Will Washington, DC, Ever Become A State? Trump Weighs In: 'No Thank You. That'll Never Happen'

President Trump on Wednesday said there’s no way he’d approve making the District of Columbia an independent state. The district, which has 700,000 residents, has been under federal control since its inception and has no meaningful representation in Congress.

In an interview with the New York Post, Trump said granting statehood to the district would be a gift to Democrats in what appear to be his first comments on the issue since taking office. During the 2015 campaign, he said he would like to do “whatever is good” for the district.

The district is overwhelmingly Democratic, giving Trump just 4% of the vote in the last presidential election. In a 2016 referendum, 86% of D.C. voters endorsed statehood.

“D.C. will never be a state,” Trump said. “You mean District of Columbia, a state? Why? So we can have two more Democratic — Democrat senators and five more congressmen? No thank you. That’ll never happen.”

The district has a single, nonvoting representative in the House and no representation in the Senate.

The district’s population is larger than that of Vermont and Wyoming and nearly equal to Alaska’s. License plates on cars registered in the district carry the slogan: “Taxation without representation.”

The District of Columbia was founded in 1790 under the Constitution to serve as the nation’s capital as a compromise between northern and southern states. The site was chosen by George Washington on land ceded by Maryland and Virginia, but the Virginia land was ceded back in 1847.

Before the coronavirus pandemic intensified in the U.S., the House Oversight Committee approved a D.C. statehood proposal that had been expected to gain approval from the full chamber.

“Congress has two choices: It can continue to exercise undemocratic authority over the 700,000 American citizens who live in the nation's capital, treating them, in the words of Frederick Douglass, as 'aliens, not citizens, but subjects,' or it can live up to the nation's promise and ideals, end taxation without representation and pass the Washington DC admissions act,” D.C. Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton said.

Trump ascribed other motives.

“They want to do that so they pick up two automatic Democrat — you know it’s 100 percent Democrat, basically — so why would the Republicans ever do that? That’ll never happen unless we have some very, very stupid Republicans around that I don’t think you do. You understand that, right?” Trump said in Wednesday’s interview.