Upon learning of former president Donald Trump’s most recent indictment last week, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis had a novel take: “Americans,” he tweeted, should “have the right to remove cases from Washington, D.C.” On Fox News, he added, “It is unfair to have to stand trial before a jury that is reflective of the ‘swamp mentality.’”
Soon, Trump and his lawyers were in on the action, arguing on social media and Sunday shows that he could not receive a fair trial in the nation’s capital.
Thus opens a new chapter in the long saga of lawmakers treating residents of the District of Columbia as if they aren’t Americans — a history as intertwined with race as with partisanship.
“What I think [DeSantis is] doing in this instance is a very age-old trick of conflating the federal government with the people of D.C.,” George D. Musgrove, a historian and co-author of the book “Chocolate City: A History of Race and Democracy in the Nation’s Capital,” said in an interview. “If ‘the Swamp’ is anything concrete … it’s this notion of federal policymakers, the federal bureaucracy, lobbyists, the people that run the federal government. Then there’s the actual 690,000 residents of the District of Columbia,” who are more likely to be middle and working class, like “teachers and bus drivers.”
Musgrove, a professor at the University of Maryland at Baltimore County, noted that a significant number of lobbyists and federal workers live in the Virginia and Maryland suburbs and that residents of the District are often “at odds” with the federal government.
“People like Ron DeSantis know that they’re two different groups of people,” Musgrove said, noting that DeSantis was a member of Congress and has an undergraduate degree from Yale’s storied history department. “But they decide to conflate the two because it works well for the narrative that they’re pushing.”