Trump dismisses idea of statehood for DC, citing potential boost for Democrats in Congress

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President Trump has rejected the idea of making the District of Columbia the 51st state.

"D.C. will never be a state," Trump told the New York Post . "Why? So we can have two more Democratic ... senators and five more congressmen? No thank you. That’ll never happen."

With a population of more than 700,000, the District of Columbia -- delineated by the Constitution as "not exceeding ten miles square" -- has more people than Wyoming and Vermont.

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Trump, who received just over four percent of the D.C. vote in the 2016 presidential election, described the District as "100 percent Democrat, basically."

"Why would the Republicans do that? That’ll never happen unless we have some very, very stupid Republicans around, [and] I don’t think you do," he said.

Currently, the District's sole representative in Congress is Democratic Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton, who was first elected to that post in 1990. Norton is permitted to serve on committees in her capacity but is not given a final vote on any legislation.

At the local level, D.C. voters have elected seven different Democrats as mayor since 1974, when the first popular mayoral election was held. The last Republican to preside over D.C. government was Henry B.F. McFarland. who served as president of a three-member Board of Commissioners from 1900 to 1910.

While Norton and current Mayor Muriel Bowser have both expressed support for D.C. statehood, Trump repeatedly made his viewpoint clear in the Post interview:

"You’d have three or four more congressmen and two more senators, every single day of every single year. And it would never change," Trump told the paper.

Unlike with other U.S. territories, Washington D.C.'s status as a District is established in Article I of the Constitution.

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At the time of its establishment in 1800, D.C. residents were permitted to vote in either neighboring Virginia or Maryland.

However, at the time, parts of what is now Virginia were within the confines of Washington DC, so the residents voted based upon which state used to hold the tract of land they lived on.

In the mid-19th Century, the City of Alexandria and Alexandria County (the latter of which is now called Arlington County) was returned to Virginia.

In Federalist Paper 43, James Madison wrote at length about his own opposition to statehood for the District, calling the federal government "too great a public pledge to be left in the hands of a single state."

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"The extent of this federal district is sufficiently circumscribed to satisfy every jealousy of an opposite nature," Madison said. "And as it is to be appropriated to this use with the consent of the State ceding it, as the State will no doubt provide in the compact for the rights and the consent of the citizens inhabiting it..."

The District of Columbia's license plate itself has long displayed a famous slogan counter to Trump's position.

"Taxation without representation," it reads -- a play on Revolutionary-era Boston politician James Otis' grievance with the British Crown.

In 1961, the 23rd Amendment to the Constitution was ratified, giving D.C. residents the ability to vote in presidential elections with a total of three electors, "equal to the whole number of Senators and representatives in Congress to which the District would be entitled if it were a State."