When someone shows you who they are, believe them. So said Maya Angelou, and she said it before anyone outside of the tri-state New York area knew or cared about the existence of Donald Trump. The president showed the country who he is when he deployed the National Guard to Los Angeles to confront those protesting the gestapo-like tactics in tracking down and detaining migrants who entered the U.S. illegally. When deploying the Guard to California, he mentioned that he might send troops in other cities for the same reason. Today, having nothing at all to do with anti-ICE protesters, he announced that the federal government will be taking over another American city’s policing.

Donald Trump is federalizing the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department because, he says, crime is so out of control that he must. The D.C. crime rate is reportedly at a 30-year low.

In a bad-movie-plot press conference, Mr. Trump went on to say several other blue state cities were in his sites for deployment of National Guard troops. They include New York, Baltimore and Chicago. There do not appear to be red-state cities on his list.

Perhaps this will be the distraction that sufficiently restores love and admiration from a base that hasn’t forgotten that their otherwise flawless leader betrayed them with the failure to release the Epstein files. Perhaps it will just be distraction enough to turn the left-leaning media’s attention away from the MAGA rift. No other distraction, including calling for the arrests of Democratic lawmakers and accusing President Obama of committing treason, has done it.

Make no mistake, though: This isn’t just about distraction. With D.C., Mr. Trump is testing the waters of shattering the boundaries of federalism and eliminating the authority of states and municipalities to protect and defend their citizens under local and state law, as they see fit. This looks like a real step toward crossing a line from which there seems little likelihood of return. It looks like a step toward martial law. From this perch up the highway from the nation’s capital, it looks and sounds like the president wants the police in all left-leaning states to be federal troops authorized to behave any way they choose, without the slightest fear that the effectively-defunct Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department will actually apply consequences for acts of police brutality. How do we know? Because President Trump said today that now police in D.C. are “allowed to do whatever the hell they want.”

Let’s sit with that a moment.

The threat of federal takeover of police in cities like my own, cities that are majority minority or close to it, with income inequality creating home and food insecurity, along with anger, the whole thing seems provocative in the most dangerous of ways. It feels like a choice to hit the gas on accelerating toward civil unrest – and police response to it.

Is everybody ready?

President Trump is once again showing us quite clearly who he is. Let’s believe him – and get the lawsuits and megaphones ready.