AP photo Members of the District of Columbia National Guard stand next to their M-ATV outside Union Station, Sunday, Aug. 17, 2025, in Washington.

Credit where it’s due: President Trump has a talent for getting the chattering classes talking about whatever he wants. Especially when he really doesn’t want them talking about other stuff.

That’s how we should view Trump’s latest drama in Washington, D.C., where he mobilized the National Guard and took over the police department.

On the one hand, there’s something new and dangerous about Trump’s willingness to deploy U.S. troops against Americans in their own cities. On the other, scaremongering about cities is a tried and true (and sad!) distraction Republicans have relied on since Nixon.

Trump’s hysterics aside, crime just hit a 30-year low in D.C. So why bring it up? Because the last month or two has been jam-packed with stories Trump has been desperate to dodge.

First, he struggled to escape the shadow of billionaire sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. Trump was named repeatedly in the Epstein files, which he’d promised to release before denying they existed at all. The episode led to a rare rupture with his base, with Trump hurling insults at followers upset about his about-face.

Then, troubling economic news piled up.

Food prices are already rising, and news broke that the president’s tariffs could cost each American $2,400 this year alone. July’s job growth was revised downward, leading Trump to fire a professional government economist and install some guy from the Heritage Foundation — who apparently joined the January 6 mob, which Trump pointedly did not want to deploy the Guard against — in her place.

Perhaps most importantly, Americans really, really don’t like the GOP’s budget-busting “Big Beautiful Bill,” which Trump signed this summer. It’s been called “the largest redistribution from poor to rich in American history.” Over 60 percent of Americans say they oppose it — and the more they learn, the higher that figure climbs.

The law made historically deep cuts to Medicaid and SNAP to fund tax cuts for billionaires and corporations, plus enormous subsidies for for-profit Pentagon and ICE contractors. As a result, 17 million Americans will lose their health coverage, killing 51,000 people every year. Millions more will go without food, including children.

Needless to say, Trump and his allies would like to keep these embarrassing facts quiet. So he’s tried a range of distractions. He flirted with filing treason charges against former President Barack Obama. He demanded the Cleveland Guardians go back to the “Indians” name. He fired off one unhinged post after another on social media.

It was only after these gambits and others failed that Trump deployed the troops in D.C., delivering a fact-free, all but explicitly racist screed about “crime, bloodshed, bedlam, and squalor” in the nation’s capital.

These claims — dutifully echoed by Fox News and GOP members of Congress — sounded a lot like stuff we’ve heard before. And each time, it’s been an effort to deflect attention from the misdeeds of the powerful and onto a poor, maligned minority.

When the GOP’s poll numbers were faltering ahead of the 2018 or 2022 midterms, we got wave after wave of deceptive ads and stories about “big city crime,” which largely subsided after the vote. When it wasn’t crime, it was a “migrant caravan” or “border crisis.”

Or critical race theory, trans kids, library drag shows, or… well, just fill in the blank.

Sideshows like these aren’t just a pain for fact checkers. They lead to real threats and violence against these communities — and assaults on all of our freedoms. And they keep us chattering about anything besides the far-right politicians picking our pockets.

For every National Guard member dispatched to the streets, thousands of families will go to bed without the food or health care they need to stay alive. That’s the real story of Trump’s America — don’t let him talk you out of it.

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Peter Certo is the communications director

of the Institute for Policy Studies and editor of its

OtherWord.org op-ed service.