We’re in our third week of President Donald Trump’s takeover of public safety in the nation’s capital, and here’s what it’s like: mostly the same.
Since there was no “crime emergency” to start with — the usual bad crime, yes, but no crescendoing crisis — things are not much different.
That’s why the National Guard soldiers started picking up trash over the weekend. Perhaps they’re deterring crime by their mere presence, but they’re not actively assisting with police work since they’re not supposed to under federal law.
Federal law enforcement officers have been busy, though, tagging along with D.C. police on traffic stops and stuffing immigrants into unmarked vehicles. I watched a group of Drug Enforcement Administration agents back up D.C. police after they pulled over a drunken driver one night last week on H Street NE. On another night, I watched DEA agents and D.C. police peer into a parked car they said belonged to someone with some sort of gun record. They decided not to tow the car.
Scenes of D.C. residents watching and filming federal officers have become common, and feds have been aggressively arresting moped delivery drivers. As a result, the mopeds that were ubiquitous on city streets three weeks ago are now mostly gone.
Meanwhile, National Guard soldiers have been chatting with tourists outside Union Station and admiring the various landmarks visible from the National Mall. Haven’t seen them do a whole lot else.
And yet, Trump is so thrilled with how he sent troops into the nation’s capital that on Monday he signed an executive order calling for an unprecedented expansion of the National Guard as a police force in American cities.
It’s not clear if the White House envisions these possible future troop deployments as more aggressive than the D.C. one or even if the president will follow through. The administration is already battling a lawsuit calling into question his federalization of the National Guard in Los Angeles. Trump does not have the power to take over other city police departments like he did in D.C.
But it’s clear Trump loves the idea of sending troops, and he probably likes the pictures of the troops most of all. The images could become an iconic part of the authoritarian aesthetic of his second term.
Matt Cleary, as associate professor of political science at Syracuse University’s Maxwell School of Citizenship & Public Affairs, told me the U.S. has stricter rules against deploying troops domestically than most other countries, and that it’s not uncommon or automatically a bad thing when troops help with public safety. “But I’m gonna keep my eyes open,” Cleary said.
Randy Manner, a former acting vice chief of the National Guard Bureau and current member of a group called National Security Leaders for America, said Trump is using the Army to further his authoritarian political ambitions.
“It will intimidate the population and desensitize Americans to the fact that it’s normal for uniformed, armed military to be in our streets,” Manner told me.
For now, I’ll keep reporting on Trump’s D.C. police takeover, and I’ll try to avoid getting crushed by a mine-resistant ambush protection vehicle.