Is Trump's DC takeover an 'Epstein Escalation'?

Is Trump sending the National Guard into Washington D.C. to “distract” from the Epstein scandal? Or is he doing it to push us even deeper into authoritarianism?

I have seen people debating this over the last couple of days on social media. To me, the answer is clear: it’s both.

Trump often creates distractions to draw attention away from negative stories. This was a key feature of his first term. His wholly unnecessary deployment of troops into DC is taking place at the exact same time that Jeffrey Epstein's imprisoned partner, Ghislaine Maxwell, has been moved to a minimum-security camp where she's eligible for work release. It seems clear that Trump is dangling some kind of deal for Maxwell, who is serving 20 years in prison for sex crimes against children.

Trump is giving sweetheart treatment to his old friend Ghislaine, a convicted child predator at the heart of the Epstein case. This is stunning and suspicious. So it makes sense he would deploy troops into yet another American city to create a spectacle and draw media attention away from the situation. Trump needs to look like a strongman leader, not like a man who is terrified of what's in the Epstein files.

But his decision to abuse the National Guard as a PR strategy creates a serious crisis as well. Trump is continually creating fake emergencies to grab more power for himself. Ruth Ben-Ghiat, author of Strongman: Mussolini to The Present, writes that:

Multiple favored strongman tactics are being deployed in President Donald Trump’s current authoritarian assault on Washington D.C. They include inventing a crisis to justify the expansion of executive power and using cities as laboratories of state repression. I also see his assault on D.C. government and law enforcement as payback for his failed coup. On Jan. 6, 2021, the Capitol Police resisted his thugs valiantly. That, to a vengeful autocrat, must not go unpunished.

So while this may serve as a distraction technique on one level, it has serious long-term consequences. Trump is testing to see how far he can go, normalizing the act of sending the US military into Democratic cities.

Here's a sketch of how his playbook works:

1) Create fake emergency
2) Bypass democracy
3) Grab emergency powers
4) Repeat

This is straight out of the Nazi playbook—literally. As I wrote back in April:

Trump is inventing crises and then using them to justify sweeping actions...because the emergency frame gives him cover to act recklessly and consolidate power.

This tactic isn't new. Nazi legal theorist Carl Schmitt called it the state of exception — when an emergency, real or invented, is used to suspend norms and rewrite the rules. Authoritarians throughout history have used this exact concept to consolidate power.

As Masha Gessen writes in Surviving Autocracy:

In Schmitt’s terms, a state of exception arises when an emergency, a singular event, shakes up the accepted order of things. This is when the sovereign steps forward and institutes new, extralegal rules. The emergency enables a quantum leap: Having amassed enough power to declare a state of exception, the sovereign then, by that declaration, acquires far greater, unchecked power. That is what makes the change irreversible, and the state of exception permanent.

But once we see this pattern, we can break it. Trump creates emergencies to grab more power. We don't have to play his game.

The smartest response? Refuse to let him control what we talk about. Yes, we fight his fascist overreach with everything we have. But we also keep talking about what he desperately wants buried.

We must express outrage at his deployment of National Guard troops in D.C., and we must also keep highlighting Ghislaine Maxwell's suspicious prison deal and what it reveals about Trump's Epstein connections. We must not let his latest outrage erase the stories that threaten him the most.

We must frame his dictator tactics as a desperate effort to look strong when he is actually at his weakest. Trump’s poll numbers have dropped and he’s trapped by another sex scandal. Perhaps we should call his DC invasion the “Epstein Escalation.”

This does not diminish the seriousness of Trump’s use of military force against American civilians in Democratic cities, a strategy based on false and racist tropes about crime.

But we must walk and chew gum at the same time. We call it what it is—authoritarian abuse—and we fight back hard. And we refuse to drop the other stories. His strategy depends on us having the attention span of goldfish, jumping from crisis to crisis while he buries his scandals. But we must be smarter than that.

Trump isn't just “creating distractions.” He's waging narrative warfare—trying to control what's in our heads and dominate how we understand what's happening. When we spot the pattern (invent crisis, seize power, bury scandal, repeat) we can jam up his operation and reclaim our power.

Gil Duran, co-founder of FrameLab, is a San Francisco-based journalist and political communications expert who worked with Governor Jerry Brown, Senator Dianne Feinstein, and Attorney General Kamala Harris. He also writes The Nerd Reich newsletter, which focuses on tech fascism and Silicon Valley extremist politics. His forthcoming book, “The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy,” will be published by Avid Reader Press. Connect with him on BlueSky or Facebook.