Live updates: Barr defends federal response in D.C.; council passes police reform legislation; Northam vows to fight order halting removal of Lee statue

Attorney General William P. Barr on Tuesday wrote to officials in the District to defend federal law enforcement’s blitzing of the city to quell unrest, saying that the television images of what was happening “conveyed the impression that the United States was on the brink of losing control of its capital city” and that the massive response was meant to ensure “that law and order in the Nation’s capital would be restored.”

“Surely you understand that the President could not stand idly by when unrest at the seat of the federal government threatened the safety of federal law enforcement officers and the operations of the United States government,” Barr wrote in a letter to D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) and D.C. Attorney General Karl A. Racine (D). “By the same token, now that federal and local law enforcement personnel — assisted by the citizen soldiers of the National Guard — have successfully stemmed further rioting, the President has made clear that our response should be adjusted accordingly.”

Bowser has clashed with President Trump over the federal response in Washington, which included deploying National Guardsmen and mobilizing every federal law enforcement agency that works under the Justice Department, including Drug Enforcement Administration agents and Bureau of Prisons riot teams. Barr, though, has consistently defended the department’s moves, and in the letter Tuesday he pointed to the burning of a historic structure in Lafayette Square and the setting of a fire inside nearby St. John’s Episcopal Church as reasons.

Barr insisted that all those deployed in Washington were operating under proper legal authorities, and his letter spelled out more specifically how some agencies had their normal functions expanded.

For example, he wrote, the Justice Department had given “additional law enforcement responsibility” to the Drug Enforcement Administration, and the U.S. Marshals Service had deputized officers from the Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Bureau of Prisons.

In a tweet Tuesday evening, John Falcicchio, Bowser’s chief of staff, called the letter, “revisionist at best/cya at worst” and that it failed “to mention examples of incitement by” the Trump administration.

This post has been updated with the District’s response.

On the day George Floyd was laid to rest, dozens of white Washingtonians gathered on the green grass of Logan Circle with signs bearing his name.

Scattered around picnic blankets, lawn games and socially distant gatherings, the crowd took a knee and quietly observed 8 minutes and 46 seconds of silence in honor of the man who died after a Minneapolis police officer pressed his knee to Floyd’s neck for that length of time.

It was the seventh day in a row Mari Quenemoen, 41, had held vigil for Floyd in the heart of her own neighborhood — one of the District’s whitest and wealthiest.

Puppies rolled and flopped under bent knees. Children climbed the backs of park benches and their kneeling parents.

When the silence broke, Quenemoen invited her neighbors to offer ways to make their community — and themselves — a little less racist.

“Tell Mayor Bowser we don’t want an increase to MPD’s budget!” called a woman.

“Support black-owned businesses,” said another.

“Teach your children what racism actually is,” shouted a man.

“Stop gentrifying,” another said.

In the center of the circle, Quenemoen nodded vigorously.

“Yes, and even I have work to do because I don’t fully understand what gentrification means,” she said into the megaphone in her grasp. “We all have work to do.”

The gathering, which began a week ago, started off as a neighborhood show of solidarity — a way for families uneasy about joining the throng of people outside the White House gates to participate in daily protests. But after several days of quiet remembrance and reflection, Quenemoen said, she wanted to do something more.

“We’re not going to vigil forever, so how can we send people home with ideas and energy that they can use to start making some change?” Quenemoen said, adding that daily vigils were planned through the end of the week.

Each day, the crowd has changed, though it has remained largely white. On Tuesday, with about a dozen black and brown faces present, Quenemoen said it was among the most diverse groups she’d seen.

As the crowd began to disperse, Jay D. Saint, 34, and Ryan Parzinger, 35, got back to their picnic.

Parzinger wondered aloud if it was encouraging to see white people trying to do something, anything, even if it was, as he felt, “misguided.”

“I think it’s a great indication that this time may be different,” Parzinger said. “I mean, we’re seeing this in the middle of Logan Circle.”

Saint smiled. For six years, he’s been marching with Black Lives Matter and donating to organizations that support black communities. As a black man and the descendant of Haitian immigrants, he said he has long seen himself in the graphic images of black men being killed by police.

“I want to believe the best, and I’m hoping it brings change,” he said. Then he shook his head. “But we’ve done all this. We’ve been doing all this for years. I just don’t know.”

St. John’s Church said Tuesday that it had raised two banners outside the building near the White House to support the Black Lives Matter movement.

