America, your front yard has been militarized. Yet residents and visitors there hardly pay the troops any mind.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s the normalization of excessive federal force under President Trump, just seven months into his reign.<\/p>\n
America\u2019s Front Yard<\/a> is what the National Park Service calls the National Mall, the grassy expanse that knits together the neighborhood that\u2019s home to the U.S. Capitol and the iconic monuments to Presidents Washington, Lincoln, Jefferson and Franklin Delano Roosevelt; veterans of World War II, Vietnam and Korea; and Martin Luther King Jr.<\/p>\n For decades I jogged here (one morning literally running into Jimmy Carter, long gone from the White House). I introduced friends and family to the Mall\u2019s delights and the museums that open onto it. I attended festivals, concerts and Fourth of July fireworks displays. On a gorgeous, sunny Labor Day this year, I returned. And for the first time, I saw armed, camo-clad soldiers among the tourists.<\/p>\n As I left the World War II memorial, five soldiers emerged nearby, marching in single-line formation to join about two dozen more beside three vans under trees near the Reflecting Pool. At the pool\u2019s opposite end, nearer the Lincoln Memorial, another dozen soldiers milled. Tourists mostly ignored the shows of force, except for the two park policemen on horseback along separate sides of the Reflecting Pool. Tourists wanted photos with them.<\/p>\n As I approached the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, five more soldiers circled a statue dedicated to women who served in Vietnam. The men studied the sculpted figures and read the inscriptions \u2014 just like tourists.<\/p>\n \u201cThey\u2019re bored,\u201d a park ranger told me. \u201cThey\u2019d rather be home with their families.\u201d<\/p>\n I and most Washingtonians (8 out of 10, according to a mid-August poll<\/a> for the Washington Post) also would rather have them home with their families, wherever home is. Six states headed by Republican governors, ever-eager to please Trump, have sent hundreds of National Guard troops to supplement those from blue Washington, who, unlike in the states where governors hold sway, are under the president\u2019s direct command.<\/p>\n Heading to a restroom on my way to the Tidal Basin and Jefferson Memorial, I passed three hulking black SUVs. Despite their darkened windows, I could vaguely make out men inside. Only the vehicles\u2019 license plates identified them: \u201cDHS,\u201d Department of Homeland Security, the tip of Trump\u2019s antimigrant spear. Perhaps these secret agents were awaiting a dispatcher\u2019s call to nab another Latino delivery driver<\/a> or raid another restaurant\u2019s kitchen<\/a> to drive up the numbers for Trump\u2019s immigration crackdown.<\/p>\n What you see out in the open \u2014 2,200 uniformed soldiers and additional federal agents patrolling the nation\u2019s capital \u2014 is bad enough. It\u2019s what you don\u2019t see, or can\u2019t identify, that\u2019s more disturbing in the land of the free. Like masked agents in unmarked cars stopping and searching residents without evident reason, as videos on social media regularly capture.<\/p>\n Either way, Trump\u2019s takeover of the District of Columbia using National Guard troops and federal agents from the DHS, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and from the FBI and other agencies \u2014 together with his threats to Chicago, Baltimore and other cities \u2014 amount to \u201ccreating a national police force with the President as its chief,\u201d as a federal judge proclaimed<\/a> this week in ruling against troops acting as cops in Los Angeles.<\/p>\n \u201cWhy is the National Guard still around?\u201d an exasperated Senior District Judge Charles R. Breyer (brother of retired Supreme Court Justice Stephen G. Breyer) demanded last month during a trial in the L.A. case. \u201cWhat is the threat today? What was the threat yesterday or two weeks ago that allowed it? I\u2019m trying to see whether there are any limits, any limits to the use of a federal force.\u201d<\/p>\n Those were my questions in Washington as well, during my Labor Day stroll and a drive through downtown and various higher-crime neighborhoods.<\/p>\n That same day, Trump boasted<\/a> on social media that, three weeks into his policing of the nation\u2019s capital, Washington is \u201cNOW A CRIME FREE ZONE.\u201d Yet he\u2019s vowed to keep boots on the ground beyond a legal 30-day limit next week, which would require Congress\u2019 assent.<\/p>\n The fact is that Washington, like any city, still has crime, though the rate was at a 30-year low before Trump\u2019s executive order<\/a> Aug. 11 citing a nonexistent \u201ccrime emergency,\u201d and it\u2019s fallen more since then, as Democratic Mayor Muriel Bowser has acknowledged<\/a>. The issue isn\u2019t whether there is crime that needs to be policed. It\u2019s who does the policing. In America, that\u2019s historically been the states and local jurisdictions \u2014 unless, as federal law requires, they prove incapable of doing so. Which they haven\u2019t.<\/p>\n If more police is an answer to crime, as Bowser and most mayors of either party would agree, then Trump should quit cutting federal funding \u2014 Washington is short a full $1 billion<\/a> in this fiscal year \u2014 and instead do what former President Clinton did amid high crime in the mid-1990s: increase money to states and cities to hire more local cops. That helped in Clinton\u2019s time, if not so much<\/a> as he liked to claim.<\/p>\n What\u2019s worse is that Trump\u2019s bid to take charge in U.S. cities extends mostly to states led by Democrats, despite high or higher crime in red state cities including<\/a> Memphis, St. Louis, Indianapolis, Louisville, Jackson and Birmingham. Sending red-state troops to police unfamiliar blue cities can only exacerbate polarization. So does a president who spurs on those troops and agents by denigrating U.S. cities as \u201cunsafe and dirty and disgusting\u201d<\/a> (Washington), \u201chell holes\u201d<\/a> (Chicago and Baltimore) and \u201cterrible\u201d (L.A.).<\/p>\n This is not normal, not in America\u2019s front yard or anywhere else in this nation. Nor will it ultimately be accepted, as Trump takeovers spread and protests expand with them. I fear this is just what the Great Divider wants: an excuse to dispatch more troops.<\/p>\n Bluesky: @jackiecalmes<\/a>
Threads: @jkcalmes<\/a>
X: @jackiekcalmes<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"America, your front yard has been militarized. Yet residents and visitors there hardly pay the troops any mind.…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":199451,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5123],"tags":[5229,110522,110521,1582,276,4219,26772,2961,224,5337,24763,40287,21039,1807,110524,290,22074,277,110523,2452],"class_list":{"0":"post-199450","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-los-angeles","8":"tag-america","9":"tag-armed-troop","10":"tag-blue-washington","11":"tag-ca","12":"tag-california","13":"tag-crime","14":"tag-jefferson","15":"tag-la","16":"tag-los-angeles","17":"tag-losangeles","18":"tag-national-guard-troop","19":"tag-other-city","20":"tag-pool","21":"tag-president-trump","22":"tag-secret-agent","23":"tag-state","24":"tag-tourist","25":"tag-trump","26":"tag-u-s-capitol","27":"tag-week"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/199450","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=199450"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/199450\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/199451"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=199450"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=199450"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=199450"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}