Beyond Big Balls and the beating he received while defending his date last week, the federal government’s recent move at the direction of the Trump administration to oversee security in Washington, DC is leading to the same sort of confused reaction that has followed other unexpected initiatives emanating from the White House since late January: is it intrinsically “Orange Man Bad” or might it actually be a good idea?
Still smarting over its exile from the White House briefing room following the Gulf of America/Mexico flare up, the Associated Press went out of their way on Tuesday to suggest the move was laden with dark overtones — even if subject quoted in the actual article, Trump’s rhetoric about DC echoes a history of racist narratives about urban crime, hoped the plan might work.
And predictably some contributors on MSNBC shrieked that Trump’s deploying the National Guard to DC to help combat out-of-control violent crime had more to do with distracting from the Epstein story or dismantling democracy than it did making anyone safer. But not everyone agrees with the peanut gallery.
Edward Corastine, 19, the DOGE-staffer who had come to be known as “Big Balls” and emblematic of the brash young upstarts on Elon Musk’s team challenging federal spending in earlier months was badly beaten by a gang of other youths over a week ago while escorting his girlfriend to the safety of her car in the city’s Dupont Circle neighborhood. But nom de guerre notwithstanding, Corastine is just one of a legion of Americans who’ve shared unpleasant experiences in our nation’s capital.
A Washington, DC native, I’ve twice been stabbed in the city — once in 1996 and more recently in 2020 (following the second incident, I permanently gave up on The Swamp and returned to Maine for keeps, as Jonathan Bush puts it) — so I tend give the benefit of the doubt to anyone who claims to be serious about cleaning up its streets. Rather than lament over these particularly bloody encounters of mine, there is another one that might be more illuminating.
About ten years ago, I was just back from Ukraine and parking my car in the alley behind my Capitol Hill home. It was late afternoon and still light out, but I noticed as I backed into my spot that I’d been quickly surrounded by a small gang of teenagers who looked like they might have been getting out of school except one wore a balaclava and another dragged a long piece of jagged metal behind him he’d probably found nearby.
“How much you gonna give us?” the group’s spokesman demanded.
My car was still running. I’ve been trained in Iraq on how to use a vehicle as a weapon and was less concerned about forking over an unofficial “tax” and more about whether I really wanted to be killing one or two kids who were probably just really stupid and tragically misguided. Lawlessness had bred them to think robbing a dude in a BMW was an ordinary and justifiable way of financing a new GameBoy or pair of sneakers.
I stared them down and eventually they retreated. Having just been in a hostile environment (and now war zone), my situational awareness was primed though I was still shaken by the event quite literally in my backyard.
But when I called the Metropolitan Police to file a report, because I believe statistics do matter irrespective of outcomes, I was struck my the hesitance of the officers I dealt with of taking one. Maybe they were just asking for money instead of demanding, one cop helpfully suggested, perhaps I was overstating the whole thing, he continued.
So when the bright young things who insist crime in Washington, DC is actually going down, I remember this exchange. After all, it is a city that runs on optics.
To her credit, DC Mayor Muriel Bowser, a Democrat, has instructed police to cooperate with the feds. Part of this has to do with dominion, after all DC is a federal region, yet it is still a markedly different posture then some Maine Democrats have taken on ICE. Bowser knows DC is not safe, and should she refuse help — as then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi urged her to do on January 5, 2021 — she will be held accountable for the outcome.
Making America’s capital safer will require patience and persistence. Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani did it in the Big Apple without the National Guard, so it is doable. Yet it will require follow through and thoughtful solutions to problems like homelessness and the sort of catch-and-release tactics advocated by so-called Soros prosecutors (again, DC is federal).
Big Balls won’t be the only one watching, but he has reason to want things to get better. This a national project. Let’s hope it works.