In a letter to parishioners posted on the church’s website, the rector and wardens wrote that “if we believe that God loves all of God’s children, we must speak out and work to make sure that justice and equity is extended to all people as well.”

St. John’s has become a focal point for protests over police brutality against the African American community. After addressing the nation last week, President Trump visited the church — which was damaged in a fire set on May 31 during demonstrations — and held up a bible for television cameras.

“As people of all colors, ages, and backgrounds continue to pour into Lafayette Square to demand equal justice, the vestry felt it was important to let all know where St. John’s and its congregation stand,” the letter said.

Malcolm Rutledge, his neck and bare chest crisscrossed with heavy metal chains invoking slavery, strolled the newly christened Black Lives Matter Plaza on Tuesday as a self-described photo op.

“We live in a time period when people can express themselves artistically,” Rutledge, 27, of Bowie, Md., said. “I just wanted to provoke thought and be a walking Instagram post.”

His message: Deep economic injustice still exists. It was baked into capitalism and helped bring us to this moment.

Rutledge, who graduated from Howard University in 2015 after studying psychology, said he has felt the sting of an economic system that he believes is stacked against blacks.

“Where’s the job market for a black psychologist?” Rutledge wondered, as a marching band passed and nearby vendors sold Black Lives Matter T-shirts. “Capitalistic society was built off the slave trade. White people got rich off people looking like me — in chains.”

That legacy exists today in the form of discrimination and ruthless competition to succeed at others’ expense, he said.

Rutledge paid $50 for the thick metal chains at Home Depot — the same place, he noted, where neo-Nazis and white-supremacist marchers purchased tiki torches for a violent and deadly demonstration in Charlottesville in 2017.

“I’ve been in job interviews and I couldn’t get the job because somebody’s white nephew was more important,” he said. When he did have work, he said, he found himself grinding out the hours and forfeiting sleep just to pay the rent.

“We are all oppressed from capitalism,” he said.

“Malcolm X was our last great black psychologist, and he died homeless.”

Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam is vowing to fight a temporary injunction from a Richmond Circuit Court judge that prevents the state from immediately removing the statue of Robert E. Lee that towers 60 feet above this city’s Monument Avenue.

“We’ve been preparing for this for a year,” Northam said during a news briefing on Tuesday. “This is a statue that is divisive; it needs to come down and we are on very legal solid grounds to have it taken down.”

Northam (D) announced plans last week to remove the bronze figure of the Confederate general from its granite base and put it in storage amid protests in Richmond and across the country against police brutality toward African Americans.

Preparations began Monday, when state surveyors used a bucket truck to examine the figure and the city prohibited parking on the street around it through Friday. But efforts came to an abrupt halt with the judge’s ruling Monday night, which prevents any further action for 10 days.

The head of the Legislative Black Caucus of Maryland wants to get rid of the state’s Law Enforcement Officers’ Bill of Rights, a state law enacted in 1974 that provides protections for officers who are investigated for alleged misconduct and abuse of force.

“I really believe it’s time to dismantle it, blow it up, tear it apart,” Del. Darryl Barnes (D-Prince George’s) said during a panel discussion Monday night. “I think too many bad actors are protected under that shield and we need to do something about it.”

For years, many advocates in Maryland have called for a partial rollback of the law, but there has been pushback from the state’s police union.

Barnes said policing reform will be a top priority of the Black Caucus when the legislature reconvenes in January.

Earlier this month, Maryland House Speaker Adrienne A. Jones (D-Baltimore County) formed a work group to address police accountability and transparency, and Senate Judicial Proceedings Committee Chairman William C. Smith Jr. (D-Montgomery) is building support for sweeping measures that would include increased transparency of records of officers accused of misconduct; banning excessive use of force, including chokeholds and shooting at moving vehicles; and establishing implicit-bias training.

Del. Vanessa Atterbeary (D-Howard), who will chair the House work group, said Tuesday that she was unaware of Barnes’s push to do away with the police shield law and unsure whether there is an appetite on the House Judiciary Committee to move in that direction.

“I’m sure we’re going to have a robust conversation that will range from doing nothing to it and getting rid of it, and I suspect the answer lies somewhere in the middle,” she said.

As firecrackers occasionally popped and went streaking above the crowd, people continued to visit a makeshift memorial outside the White House dedicated to black men and women who have died during encounters with police.

