Could Trump really 'take over' American cities?

As President Donald Trump continually works to expand his power through executive actions, one of his recent proposals takes things to the next level. He has suggested he could use the authority of the presidency to perform a federal "takeover" of major cities like New York and Washington, D.C. But political scientists are split on whether Trump has the ability to do this, whether he will try it and how it would work.

"We have tremendous power at the White House to run places when we have to," Trump said to reporters during a Cabinet meeting. And he has threatened to do just that in New York if Democratic candidate Zohran Mamdani wins the city's mayoral election.

What did the commentators say?

Trump's threat to take over cities, in particular New York, is a "menace of federal overreach and an affront to self-governance through fair democratic elections," said Politico. But his comments may have been "just political saber rattling, the natural escalation of a president who loves to shock with his rhetoric."

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Trump "cannot take over the city, period," said Richard Briffault, a Columbia University law professor, to Newsday. But there are "lots of ways he can interfere with or harass" certain cities. There are ways in which he can "make life difficult." While the Constitution gives broad power to states to run their cities, Trump could "try a combination of controlling actions short of total control" to exert pressure on Democrat-run metropolises.

This could include "federal lawsuits, targeted investigations, executive orders, congressionally-passed laws, agency regulations, National Guard deployments, grant clawbacks, ignoring contractual obligations, funding cuts" and more, said Newsday. The administration could do this while also "flooding the city with federal agents and even arresting local officials."

Despite living in Washington, D.C., Trump has "repeatedly publicly criticized the nation's capital" and uses the city as a "test case for his tough-on-crime agenda," said The Independent. Unlike other big cities, Congress "still maintains significant authority to review or overturn local laws" in the district, meaning Trump could hold a certain sway over the city.

What next?

Trump hasn't yet directly named other cities as targets, though he has often lambasted Chicago and Los Angeles, the latter of which has been embroiled in a fight over Trump's ICE raids. Only "time will tell what, if anything, comes of these threats, but a couple of angles are worth keeping in mind in the coming months," said MSNBC.

Trump has still not specified "what he meant by the White House potentially running" these cities or how he would go about it, said Bloomberg. If Trump is "serious about imposing restrictions on cities that make decisions he doesn't like, it would represent a radical and dramatic step in his larger authoritarian vision," said MSNBC. And while he has particularly criticized Washington, D.C., for its crime rates, violent crimes are down 25% year-to-year as of July 2025, according to the city's Metropolitan Police Department, while all crimes are down 8%.