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The press conference on Monday during which Donald Trump announced a federal takeover of the police force of Washington, DC, served as a microcosm of his second term.

First of all, there was the underlying policy itself, if that’s what you want to call it. 

On the one hand, it is entirely based on sentiment and anecdotes according to which the nation’s capital is a crime-ridden hell hole, even though statistics show that violent offenses are dropping sharply. 

It should also be noted that the voters of the nation’s capital did their part in trying to keep criminals out of their city by voting for Kamala Harris in November. 

On the other hand, federalizing the police force is a classic move of authoritarian regimes, and Trump has been trying to gain control of liberal strongholds through a show of force. He attempted to do the same in Los Angeles earlier this year, and, having failed there, he is now doing it closer to home. 

Whether he succeeds this time around remains to be seen. 

While Trump certainly seems determined, he is putting this initiative in the hands of some truly incompetent people, which, true to form, include not one but two former Fox News hosts, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and newly confirmed US Attorney Jeanine Pirro, who improbably hold positions of significant power because they said nice things about the president on TV.

And let’s not forget FBI Director Kash Patel, who used his time at the podium to completely contradict Trump’s rationale for the takeover by saying that the murder rate in the US is on track to be the lowest in history. 

The entire effort will be overseen by Attorney General Pam Bondi, which means she will likely be too busy to release any files related to Jeffrey Epstein. 

Speaking of Trump’s old pal, another way in which the press conference was characteristic of Trump’s second term is that he ignored a question about the child sex trafficker, who died in prison under dubious circumstances during his first term. 

Apart from that, the press once again failed to do its job. The questions the journalists asked amid an authoritarian takeover ranged from inane to more inane.

Instead of inquiring about whether they might get a nicer press briefing room or whether the China tariffs would go into effect at midnight, which is something we’ll all find out whenever the president makes up his mind about it, they should have peppered him with questions about how he squares this “tough on crime” approach with using his first day in office to pardon violent criminals who assaulted cops in DC.

The only thing we learned is that Trump forgot whether he is meeting Vladimir Putin in Russia or the United States later this week… twice. Needless to say, if this had happened to Joe Biden (and similar things did), we never would have heard the end of it.

To make sure that he hit all of the highlights, Trump also rambled on about trans people for a while.

Will any of this make the nation’s capital any safer or just create chaos? 

We aren’t sure… especially not with these guys in charge. 

Then again, that’s not really the point. Instead, what this is all about is amassing more power in the hands of an authoritarian president… and that really sums up Trump’s second term quite well. 

In his Navigating the Insanity columns, Klaus Marre provides the kind of hard-hitting, thought-provoking, and often humorous analysis you won’t find anywhere else.