They pointed to signs that made them laugh, or those that made them want to cry.

Some paused to take video of a man break-dancing, or to watch workers power-washing the base of a statue inside the park, or to groove a little, masks on.

At the Hay-Adams, a luxury hotel overlooking Lafayette Park, workers were adding giant Black Lives Matter placards over the plywood covering the windows.

Bisa Williams had stayed away from the protests. Williams, older than 65 and aware of the risks of the coronavirus pandemic, wanted to be safe. On Tuesday she realized, “I cannot separate myself from this,” she said.

It is a moral obligation to acknowledge the wall, said Williams, a former U.S. ambassador to Niger. “I used to work for the federal government, and the notion that the president would put a fence in front of the White House — ,” she said. She broke off, shaking her head.

Now, she said, “We’ve made this a shrine.”

The message to the president is, “You cannot block us out.” For too long the country has tried to block black people, culturally, economically, linguistically, she said.

So she came to the wall. She had seen a sign that said, “We’re still crying for Emmett Till.” The list is, she said, endless. She wasn’t going to add a message, Williams said: “I am it. I embody it.

“This is to remind other people.”

Amid historic protests drawing attention to police misconduct, the D.C. Council passed sweeping reform measures Tuesday that prohibit hiring officers with a history of serious misconduct on other police forces and require the city to swiftly make public the names of officers who use force on citizens.

The legislation passed unanimously, with a veto-proof majority, despite a stern letter that Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) sent the Council during its meeting, in which she urged lawmakers to slow down and hold public hearings before passing the legislation.

“I am especially concerned,” Bowser wrote, that the proposals “amend laws related to issues like Body-worn cameras, laws which received significant consideration and public input when they were crafted…. Allowing for community input and vetting by our residents can only serve to refine and strengthen changes to policing in the District.”

The District joins lawmakers across the country, from the Minneapolis City Council to Democrats in the U.S. Congress, in closely examining policing, prompted by two weeks of nationwide grief and fury sparked by the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis police custody.

Close to 1 p.m., the half-dozen pastors gathered outside St. John’s Episcopal Church, sweating and ready to sing.

They all wore white T-shirts, they all lead churches in the Washington region, and they were all there to honor the memory of George Floyd. At almost the exact moment Floyd’s body began its final journey through the streets of Houston to the same Pearland, Tex., cemetery where his mother is buried, the Rev. L.K. Floyd (no relation) gripped a red megaphone and led a small crowd through a rendition of “We Shall Overcome.”

The singing finished, he said all Americans living through these turbulent times must reach for the unchanging hands of God — and that he hoped God would reach back out to one man in particular.

God “can change the heart of the king,” said Floyd, who leads Heart Changers Church in Silver Spring, Md. So “we are praying even at 1600 Black Lives Matter Plaza.”

The pastors were standing close to the White House, but even closer to St. John’s, where President Trump held a Bible awkwardly and posed for a photo last week after police forcibly cleared demonstrators away from Lafayette Square with tear gas and rubber bullets.

This was not lost on the faith leaders.

Pastor Carolyn Gilmore, who leads Galatians Baptist Church in the District, asked the Lord not to knock the president down, but to lift him up and “move on his mind.”

“We’re asking you, Lord God, to go into the White House with your mop and broom,” Gillmore said, “and sweep away all the things of wickedness.”

The Rev. Brandon Spriggs had a different ask.

“Mr. President,” said Spriggs, who pastors Zion Hill Agape Baptist Church in Capitol Heights, Md., “we come demanding not that you hold up a Bible, but that you open one.”

Some passersby stopped, closed their eyes and lifted their palms to the beating sun as they listened. Others tried to look over at the White House, but their view was blocked by a large “Black Lives Matter” poster that someone had draped over the metal fencing barring the way to Lafayette Square.

On the other side of the street, Maria Fyodorovna felt her 11-year-old daughter tug her arm and turned to look. The girl was pointing at the speechifying and singing taking place outside St. John’s.

Fyodorovna, 47, had tried to explain to her daughter why Trump had forced largely peaceful protesters away from the park with spray that burned their eyes and made them cough. She had told her daughter that the president wanted to take a pretty picture.

Now Fyodorovna bent over and spoke directly into her daughter’s ears, ducking beneath the girl’s pink hat, over which she’d stuffed leopard-print cat ears.

“Yes,” she told the 11-year-old. “You remember when the president took that photo — that’s where that was.”

