The next mayor of DC will have to navigate its most famous resident: President Donald Trump

(CNN) — Janeese Lewis George, a Washington, DC, councilmember and leading candidate for mayor, was knocking on doors when her team got word that President Donald Trump said he wouldn’t “put up with it” if the democratic socialist wins her Tuesday primary.

“Maybe we’ll take back Washington, run it on the federal basis,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office Thursday.

Her team paused its canvassing, huddled together and within a few hours released a response.

“Threatening home rule because you don’t like how residents are voting is an attack on democracy itself,” Lewis George said in a video, referencing DC’s right to self-governance. “The people of DC elect their mayor, and they want someone who’s going to stand up to Donald Trump.”

The comments from the president underscored a debate at the center of the DC mayor’s race over what kind of leader Democrats in the district want standing between them and an administration threatening their autonomy.

It’s a question that’s dominated Democratic primaries across the country this election cycle, endangering incumbents who some voters say aren’t doing enough to push back on the Trump administration. But the deliberations over how to fight a president whose party controls both chambers of Congress have uniquely high stakes in DC, where thousands of National Guard troops still patrol the streets and the threat of federal interference is ever present.

Both Lewis George and her main primary opponent, the more moderate former DC councilmember Kenyan McDuffie, have vowed to take on the president, build bridges with members of Congress and fight to protect home rule.

McDuffie, who spent 13 years on the DC council before resigning earlier this year, said he has the experience to “wage a smart fight” against the president. He argued the president’s comments about Lewis George show he would use her as an effective foil if she’s elected.

“If you believe Donald Trump is a threat to DC’s local autonomy, then the last thing we should do is elect someone whose agenda would make it easier for him to justify federal intervention,” McDuffie told CNN. “My message is simple: don’t give Donald Trump what he wants.”

Lewis George, meanwhile, has been more critical of outgoing Democratic Mayor Muriel Bowser, the longtime incumbent who has sought to find a middle ground between working with the administration and asserting DC’s rights. She’s also won the support of groups like Free DC, which formed last year to advocate for DC home rule and statehood.

Lewis George, who was elected to the DC Council in 2020, has pushed back on the suggestion that her election would give the president cover to interfere in the district’s affairs.

“Kenyan McDuffie has not figured out what the rest of us have. You don’t stop Donald Trump by fearing him,” Lewis George said in a statement to CNN. “I’m a daughter of the District, and I’ve been fighting for DC statehood my entire life. I’m not going to take a lecture from Kenyan McDuffie on Home Rule.”

When asked for more information about Trump’s threat to exert federal control over DC, the White House referred CNN to the president’s Oval Office remarks.

Taking up Bowser’s balancing act

Phil Mendelson, the chairman of the DC council, said that while candidates talk about fighting Trump on the campaign trail, “being in office is different.”

“I would describe it, in a word or two, as a balancing act,” he said. “That’s what Mayor Bowser has been attempting for the last couple of years. I think in the eyes of the residents she has not done a good enough job at that.”

DC has only been able to elect its own government since the passage of the Home Rule Act of 1973. But even that autonomy is limited. DC’s delegate to Congress is a non-voting member. Congress can overturn DC laws, a power it has exercised rarely over the last 50 years. It can also pass legislation to repeal the Home Rule Act, though there appears to be little appetite to do so. A GOP-backed measure to overturn home rule — named the BOWSER Act — failed to gain any traction.

Last August, the president sent National Guard troops to DC and declared a crime emergency in the district, allowing the federal government to take control of the city’s police department for 30 days.

Bowser was critical of the federal takeover and worked to prevent an extension of the 30-day emergency that allowed it to happen. But she faced widespread backlash over what some viewed as her efforts to appease the administration, including crediting a reduction in crime to the surge in federal law enforcement.

