Welcome to Margin of Error, a politics column from Tom Scocca, editor of the Indignity newsletter.
On Monday, President Donald Trump put out an executive order directing, among other things, that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth make ready “a standing National Guard quick reaction force that shall be resourced, trained, and available for rapid nationwide deployment.” The president also called for Hegseth to create a new “specialized unit within the District of Columbia National Guard, subject to activation under Title 32 of the United States Code, that is dedicated to ensuring public safety and order in the Nation’s capital.”
There are already more than 2,000 National Guard troops in Washington, D.C., at an estimated cost of more than a million dollars a day—including units deployed from, in ascending order of distance, West Virginia, Ohio, Tennessee, South Carolina, Mississippi, and Louisiana. They are there, according to Trump’s executive order, to “address the rampant violence and disorder that have undermined the proper and safe functioning of the Federal Government, and therefore, the Nation, and that have led to disgraceful conditions in our Nation’s capital.”
On Sunday, the National Guard forces assigned to the president’s crisis response in the District began carrying M4 assault rifles or SIG Sauer M17 pistols around in public. On Tuesday, the Washington Post reported, Guard members “scooped, spread and smoothed mounds of mulch around the city’s treasured Tidal Basin cherry trees.” Fox 5 DC reported that a “full busload of National Guard members were seen Tuesday morning picking up trash around Lafayette Park, just outside of the White House.”
The nation’s capital is under armed military occupation, against the wishes of its own government and residents. The armed military occupation is an empty, idiotic spectacle. But also the armed military occupation is armed.
The Defense Department has described the Guard members as performing “presence patrols,” a bit of military jargon transplanted to a civilian city. The government’s Defense Visual Information Distribution Service offers photographs of troops carrying out previous “presence patrols” in places including Kandahar, Baghdad, Basra, and Kenya, where the caption described the Army as “countering violent extremist organizations throughout East Africa.”
There are also photos showing a presence patrol in Busan, South Korea, on Memorial Day weekend in 2022, apparently to prevent American troops stationed there from repeating their illegal and rowdy behavior, including shooting off fireworks on the beach, from the previous Memorial Day. But the tourist spots of Washington, D.C., are quiet—unseasonably quiet, James Fallows reported, on a weekend survey of the city.
The National Guard is, for now, mostly a decorative element in the president’s crackdown on Washington, D.C. The forces in fatigues tromp around doing busywork, while masked gangs of federal agents set up checkpoints to hunt for immigrants, demand ID from people riding the Metro, block the sidewalk on the way to school, chase after petty crimes, and attack people so recklessly they hurt themselves. Without active military assistance, those efforts have already managed to overwhelm the courts and overreach the plausible limits of prosecution.
But Trump wants troops in the streets. Troops in the streets are essential to his idea of what it means to be president. Amid the Defense Visual Information Distribution Service’s pictures of foreign interventions, there is a domestic photo from five years ago, in which members of the Georgia National Guard, in the words of the caption, “assist City of Atlanta SWAT team members conducting area presence patrols while enforcing a curfew during ongoing civil unrest.” The date of the photo is June 4, 2020.
That was the day after Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton responded to the George Floyd protests by publishing his “Send in the Troops” op-ed in the New York Times. In it, he called for “an overwhelming show of force to disperse, detain and ultimately deter lawbreakers,” to make up for “delusional politicians” who “refuse to do what’s necessary to uphold the rule of law.”
At the time, and afterward, there was dispute over what the piece really meant. Many readers and much of the Times staff took Cotton’s demand—delivered in the midst of a nationwide police riot against the protests—as a call for violent escalation, and the Times opinion editor, James Bennet, who revealed he hadn’t read the piece before his section published it, lost his job. That response, to Bennet’s defenders, was an expression of collective left-wing madness and dishonesty; in the op-ed, after all, Cotton had insisted the military be used against “rioters and looters” as distinguished from “peaceful, law-abiding protesters.”
Cotton’s president, meanwhile, was fuming that the protests “made the country look weak” and asking his then-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff if the military could “just shoot them in the legs or something,” according to his defense secretary at the time. But with a few exceptions—dropping two military helicopters, one with medic logos, low enough over the streets of D.C.’s Chinatown to break a tree and chase off protesters with the rotor blast—the National Guard mostly, and disappointingly from Trump’s point of view, behaved itself.
Now, without even waiting for civil unrest, Trump is trying again. In place of Cotton’s “nihilist criminals” and “cadres of left-wing radicals,” the target is the “violent gangs and bloodthirsty criminals, roving mobs of wild youth, drugged out maniacs and homeless people” that the president claimed controlled the streets of Washington. So far, the worst thing the National Guard has done in pursuit of the nonexistent enemy is to run a red light on a residential street in a 15-ton Mine Resistant Ambush Protected All-Terrain Vehicle, hitting a Hyundai SUV broadside and sending the driver to the hospital. It’s all bullshit, but bullshit with military hardware has a way of becoming real.
Source link