The girl stared for a moment. Then she nodded and kept walking.

Amid widespread demonstrations against police violence that have transfixed the nation’s capital, D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) has emerged as an unlikely foil to President Trump.

Bowser defied the president’s attempt to seize control of city streets and demanded he withdraw federal law enforcement and military deployed to quell unrest. She also installed a massive Black Lives Matter street mural on 16th Street, across from the White House, and renamed that stretch of asphalt Black Lives Matter Plaza.

Bowser’s left-leaning critics, who want her to defund the police department, slow gentrification and greatly expand housing for the poor, dismissed the renaming as an empty gesture. Others hailed her as a fresh voice of the anti-Trump resistance.

The Washington Post spoke to Bowser in her city hall office for 30 minutes Monday as part of a profile that ran on the front page of Tuesday’s print edition.

At the instant the funeral for George Floyd began in Houston, Marissa Faraclas turned to her 11-year-old son in Washington, D.C.

She had finally spotted a sign — one of hundreds adorning the tall metal fence outside the White House — she felt she could explain in a way he would understand. Faraclas, 46, nudged her son and pointed at the small cardboard rectangle, on which someone had scribbled in black Sharpie, “COMPLICIT COP = GUILTY COP.”

“Do you know what complicit means?” she asked, and the boy shook his head. “It’s if you just stand by and don’t say anything. Kind of like watching a friend get bullied in school.”

At the same moment a few yards away, a newscaster in a pink blouse began broadcasting live, her back to the White House.

A black man paused before a sign reading, “AM I NEXT?” and reached into a brown paper McDonald’s bag to grab a gulp of fries.

A white woman in jogging shorts, midway through a run, noticed a sign had slipped off the fence. She stopped, crossed the sidewalk and retaped the large white poster to the chain metal links so it again told passersby, “BLACK LIVES MATTER — ON THE STREETS, IN THE HOME, WORKPLACE.”

Gary Palmatier, one hand guiding his bicycle, stopped and raised his iPhone to take his 36th picture of the fence. Palmatier, who is retired, had biked about eight miles from his Arlington home to reach Lafayette Square.

It was far longer than the 66-year-old normally biked in a day. Sweat darkened the front of his lime-green T-shirt in a heart shape and wet the corners of his cloth face mask, which was covered with images of newspaper front pages.

He had timed the trip so he could begin strolling along the fence as noon struck — just as people in a Houston church hundreds of miles away fell silent, listening to a pastor honor the life of a man who never expected to die beneath the knee of a police officer, nor to change the country with his last three words.

Palmatier stared at a white sign that listed every one of Floyd’s 84 final utterances, from the moment his neck went beneath the knee to the moment he stopped breathing. “I can’t breathe” appeared nine times. “Mama” appeared twice. “Please,” 12 times.

“I feel more like I’m part of the funeral here,” Palmatier said, “than watching on TV.”

To his left, two small black boys approached the fence. One, holding a basketball under his arm, jostled the shoulder of the other and jabbed an index finger toward the fence.

“Defend the police?” he asked, confused. Then he realized.

“Oh no,” he told the smaller boy, who was sucking his thumb. “Defund the police.”

Isamu Kawashita knelt in jeans covered with sequin butterflies at the fence in front of the White House, cutting black poster board to add to the growing collage of protest posters. Someone had left a vase of wildflowers. There was a vintage advertising photo of a mom smiling at her babies behind a baby gate, juxtaposed with a photo of the fence around the White House.

There was a drawing of a clenched fist, colored in brown crayon, and bands of stretchy tape looped through the fence to make giant letters: “BAN STOP + FRISK.”

Kawashita dipped a brush into a jar of white paint and drew it over Japanese characters he had written in pencil on the poster board.

Home from university in Japan because of the pandemic, he wanted to send a message: “Japan stands with you.”

In Japan, the only thing media audiences see of the protests is conflict, he said. “I want to show it is not only violent.”

People wandered past, taking photos of the posters. Then shouting broke out at the other end of H Street NW. A black man was yelling at a white man whose bald head was wrapped in a bandanna. “I’m telling you your job here is to listen!” the black man shouted as the white man shouted back. Police officers approached as others gathered around, but the officers held back, just watching. A man fell off his bike and people spun around at the crash, expecting another fight. “Medic!” people called, hurrying forward to help.

