Kash Patel. Image: Sgt. Keisha Brown, U.S. Army, Wiki Commons
Kash Patel. Image: Sgt. Keisha Brown, U.S. Army, Wiki Commons
Things are heating up in Washington, and it’s not just the yearly August sweat-dome settling over the city.
Republished with permission from Lucian K. Truscott IV
In a normal world—in other words not the one we currently occupy—this would be the time that a normal president—very much not the one currently in the White House—would lean back in his chair in the Oval Office confident that the distinguished and competent FBI director he had appointed would be fully prepared to carry out an order such as the one Donald Trump just issued. Threatening a takeover of the national Capital, Trump ordered that the FBI deploy 120 agents to assist the Metropolitan Police in night patrols to prevent carjackings and violent crime.
Trump appointed to run the FBI a man who wrote not one, but three children’s fantasy books featuring Donald Trump as a king and a wizard named…you guessed it…“Kash” who defends the king from evil villains named “Hillary Queenton,” “Sleepy Joe” and “Comma-la-la-la.” The Patel trilogy was published by Brave Books, self-described as a “Christian publishing company that makes books for kids that reinforce biblically-based, foundational values.” Which in a normal world—not ours—would not to mean much, if the books’ author hadn’t become the head of the largest law enforcement agency in the United States.
Let’s stipulate right from the beginning that enforcing the law in any large American metropolitan area is a difficult job. Police officers are trained for months to be ready for such a job, and then go through a long rookie period when they are closely supervised by a superior on patrols so that they become familiar with police procedure, the area they will be assigned to, and the general nature of the difficult work of dealing with a public that is usually not friendly to the officers assigned to protect them.
This is training FBI agents do not go through. Nor have the 120—count’em, a whole big hundred and twenty!—agents been on the job of policing the streets of Washington D.C. even as long as the rawest rookie on the Metro force.
So how is the federal “takeover” of policing the District of Columbia going to go with Kash “Wizard” Patel running the show? Violent crime is down in D.C. from its peak in 2023, down 26 percent from this time last year. Homicides are down. Even burglaries are down. So, what has Donald Trump’s Depends all in a twist? Why, a former DOGE puppy we were introduced to by his internet handle, “Big Balls,” was injured in a carjacking attempted by several teenagers, at least two of whom have already been arrested. This is what got Trump’s attention. Not the recent killing of a child by a stray bullet. Not the mugging of a teenage girl in Anacostia. Not even the robbery of a shopkeeper at gunpoint. One of Elon Musk’s favorite DOGE employees got carjacked, a crime that is a problem not just in Washington D.C. but has exploded across the country in cities and rural areas both.
Washington, like many American cities, is not an easy place in which to live. Gentrified “safe” areas abut neighborhoods that are places of high poverty and higher crime rates. Getting safely from one place to another on foot or in a car can thus be tricky.
Click here to read the rest of this article.
Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist and screenwriter. He has covered stories such as Watergate, the Stonewall riots and wars in Lebanon, Iraq and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels and several unsuccessful motion pictures. He has three children, lives in rural Pennsylvania and spends his time Worrying About the State of Our Nation and madly scribbling in a so-far fruitless attempt to Make Things Better.
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