough to cover its mortgage. D.C. is the only jurisdiction where these properties, on average, run a negative cash flow.

You cannot fund a pension with assets engineered to lose money.

Now follow who is cheering anyway. George is backed by organized labor, including the building-trades unions that would staff any public building push. They gain the work whether or not a finished building ever turns a profit.

The wages are immediate. The return to the pension is theoretical. A 2021 RAND study of Los Angeles’s homelessness bond found a labor agreement added about $43,000 per unit, enough to build 800 more homes. The figure is contested, but the direction is plain.

So the people capturing the upside aren’t the ones carrying the risk. The trades collect today; the pensioners and the city absorb the loss later. It is a wealth transfer dressed as a housing plan.

This is the well-worn appeal to a frustrated electorate — that government should simply do more. It satisfies because it skips the part where someone makes the numbers work.

McDuffie’s smaller plan faces the same frozen market, where developers have largely stopped building. The difference is that he isn’t promising to conjure the constraint away.

The resentment is real and earned. More than 90 percent of this city votes Democratic, and Trump’s deployment doesn’t register here as public safety. It registers as occupation.

But a mayor’s hands are tied against a president exercising executive authority.

Defiance is a posture. It is not a lever.

What is left of home rule is fragile. Trump’s allies are already moving to repeal the law behind it, and now the president has said out loud that he might join them. Protecting it means not handing Congress a fresh reason to take it back.

Take the threat seriously on its own terms first. The president cannot end home rule on his own. Repeal is an act of Congress, which means it has to clear the Senate, which means it needs sixty votes. Republicans do not have sixty votes. They are nowhere close. Trump’s remark was off-the-cuff, the kind of thing he says to a reporter on his way somewhere, and as a literal plan to dissolve the District’s government it runs into a filibuster he cannot wish away.

That is the comforting half. Here is the other half. Congress does not need to repeal home rule to bend this city to its will, and it has already shown how.

Last year it stripped roughly a billion dollars of the District’s own money — not federal funds, our money, already approved — out of the budget by quietly dropping one line from a spending bill. The city froze hiring and braced for layoffs. The fix sat stalled in the House for months even after the Senate passed it and Trump told them to. The money was eventually made whole, but the lesson stood: the real power over Washington is not a dramatic repeal that needs sixty votes. It is the line item that needs only a majority and a few weeks of indifference.

George understood the opportunity immediately. Within hours she called the threat “an attack on democracy itself” and vowed not to protect home rule “by obeying in advance.” It was the right note for the moment, and it cost her nothing to hit. Trump may have done more for her candidacy in one offhand answer than her field operation could do in a month.

There is no surer way to consolidate a Washington Democratic primary than to have this president name you as the candidate he fears. This is a city where even the District’s Republicans backed Nikki Haley over Trump in the 2024 primary. His disapproval is a credential here.

But resistance is not a policy. It is a feeling, and a satisfying one, and it ends the moment someone with real power decides to test it. The harder question is what the next mayor actually does when Congress reaches for the budget again, and on that question defiance has an answer problem.

At a recent debate George said she had been counseled by House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries to focus on working with Democrats, because, in her telling, “Republicans lie.” As a primary line it works. As a governing strategy it collides with how this city actually gets things done. The Democrats are in the minority, for now. The committee that oversees the District is run by Republicans. When the Commanders won the right to come home to RFK, the bill that transferred the land was authored by James Comer, the Republican chairman of House Oversight — the same chairman who, separately, was among the voices saying the District’s billion dollars should be returned.

Working only with the party that cannot deliver a floor vote is not a plan. It is a slogan that turns out the base and leaves the city without leverage on the day it needs leverage most.

We have run the symbolism experiment before.

In 2020, Bowser painted “Black Lives Matter” in 35-foot letters a block from the White House and called it a rebuke to Trump. It felt like power. In March 2025, with the city’s funding under threat, the jackhammers arrived and the plaza was gone.

The symbol that felt good in the moment was the first thing surrendered when the pressure became real.

A city that feels occupied wants catharsis, and I understand the pull of it. But catharsis is not governance, and a promise that can’t be financed is only a more expensive way of feeling good.

Before we hand the keys to the candidate vowing to upend the system, we should ask what happens when the system upends back. Resistance feels like power right up until someone with real power calls the bluff.

The District already knows how that story ends.

The proof is painted over, on 16th Street.

Melik Abdul is a D.C.-based public affairs professional and longtime Ward 8 resident. His work has appeared in the Washington Examiner, The Hill, Newsweek and across cable news networks.