The argument was over — the black man walked away, shaking his head wearily. The white man turned to the crowd: “All of you don’t have a job! Get a job!” People turned away. They went back to taking photos.

Janiya Hepburn, 18, of Anacostia was painting “Black is beautiful” in big red letters on the sidewalk by the fence. She chose red because it is the color of blood. She was planning to add some blue, to highlight the message. “People in my hood say when you see the blue lights, walk the other way,” she said.

Hepburn came there Tuesday because she’s black and has eyes, she said. “I feel like America has shut its eyes for too long.”

She and her friends had brought a can of mint-green paint, as well — just to make the letters stand out. “Once you catch their eye, they see the message,” she said. “You got to catch their eye first.”

At midmorning Tuesday, a young black man wearing blue jeans and a white shirt approached the fence surrounding Lafayette Square carrying three large trash bags. He put two on the ground and heaved the other over the 8-foot-high chain link fence onto the park grounds. A few protesters, including one wearing a Black Lives Matter shirt, called out to him to stop.

The man ignored them and prepared to throw another over the fence when an older black woman approached him and gently took his arm. The two then began a quiet but intense conversation. After 10 minutes they embraced and walked in separate directions. Another protester had removed the two remaining trash bags.

“I just shared my wisdom with him,” Nadiyah Abdullah, 67, said in an interview after the encounter. “As a mama, I can feel his anger and his hurt, but I had to say ‘no’ to the young brother. I said we need to be the presence of equality and liberation, but let’s not merge that with the lesser.”

Abdullah, a California resident who was in Washington visiting her daughter, said the man responded to her entreaties and said he would listen to her.

“For such a time as this little brother, we’re here, we’re in it,” Abdullah said she told the man. “In 2020, the world needs us.”

In the hours before Floyd’s funeral, people pushed strollers and walked dogs down Black Lives Matter Plaza, holding up phones to take video of the painted letters stretching toward the White House. As property managers, Shonda Smith and colleague Sara Pray have been dealing with some of the aftermath of the ongoing protests and the looting in the initial days, including broken glass storefronts.

On Tuesday, they walked from work nearby to see the mural — but not the mural painted on the street. Their destination was the collage of protest posters covering the black metal fence caging the White House.

“This is history — and present,” Pray said. “It’s important to take it all in.”

It was incredibly moving, Smith said, to see the mural.

Gospel music played from speakers by St. John’s Episcopal Church on Lafayette Square as people read the cardboard and hand-lettered poster board signs that fluttered a little in the breeze.

“Respect free speech.”

“Decrim sex work.”

“Let them breathe.”

“8:46” — a reference to the number of minutes and seconds Floyd lay on a Minneapolis street with an officer’s knee on his neck.

“If you are silent about your pain they will kill you and say you enjoyed it. — Zola Neale Hurston.”

“Stop killing us.”

A “Bunker King” sign that mocked the president by mimicking the logo of a famous fast-food chain.

A sign about Breonna Taylor was especially meaningful to Smith, who has been following the case since March and was moved that Taylor hadn’t been forgotten in all the heat and light of recent days.

The mural in the street was a government gesture, Pray said.

“As far as the real voices of the community —” she said, gesturing to the growing mural on the fence.

“Those are the people that are representing D.C. and people all over the world. Everyone should come here and read them — read all of them.”

The Montgomery County Council is set to introduce legislation next week that would include new restrictions on use of force by county police.

The proposal will have four main tenets, said council member Will Jawando (D-At Large): changing the standard for use of deadly force, banning the use of chokeholds, prohibiting officers from striking anyone who is already in handcuffs or other restraints, and mandating that officers intervene if they see a colleague using excessive force.

The legislation will be jointly introduced by the four black and Latino council members: Jawando, Craig Rice (D-District 2), Nancy Navarro (D-District 4) and Gabe Albornoz (D-At Large).

“It’s a response to what is going on but we’re definitely going to need to do a lot more,” Jawando said. He added that lawmakers “definitely need to look at the re-prioritization of our budgeting.” He said he is also considering proposals to cut down on the number of police officers in Montgomery County Public Schools.

The county’s fiscal 2021 budget was approved in May, but lawmakers have said that they plan to introduce significant amendments to it once they are able to ascertain revenue shortfalls caused by the coronavirus pandemic.

