Washington D.C. Exposes America’s Rank Hypocrisy

By Jacob Weindling | August 11, 2025 | 3:23pm

Photo by Alex Guerrero from Washington, DC

Trump Administration Washington D.C.

Washington D.C. Exposes America’s Rank Hypocrisy

“End taxation without representation” read the license plates in the capital of the nation founded on the premise of no taxation without representation. Washington D.C.’s longtime status as a colony within an empire has been the fissure at the heart of a so-called democracy whose defining quality in the 21st century has been outright hypocrisy. America likes to think we are one thing, when we are very clearly something else, and now everything is breaking down.

We do not, or did not, have a democracy. We live in a republic with democratic elements to it, and decisions like Marbury v. Madison have helped push that dynamic towrds a republic of elites since. The democracy lovers and norm respecters throughout the Beltway and Democratic Party have been exposed as weak hypocrites every time that the GOP weaponized our republican system against them, all while they cosplay as characters in a discount Aaron Sorkin drama. Say what you want about The West Wing, but at least Sorkin’s ideas were never as hackish as kneeling in Kente cloth in 2020, voting to give the police more money in 2022 then donning a hot dog costume in 2025 to ask how Trump could be weaponizing a bipartisan and depraved status quo against us.

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Trump claims Washington D.C. to be a city riddled with crime, and while that may be true of teenager-based crime among people named Big Balls, the actual data from the police says otherwise. Crime is down. This is really about the Republican Party’s lone animating principle: racism and a desire to return to their Jim Crow roots. For them to realize their Alien and Sedition Act-style vision that Hitler wrote approvingly of in Mein Kampf, they need all the dark skin-coded cities like Washington and Los Angeles and Chicago to be infested with crime, otherwise their Crusade to save western civilization just looks like a familiar genocidal march we have seen take place from Germany to Japan to Israel to Myanmar to the United States to all across the globe (and Trump has pledged that “this will go further” to New York City, Baltimore, and Oakland). Trump is the GOP’s id, and he is invading a powerless territory trapped in the American empire whose population is 41 percent Black. This, and greed, is what the Republican Party is all about.

The enduring legacy of this political era is the abject hypocrisy of everyone in elite power. Democrats fire off snarky tweets about Trump and Washington D.C. while their politicians avoid serious talk of passing policy that could prevent this kind of assault in the future–like making our nation’s capital a state, a bill that Democrats could have passed with any of their Congressional majorities this century (another thing we can thank self-appointed president Joe Manchin for). It certainly would have helped provide D.C. with some measure of sovereignty that it could really use right now to protect itself from Donald Trump’s invasion. Meanwhile, Republicans claim to fight for the little guy while spending every nanosecond of their lives laser focused on increasing their billionaire donors’ net worths by any means possible, especially their cult leaders’ net worth. All while cable news Independents and the 17 people still listening to them pretend that they speak for Normal Americans™.

Corporate titans have reduced themselves to subjects bringing gilded gifts to dear leader, slovenly begging their master for a tax exemption in a new economic system they know is a murder-suicide pact with our largest trading partners. Universities who proudly proclaim themselves to be bastions of free thinking are now engaging in a McCarthyite quest to purge their student bodies of pro-Palestinian sentiment in the midst of Israel’s genocide of Gaza escalating once more, while their student papers have to take on the craven and/or cowardly administrators’ task of defending their students from the federal government. Also aiding and abetting Israel’s genocide is the American media, supposedly the Fourth Estate established to stand up to power, when their corporate masters simply see them as another gift to offer dear leader. There are some good mainstream journalists, but many far too often perpetuate the GOP’s lie of eternal crime waves in their dedication to sensationalist coverage above all else, providing a false pretext for Trump’s next big lie.

watching national reporters who live in DC do this is really embarrassing. no one speaking at this conference was raising a legitimate issue.

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— m (@keptsimple.bsky.social) August 11, 2025 at 11:52 AM

Hypocrites. That is America in the 21st century. We can’t hide from this fact, it says so on many of the license plates inside the literal Beltway. This country currently finds itself in its largest constitutional crisis since the Civil War, and while Trump is the big bad wolf who blew the house down, he didn’t create the shaky foundations opening the door for Donald freaking Trump to potentially end the experiment of the United States of America. A man like him could only take over a country already fundamentally broken to its core.

No taxation without representation is the keystone of our democratic ethos, as taxation without representation is monarchy like what Trump wants. Washington D.C. has experienced a form of this before Trump, and has protested it very publicly, but it has fallen on deaf ears among most of America’s supposed elite intellectual class. Those in power on the left and center have actually become America’s conservative party, as their only proven goal is to conserve an increasingly unpopular status quo buckling under the weight of its own hubris. There is no real liberal national party in America right now, and the GOP would be better described as revanchist. They are only interested in conserving anything that is a relic of America’s days as a slave colony, and their stated political goal is to return us to the policies of the days before women could vote.

Democrats more than anything need to return to a more liberal style of politics if America is ever not going to be a raging hypocrite of a country. Making Washington D.C. a state should not be coded as left or liberal thought, and in a rational world, Trump’s invasion of it should brand it a reasonable act among the Very Serious People if they were actually very serious people. It’s a perfectly legal thing to do through an act of Congress, and it is utterly preposterous to house our nation’s politics inside a region that sends a representative to Congress who is not allowed to vote on bills that govern their city. Everything that led to this depraved moment had many authors, and history did not begin on August 11th, 2025, the day that Trump invaded D.C.

If the Democrats ever want to take power again, and they can given how bad the GOP’s internal polling must be, they should lead this next election cycle with a pledge to make D.C. the 51st state. It does not have a crime problem as Trump falsely claims, and the fact that a sex trafficking pedophile’s “best friend” can win a thin majority and overrule a major city’s sovereignty proves that we are what Washington D.C.’s license plates say we are: hypocrites. Making them the 51st state and ending taxation without representation in our capital once and for all would help kick-start America’s journey to prove otherwise.