Donald Trump‘s deployment of National Guard troops to the nation’s capital and forcing a federal law enforcement takeover of the Metropolitan Police Department is not only terrorizing residents and workers, it’s also harming local businesses. Washington, D.C., restaurants are experiencing significant drops in reservations, and bars are seeing fewer customers.
Online reservations for D.C. restaurants plunged more than 25 percent in the days immediately after Trump announced the takeover of D.C. police for the first time in the country’s history, according to OpenTable data, WUSA 9’s Jordan Fischer reported.
Trump announced the authoritarian occupation on Monday, and OpenTable reservations decreased by 16 percent compared to the same day last year. By Tuesday, reservations were down 27 percent. By Wednesday, that number rose to 31 percent.
This is not part of a national trend. Nationally, restaurants saw 12 percent gains in OpenTable reservations.
D.C. bar owners are noticing a similar disturbing decline in business, The Advocate reported. Crush Dance Bar, a LGBTQ+ inclusive business, saw a 75 percent drop in business this past Thursday. On Friday, business was just half of what they usually see.
“Washingtonians leaving the city to avoid the chaos on top of a reduction of tourism is crippling small businesses,” Crush’s co-owner, Mark Rutstein, told The Advocate.
Dave Perruzza, who owns gay D.C. sports bars Pitchers and A League of Her Own, said he lost an estimated $7,000 in just one night and noticed fewer people came from out of town.
“Thursdays are all local, but Fridays and Saturdays we get people from out of town, and we just had none of them. It was awful,” he told The Advocate.
People may be avoiding D.C. streets due to a rise in law enforcement presence, including immigration checkpoints, which have been met with protesters screams of “Go home, fascists.” One officer at a checkpoint said they were looking at drivers’ “driving eligibility” and “status.”
According to Defense Sec. Pam Bondi, federal and local law enforcement have arrested 300 people during the crackdown on D.C. Law enforcement has also targeted numerous homeless encampments since the federal takeover, destroying the belongings of countless unhoused people. Trump has said he wants to ship unhoused people to locations “FAR” outside the district.
Sadly, it looks like conditions in the capital will only get worse, and the possibility of military violence against civilians will increase.
More troops — approximately 700, nearly doubling the current number of troops in D.C. to around 1500 — are on the way from Ohio, West Virginia, and South Carolina. The Wall Street Journal first reported Saturday that National Guard members were preparing to carry weapons, and a National Guard spokesperson told CBS News that deployed Guard members “may be armed consistent with their mission and training.”
Despite Trump’s insistence that the occupation is in response to crime and his claim that D.C. is facing “the worst violent crime ever,” the statistics show that violent crime in the capital is down 26 percent compared to last year. Last year, violent offenses reached their lowest levels in three decades.
“We are not experiencing spikes in crime,” D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser said Sunday on MSNBC. “In fact, we’re watching our crime numbers go down.”
Blue cities and states are hurting in other ways, thanks to Trump’s immigration policies, CNN reported. The number of private sector workers in California decreased by 750,000 from May to July, with Hispanic and Asian Americans making up the majority of losses. In New York City as well, fewer Hispanic men are participating in the labor force.
The occupation may not end with D.C. The capital and Los Angeles are testing grounds for the administration to prepare to militarize law enforcement in other Democratically-led cities. As Rolling Stone reported, the administration is already drawing up plans to do so.