Lawmakers on Tuesday also introduced a resolution to declare racism a public health crisis. The resolution is not a legally binding document and does not introduce new regulations or laws, but affirms the county’s commitment to addressing racial inequity across different sectors, lawmakers said. The county in 2019 introduced the Racial Equity and Social Justice Act, which mandates that all legislative action is taken through the “lens of racial equity.”

The National Park Service will remove most of the tall metal fencing surrounding Lafayette Square by Wednesday, the agency said.

Officials erected the fence early last week to bar access to the park near the White House, which sits south of it. The fencing first appeared shortly after police aggressively cleared a crowd of largely peaceful demonstrators from the area of the square using chemical irritants and rubber bullets.

In the days since, crowds have continued to gather outside the park daily to protest.

When night fell days ago, demonstrators occasionally rattled the fence, shouting at law enforcement officers lined up behind it — but more recently, protesters have converted the fencing to a crowdsourced memorial wall, filled with posters, names and paintings of black men and women who died during encounters with police.

A National Park Service spokeswoman did not immediately respond Tuesday to a question about what would happen to the artwork when the fence comes down. She said some fencing will remain in areas that suffered damage during demonstrations or where safety hazards exist.

Officials have also lined the entirety of the Ellipse — the sweeping green lawn south of the White House — with more than a mile of fencing, reinforced by white concrete barriers. The Park Service plans to remove that fencing by Wednesday as well, the spokeswoman said.

The crowd swarming the fence north of the White House turned its attention from the rows of riot police on the other side of the barrier to one of their own. A young man had scaled the street sign at 16th and H streets last Tuesday night and was trying to tear it down.

Boos erupted around him, and he was pelted with water bottles. A chant — “Peaceful protest” — rumbled to life in the same place where, a day earlier, demonstrators had been tear-gassed and shot with rubber bullets to clear the way for President Trump’s visit to St. John’s Episcopal Church. The young man climbed down and was carried out of the crowd.

The scene captured the warring impulses that gripped the nation’s capital early last week during demonstrations over the death of George Floyd. For 48 hours, Washington teetered on the brink of chaos, with the city poised to descend into the kind of civil unrest last seen in 1968 after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. Instead something very different happened.

Faced with outrage from black alumni and the resignation of at least three African American staffers, Liberty University President Jerry Falwell Jr. has deleted and apologized for a two-week-old tweet that showed a face mask decorated with a photo of a person in Ku Klux Klan robes and another in blackface.

The images were intended to mock the mask requirement implemented by Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam (D), who nearly resigned from his office last year amid revelations that the racist photo had been featured on his medical school yearbook page.

But it upset many of the African American students, staff and alumni at Liberty, which was founded in Lynchburg, Va., in 1971 by Falwell’s father, Jerry Falwell Sr., and is one of the largest Christian universities in the world.

LeeQuan McLaurin, who began as a student at Liberty in 2012 and has worked there since, resigned from his position as director of diversity retention last week. He said in an email that Falwell’s tweet on May 27 was a tipping point of larger racially related problems that he has experienced at the school, which he said have contributed to a drop in Liberty’s residential undergraduate African American population from 10 percent to 4 percent between 2007 and 2018.

Michael Turner’s encounter years ago with Montgomery County police, as he explained in a recent email to a department commander, was appalling.

Turner was 18. Officers had come to break up a party in the suburban county and quickly focused on Turner and his fellow African American friends. They checked IDs. No one was drunk. The cops asked them to move along.

“One officer looks at us,” Turner wrote, “and says, ‘Now go back to your projects.’ ”

The broader context of the email, written eight days ago, was Turner’s effort to explain why he wanted a protest in downtown Silver Spring.

“We come in peace, commander,” wrote Turner, 36. “March with us. It’s time for a change. I’m ready to help, are you?”

LeBron James retweeted her. Civil rights icon Rep. John Lewis posed for pictures with her. “Morning Joe” wanted her on MSNBC.

Appearing on rapper Lil Wayne’s radio show — a show normally devoted to stars like Drake and Eminem — D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) could not help but crow about her duel with President Trump.

“When you’re the president, you’re supposed to swing up, you’re supposed to be beating up on foreign leaders,” Bowser said. “Not swinging down on chick mayors.”

In a city famous for political bombast, Bowser is known as a cautious leader who expresses herself in the forgettable words of a government bureaucrat. Now, in the span of a week, she has turned into a fresh voice of the resistance, buffeted by Trump’s threat of a federal takeover and his use of racist language to criticize street protests over the death of George Floyd in police custody.