Trump takes over D.C. because 'Big Balls' got his ass beat by a teenage girl

That's the excuse the president is using, at least, to kick off his military takeover of American cities.

Guys, you may remember our friend Edward “Big Balls” Coristine, a 19-year-old Canadian hacker in Elon Musk’s child army who was hired to break into federal buildings and mass fire the government.

I thought we may have heard the last of Big Balls when he “resigned” — or was…sacked? — from DOGE back in June. And then a truly bizarre thing happened last week: Musk tweeted a dubious tale about an unnamed DOGE kid getting his ass kicked by a dozen men in D.C. while supposedly trying to rescue a woman he saw them assaulting. After claiming this little dweeb “saved” the woman from a roving gang of thugs, Musk concluded, “It is time to federalize DC.”

The identity of the DOGE staffer wasn’t clear until the following day, when Trump seized on the story to justify his takeover of the D.C. police and posted a photo of Big Balls all bloodied up on the street. “If this continues, I am going to exert my powers, and FEDERALIZE this City,” he wrote.

Naturally, the story in police reports turned out to be a bit different than the tale Elon spun. A 15-year-old boy and girl were arrested for a 3 a.m. unarmed carjacking attempt on Big Balls in Logan Circle, which reportedly happened with his girlfriend in the car. Officers say they saw other “juveniles” beating up Big Balls and released a photo of a third Black teenage suspect. I would guess that Big Balls was probably also shouting racist slurs at this group of teens before getting bloodied up, but who knows, I was not there.

Regardless of whatever happened to Big Balls at 3 a.m. that morning, we can all agree that it does not justify Trump seizing control of D.C.’s police, deploying 800 National Guardsmen under the pretext of “cracking down” on crime and expelling homeless people, and essentially testing out martial law in the nation’s capitol. Nevertheless, calling Monday “Liberation Day” in D.C., Trump officially declared a “public safety emergency” in the city, claiming it has some of the worst crime in the world.

“This dire public safety crisis stems directly from the abject failures of the city’s local leadership,” he said this morning in a press conference. "We’ll deploy officers across the District with an overwhelming presence. You’ll have more police and you’ll be so happy because you’re going to be safe.” (Keep in mind that Trump refused to deploy the National Guard in D.C. during the Jan. 6 insurrection, when his own supporters were violently assaulting Capitol police officers.)

Of course, this whole premise is a lie — D.C.’s violent crime rate is currently at a 30-year low, according to the Department of Justice. Big Balls getting carjacked, if that’s even what happened, is not national emergency worth summoning the military for. But Trump being able to post a photo of a white Republican pipsqueak being bloodied up by a few Black teens in D.C. sure does make for some excellent propaganda and make the timing feel right for him to do what he already wanted to do, which is turn this very liberal city he’s forced to live in as president — a city that nearly universally hates him — into his little mini-North Korea. And because Democrats never fought hard enough for D.C. statehood when they were in control, he’s pretty much able to do that.

Trump also just openly announced that he doesn’t intend to stop with D.C., which is pretty much a five-alarm fire. "If we need to, we're gonna do the same thing in Chicago, which is a disaster,” he said in today’s presser. “We have a mayor there who is totally incompetent and we have an incompetent governor there... hopefully L.A. is watching." He added N.Y.C., Baltimore, and Oakland to the list of cities he’s considering taking over, which all also happen to have Black mayors, saying, "This will go further. We're starting very strongly with D.C."

You don’t have to try very hard to read between the lines here. When Trump talks about “crime” and “cities,” he’s referring to “Black people” and “people who don’t vote for him.” He wants to punish cities for not liking him, and his voters want him to punish cities for not liking him. His Secretary of Transportation, the Road Rules guy who’s crashing planes every day and apparently trying to build a nuclear reactor on the moon now, literally goes on Fox News every day to talk about how terrified he is of the New York subway. The Trump Administration has been deliberately fomenting a fear of cities in order to groom its rural base and lay the groundwork, in advance, for this authoritarian takeover of liberal strongholds.

Unfortunately, they’re also fucking over America’s farmers in the meantime by deporting all their laborers, letting their crops rot in the fields, and crushing them with tariffs. Trump is rapidly losing whatever rural base he think he has in the bag for next year. So while this is another really disgusting and sad day in this country — particularly in D.C., a city I love and am hurting for — my gut feeling right now is that Trump is acting out of desperation. He knows he’s circling the drain, politically. He’s probably days away from hiring someone to taste his food in case it’s poisoned. And the only way his self-ascribed dictator “powers” hold any weight at all is if all these institutions, including the military, continue to roll over and obey illegal orders.