"General cleaning at 10 a.m." - When the backdrop becomes power

On Monday morning, Washington will not wake up but be rearranged. At several locations, signs read: "General cleaning from 10 a.m." A harmless phrase from city sanitation - that is how it sounds. Yet in recent days, the capital has learned that these words can mean more than brooms, shovels and garbage trucks. Then someone will once again pack up their backpack, a bulldozer will scrape the ground, and a department for "beauty" will produce images that will be fed into the stream of official success stories. A staging of order, in which every single move is part of a larger production.

Such stagings are old. They work because they are both banal and brutal. The regime in the Third Reich mastered this method perfectly: street sweepers and SA men, cameras and headlines - the "cleansing" was staged as a public event that supposedly served the common good but in reality manifested political and social control. Today there are no brownshirts but Humvees in front of Union Station and National Guard members at the entrances. And it is not Goering who signs the orders, but Pam Bondi, attorney general in the service of a president who elevates the logic of a state of emergency to the form of government.

Bondi is not the person in camouflage standing at the checkpoint. She is the pen that shifts the framework until local law no longer applies. Her decree appointing the DEA chief as "emergency police commissioner" of Washington is the legal bracket that holds the backdrop together. Under her stroke, a municipal police force becomes an instrument of the federal government. The "general cleaning" is only the most visible, most everyday link in a chain of measures that turn security into a backdrop, law into elastic, and the state of emergency into a method.

The metaphor of cleaning has had a sinister career in political history. It sounds like hygiene and renewal but conceals the coercion behind it. In the authoritarian context, it becomes the semantic cloak for removing the unwanted - be they political opponents, minorities or, as now in Washington, the visibly poor. In this Washington, tents become "garbage," people become "disruptive factors" in the cityscape, and the bulldozer becomes the conclusion of a policy that does not negotiate conflicts but pushes them away.

This Washington is not at war. But it lives for a long evening in the mode of an occupation - not with tanks and barricades but with legal decrees that appear as sober as an administrative act. Bondi's signature replaces the will of a city government, and the signs with the time of the "cleaning" mark not only public spaces but also the territory of self-government that is being redefined here. Anyone who is in Washington at 10 a.m. on that Monday may only see a garbage truck roll up. But in the shadow of this routine, another program is running: the demonstrative disempowerment of a city by its own government. And that, as history teaches us, is more dangerous than any short-term unrest. For it establishes a new normal in which the distance between order and superordination is only a pen stroke away - and an attorney general willing to make it.

In the meantime, Trump is on his way to Alaska - as a self-proclaimed peacemaker. A good laugh. And then he returns to Washington, where the real tragedy awaits: the White House, a building that urgently needs a thorough cleaning - with all that goes with it.

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