New consumer price numbers out this morning! Overall, inflation held steady at 2.7 percent year over year last month, the Labor Department reported. But core inflation was elevated, coming in at 3.1 percent as tariff-related price hikes started to kick in.

With Trump’s handpicked goon likely coming in to head the Bureau of Labor Statistics, this could be the last reliable inflation report we get for a while—so, you know, try to savor the flavor. Happy Tuesday.

I’m Sure It’s Fine

by William Kristol

It’s a familiar headline for Americans of my generation: “Authoritarian Government Uses Pretext to Take Control of Police Force in Nation’s Capital.”

The dateline could be Belgrade or Bangkok, Caracas or Cairo. We’d read the stories, shake our heads, and reflect on the fragility of democracy in the Third World. We might have taken a moment to think: “It can’t happen here.” But the truth is that the possibility of it happening here seemed so remote that the thought barely came to mind in the first place.

We did, of course, know that it had happened in counties more like us in the first half of the last century, in European capitals like Rome and Berlin and Madrid, and Prague and Budapest and Warsaw. But that was a long time ago. That couldn’t happen here. It couldn’t happen now.

And then, yesterday, the president of the United States announced the following:

Under the authorities vested in me as the president of the United States, I’m officially invoking Section 740 of the District of Columbia Home Rule Act, and placing the DC Metropolitan Police Department under direct federal control. . . . In addition, I’m deploying the National Guard to help reestablish law, order, and public safety in Washington DC, and they’re going to be allowed to do their job properly.

The president claimed an emergency existed in the District of Columbia even though crime is down a lot over the last two years—and especially over the last two decades. He announced it even though other cities in the United States have higher rates of violent crime. A failed carjacking incident at 3:00 a.m. one night a week ago—an incident that, it must be noted, was stopped by the D.C. police and that resulted in the arrest of two of the perpetrators—was the pretext for the president’s actions. It also must be noted that it’s unclear what the legitimate “federal purpose” of the president’s action is, which is what the statute requires.

Still, a federal takeover of the local police has happened in the capital of the United States.

There are those who may comfort themselves by arguing that Washington, D.C. has, for historical reasons, a peculiar legal status. That this couldn’t happen elsewhere in the United States. Except, a version of it has already happened in Los Angeles. And the president emphasized yesterday that Washington may be a precursor for more to come:

You look at Chicago, how bad it is. You look at Los Angeles, how bad it is. We have other cities that are very bad. New York has a problem. And then you have, of course, Baltimore and Oakland. We’re not going to let it happen. We’re not going to lose our cities over this. And this will go further. We’re starting very strongly with DC.

So perhaps D.C. isn’t such a unique case.

Indeed, the Washington Post reported this morning that “the Trump administration is evaluating plans that would establish a ‘Domestic Civil Disturbance Quick Reaction Force’ composed of hundreds of National Guard troops tasked with rapidly deploying into American cities facing protests or other unrest.” The paper cited internal Pentagon documents. So, in other words, the use of federal troops at the discretion of the president to quell “domestic civil disturbance,” as he defines it, would be normalized.

And the fact that all the cities mentioned by the president yesterday are run by Democratic mayors, in states with Democratic governors—one shouldn’t read too much into that, right? A Trump administration takeover of law enforcement in Democratic cities with an eye to using that control for political objectives—that couldn’t happen here.

It’s true that the president did say at the White House yesterday, in a partisan moment, that, “Democrats are weak on crime, totally weak on crime” and “do not want safety.” But that surely doesn’t mean much. Those cabinet officers standing there beside the president yesterday—Attorney General Pam Bondi, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth—are officials sworn to uphold the Constitution, confirmed by the United States Senate. They and their colleagues in senior positions in the federal government wouldn’t go along with a widespread deployment of law enforcement and the military at home for political and partisan purposes, right? That couldn’t happen here.

The president did say that under the new order of things in Washington, the police will be “allowed to do whatever the hell they want” to secure the streets. But that’s just performative pro-police rhetoric, right? It may sound like the actual legitimization of police brutality. But that couldn’t happen here.

After all, the leaders of our major institutions would speak out, forcefully and in unison, against it. Here in the United States of America, our leaders would not avert their gaze. They would not keep their heads down. They would not simply go about their business. They would not shirk their civic duty.

Here in the United States, distinguished libe