Bowser’s cooperation marked a reversal from Trump’s first term, when the mayor was a leading figure in the Democratic resistance. This time around, she met with Trump at his Mar-a-Lago club before he retook office, and in March 2025 announced the removal of Black Lives Matter Plaza, a two-block landmark near the White House that she once championed, after the president and congressional Republicans in Congress threatened to cut more than $1 billion from the city’s budget. “We have bigger fish to fry,” she told CNN at the time.

A Washington Post/Schar School poll released earlier this month found that 50% of DC registered voters wanted Bowser to do more to oppose Trump, compared to 34% who said she was handling the city’s relationship with the president just right. Seventy-nine percent of voters disapproved of the federal takeover of DC’s police department.

A spokesperson for the mayor declined an interview request from CNN.

‘Pandering’ promises to fight Trump?

Whoever wins Tuesday’s primary will be heavily favored to win the November general election. The next mayor will have to strike their own balance between working with and fighting against the Trump administration during the president’s final two years in office – and there’s not yet a clear answer as to which candidate DC residents prefer.

The Post/Schar School poll found that under the city’s new ranked choice voting system, 32% of registered Democratic primary voters said they would rank Lewis George first, 25% said their first choice is McDuffie, and another 26% said they were undecided. Democratic voters were split on who they trusted more to handle DC’s relationship with the Trump administration, with 35% saying McDuffie and 32% saying Lewis George, within the margin of error.

Critics of Bowser’s approach argue she has at times complied in advance with the federal government.

“History teaches us that that positioning of, ‘Oh, let’s not make trouble,’ is actually very dangerous … and we’ve seen that from our current mayor a lot,” said Alex Dodds, the campaign director for Free DC. “We were really looking for a mayoral champion who would assert those rights.”

But others stress that any DC mayor must work with the federal government. Bill Lightfoot, a former DC councilman who ran the mayoral campaigns of both Bowser and former DC Mayor Adrian Fenty, said candidates’ promises to fight Trump were “pandering.”

“The candidates are just blowing smoke. They’re telling the people what the people want to hear,” Lightfoot said. “As a practical matter, they have no power, no resources, to oppose the president.”

He said he expected that whoever wins the mayoral race will request a meeting with the president, just as New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani did last year. “And then they’re going to play nice,” Lightfoot said.

A democratic socialist vs. a moderate Democrat

While the Trump factor has dominated much of the race, Democratic candidates have still had to make their case to voters on affordability issues and public safety.

Lewis George’s campaign has drawn comparisons to that of Mamdani, another democratic socialist who defeated an establishment-backed moderate in 2025.

“What Mayor Mamdani and other rising leaders have been saying, and I agree with this, is that people need to see that government can work for them – not just the wealthy and well-connected,” she said in a statement to CNN.

McDuffie has sought to paint Lewis George as a less experienced candidate with an unrealistic platform. He’s also accused her of being soft on crime over her opposition to enforcing youth curfews to curb instances of large gatherings of teenagers behaving disruptively in public spaces. Lewis George argues curfews are dangerous due to concerns over how federal officers would enforce them.

Lewis George has attacked McDuffie over his donors and said he didn’t do enough to fight for lower utility costs, a claim he called a “lie.”

Sam Epps, the president of Metropolitan Washington Council, AFL-CIO, which has backed Lewis George, said the candidate’s focus on cost-of-living concerns is part of why they’re supporting her.

“It costs our members more money to pay for rent, to put gas in their car, to buy groceries, and Janeese Lewis George is the one who we believe — and we are supporting full throttle — that she will help tackle these affordability issues,” Epps said.

For others, the race has come down to experience.

Ashley Ruff, a DC native and advisory neighborhood council commissioner in Southeast DC, said she’s supporting McDuffie because he has a longer record of fighting Trump during his tenure on the DC council. She said she wanted to vote for a candidate who she felt had shown they heard her.

“I want to go for somebody that, you’re going to hear my voice, you’re going to come and help me clean up my neighborhood, but also you’re not going to push the people out of my neighborhood because you’re going to try to make things better,” she said. “Things don’t just happen overnight.”

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