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MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
On a Wednesday afternoon, Elle - that's a bakery and restaurant in D.C.'s Mount Pleasant neighborhood - it's fairly full. Many of the tables are occupied with people plugging away on laptops, coffee mugs and sandwiches to the side. But co-owner Nick Pimentel said he has noticed traffic slowing down since January.
NICK PIMENTEL: It just seems like every time we think we've figured it out, something new happens, either a change in the administration or a federal takeover or cost of eggs.
AILSA CHANG, HOST:
It is Restaurant Week in Washington, D.C., a promotional event aimed at boosting sales during the typically slow August. But Pimentel says this year, Restaurant Week has not given Elle the boost they've come to expect and badly need.
PIMENTEL: Last summer Restaurant Week, we were pretty much fully booked all seven days. This year, reservations are still coming in, but we're about 50% to 60% booked.
KELLY: Elle is a fixture in the area. It's been around nearly eight years. But it's a tough industry, and Pimentel says business has not been the same since COVID.
PIMENTEL: We're not a profitable restaurant. Definitely not going to even break even in August.
CHANG: He says both guests and staff are unnerved by the federal law enforcement presence. He has seen officers - masked, plainclothes, armored - mostly just standing around in the neighborhood. But also...
PIMENTEL: They're walking down the street, looking in windows.
KELLY: Looking for what, exactly?
PIMENTEL: I don't know. Don't know. Looking for the crime that they claim is here.
CHANG: President Trump called in the National Guard and took over the D.C. police earlier this month, he said as a way to crack down on crime. Earlier this week, he told reporters it's working.
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PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Friends are calling me up. Democrats are calling me up. And they're saying, sir, I want to thank you. My wife and I went out to dinner last night for the first time in four years. And Washington, D.C., is safe.
KELLY: But Elle co-owner Pimentel says he wasn't threatened by the crime. And with 47 people on his payroll and fewer people than he would like in the dining room, he says he's more worried about making sure his people get paid.
CHANG: The increased federal law enforcement presence is just one of the many ways in which the Trump administration has tried to take over Washington D.C. The administration has deployed the National Guard on D.C.'s streets. Immigration agents have set up checkpoints all over the city. And Trump invoked an emergency power to take over D.C.'s Metropolitan Police force. The White House says it's responding to, quote, "out of control" crime throughout D.C. But data from the Metropolitan Police Department shows that violent crime is at a 30-year low there.
So what happens when an executive takes over a large part of law enforcement in a capital city? Well, that's a question we're going to put to M. Gessen. They're a columnist with The New York Times and the author of several books, most recently "Surviving Autocracy." Welcome back to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED.
M GESSEN: Good to be here. Thank you.
CHANG: Good to have you. OK, so tell me, what was your first reaction when you started watching what's been playing out in D.C. over the last week and a half?
GESSEN: Oh, I don't know if you want me to say that on air. But...
CHANG: (Laughter) Please, feel free.
GESSEN: You know, so much of establishing autocratic rule is a matter of perception, because, you know, we tend to think of this as sort of a series of decrees and executive orders or court decisions. And all of that is very important. But there is something that Trump is extremely sensitive to, which is whether he looks like he's in control of everything. And to put it more bluntly, in an autocracy, ultimately, probably the most important thing is what people think about who is in charge of all the people in uniforms and carrying guns.
CHANG: OK.
GESSEN: And for somebody to come on the scene and say, OK, I'm in charge of all these people is a very important part of establishing the perception of autocratic rule.
CHANG: OK, that said, the president has pointed out that he has heard from people who feel safer now because of the increased law enforcement presence on the streets in D.C. Now, sure, those reports have not been independently verified. But do you think there is an argument that the visible presence of law enforcement can make many people feel safer?
GESSEN: You know, there are a couple of things I want to say about that. One is that we have a president who systematically says things that are not true. So I think it may be a mistake to engage with this assertion that he has heard from people who say they feel safer. I would also say that that's not generally how public policy is made. You know, there are more complicated things than whether one or two or even dozens of individual people feel a particular way. There are things that we measure that have to do with public safety in any other policy. You know, the actual metrics...
CHANG: Right.
GESSEN: ...Of whether it is...
CHANG: Not just perception.
GESSEN: Yeah, not just perception but, you know, whether these kinds of measures are effective for public safety. And there's zero evidence for that.
CHANG: I want to note that you have mentioned autocracy, autocratic government several times already. And you have reason to make these references. I mean, you lived in Russia as that fledgling democracy tipped into authoritarianism. And I'm just curious if you could flesh that out a little bit more in terms of, do you see any echoes of that in what is happening in Washington, D.C., right now?
GESSEN: Absolutely. The demonstration that this military force is deployed directly by the leader of the country is an autocratic hallmark. And I think that that's what we're living through. I think we are witnessing or have already witnessed that. With every attack on voting rights, but also every time military force is asserted on domestic soil, it becomes less likely that people will be able to fully exercise their electoral rights. And that means we're at the point of autocratic breakthrough.
CHANG: Are there differences or similarities that you're seeing now in how journalists are reacting to these moves by President Trump versus what you saw of the media during Putin's rise in Russia?
GESSEN: You know, one thing that's significant, and this is not so much about the media as about the autocratic process itself, is that it's moving so much faster in the United States than it did in Russia. It took Putin over a decade to consolidate autocratic rule. Or put a different way, it took Putin over a decade to do as much as I think Trump has done in seven months. So Russian journalists were, to a large extent, complicit in normalizing what was happening politically, partly because it was so slow and partly because you could look at any one thing and say, well, yeah, maybe not such a great idea, but also not so terrible either.
CHANG: Interesting. So do you think the speed of what President Trump is doing is actually a way to slow down the normalization of these tactics here in America?
GESSEN: Well, that was going to be the bad news (laughter). The bad news is that you think that that would happen, but I'm actually observing normalization on steroids. I mean, think about how shocked we were when the National Guard was deployed in Los Angeles over the objections of the governor. And yet it happened. And now we're watching this happen in D.C. And we're not even, I think, spending enough time talking about this as a pattern. We are falling into the trap of treating these as isolated incidents and also looking for ways in which this isn't quite the disaster that maybe we feel in the pit of our stomach it is. And I think that that's just all parts of normalization.
CHANG: M. Gessen is a columnist with The New York Times and the author of several books, including "Surviving Autocracy." Thank you so much for joining us today.
GESSEN: Thank you for having me. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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