President Trump's effort to lessen crime in Washington, D.C., and launch a "beautification" effort is clashing with a long tradition of Republicans criticizing and outright writing off the nation's cities.
Republicans and conservatives for years — decades, even — had amplified the failures in cities as being the result of Democratic policies and flaunted migration from blue urban centers to red states. And as those on the right have slammed the nation's metropolises, only a tiny fraction of the biggest cities have Republican mayors, and there's scant discussion in right-wing circles and institutions about urban policy.
Trump's new fixation on D.C. and takeover of police could give conservatives an opportunity to increase their foothold in urban policy and in cities.
A big challenge, though, is getting the conservative base to care about the hubs of Democratic and progressive power at all.
Conservative commentator Charlie Kirk last month made a lengthy post on X arguing why conservative should care about the New York City mayoral race:
"All of America looks toward New York … Plenty of people wanted us to abandon college campuses as lost cause communist no-go zones, but we learned last year that if we bothered to fight back, we could turn the tide. New York can be the same way," Kirk said.
And in a monologue on his radio show on Monday, Kirk argued that Republicans face a question of political will when it comes to addressing policies and outcomes that they don't like in cities. "You need to dive deep and dig deep, to have the fortitude, the wherewithal, the spine, the cojones, the chutzpah to achieve what you want to achieve," Kirk said. "We just put up with crime for the last 40 years because we're afraid of being called racist."
Some on the right, though, are content to let the progressive left take their policies in cities as far as they want in order to maintain a foil. Columnist George Will put it succinctly when he told HBO host Bill Maher this month that he wants Zorhan Mamdani to win the New York City electoral race: "Every 20 years or so, we need a conspicuous, confined experiment with socialism so we can crack it up again."
Aaron Renn, a writer who has explored city policy, noted it has not always been that way, pointing to former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani once being hailed as a great Republican mayor. And Renn said a result of Republicans ceding those fights in cities means there are far fewer Republicans with city-level experience: "There are simply fewer people in sort of Republican political world who have an urban perspective, because there's just fewer of them..
Despite the challenges, there has been a ripple of movement on the right in favor of more active urban involvement
Former Fox News host Tucker Carlson has repeatedly talked on his podcast about the cleanliness of cities being a reflection of a successful or unsuccessful society.
And after Dallas Mayor Eric L. Johnson switched parties to become a Republican in 2023, he founded the Republican Mayors Association — the first GOP group focused solely on GOP mayors.
"For a long time, you had, I think everybody took some of the cities for granted. The Democrats took them for granted, just assuming that cities would continue to vote Democrat, regardless of how the cities were being run," Bridgewater, N.J., Mayor Matthew Moench, chairman of the Republican Mayors Association advisory board, told me. But the group, he said, is aiming to "go into those areas in the cities that may have been ignored for too long, and say we think that we can win anywhere."
"The voters in the most distressed areas of any city in the country, they want the same things that everyone does. They want to walk down the street without fear of their safety. They want their kids to get a good education. They want opportunities for job growth," Moench said.
The gains that Republicans made in 2024 showed Republicans that there could be value in getting more involved in the urban areas rather than only using the cities as a foil.
In New York City, for instance, Trump had the best performance of any Republican presidential candidate since 1988, according to the New York Times.
"The reason that Republicans have a majority in the House right now is because of the urban swing and Trump's urban coattails," argued Charles Fain Lehman, a fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute think tanks and senior editor at the group's publican, City Journal.
Trump's takeover of the D.C. police force could also be instructive for red-state legislatures across the country as they increasingly battle with Democratic-run cities — reversing city policies or blocking them from taking effect, in a mechanism known as preemption. In Kansas City, Mo., for instance, was blocked by the state legislature from hiking its minimum wage. Lehman said there are opportunities in Texas where the state can preempt local policies on public camping and crime.
"There are places where the red state legislature could conceivably step in, and in some cases, has stepped in and say, 'We don't like what you're doing here, and actually, the city is a creature of the state, and so we have final say in authority and what's gonna what's gonna happen here,'" Lehman said.
And if Trump is successful in bringing crime in D.C. down — and that's a big if — that could be a high-profile demonstration of Republican policies that others could imitate in other urban centers.
But there are also risks for Republicans if Trump's gambit is not successful. Renn pointed to former Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder (R), who was accused of mishandling the Flint, Mich., water supply amid the city's crisis of lead-contaminated water. Snyder was criminally charged in connection to the Flint water crisis, but the charges were later dismissed.
"If you are a highly incompetent urban leadership class, which all too many of them today are, they would love to be able to who, in some way pin the blame on a Republican," Renn said.
Further reading: DC Police Union chair supports Trump takeover, from The Hill's Elizabeth Crisp.
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