Washington, D.C. held a mayoral primary on Tuesday. Democratic socialist Janeese Lewis George won it with 52.6 percent of the vote. She wants universal childcare, expanded rent control, 72,000 new city-built housing units, and a governing vision that every journalist covering it has described as the DC version of NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani. She did not campaign secretly. The voters knew exactly who she was.
Trump was asked what he would do if she won.
“I wouldn’t like it,” he said. “Maybe we take back Washington, run it on the federal basis.”
Take it back. From the people who live there. Because they voted wrong.
Washington DC has had elected local government since 1973. Home rule. Fifty-three years of mayors, city councils, and school boards chosen by the actual residents. Trump won DC in 2024 with 5.9 percent of the vote, which means 94.1 percent of the city’s voters looked at his candidacy and declined, which is the kind of repeated and emphatic rejection that most people would take as information about what the city wants. Trump took it as evidence the city needs to be managed differently.
The city he is threatening to “take back” already operates at the pleasure of Congress in ways no other American city does. Congress can, and occasionally does, override DC laws it dislikes. The federal government owns a substantial portion of the land. DC has no senators. It has a non-voting House delegate. It pays federal taxes without full federal representation, which is the situation its license plates describe as “taxation without representation,” a phrase Americans once considered a good enough reason to start a revolution.
Trump’s position is that on top of all of that, if the residents of Washington choose a mayor he disagrees with, he should be able to take the local government away entirely. Not because she has done anything illegal. Because she is a socialist, and he would not like it.
When the president’s response to losing an election in a city is to threaten to abolish that city’s elections, what is the word he is looking for?
Sources
Fox News: Socialist DC mayoral candidate Janeese Lewis George leads primary vote
Fox News live primary results, June 16, 2026
