The images are bizarre yet familiar. Along Pennsylvania Avenue, troops stand watch in full battle dress. Armoured vehicles idle before monuments built to honour liberty. This is Washington, not Kyiv, Caracas or Moscow. It is not the aftermath of a terrorist attack or invasion but rather a president who has discovered that the spectacle of force is itself power.
Advertisement
On the orders of US President Donald Trump, National Guard units have been deployed across the US capital. More striking still, he has taken the extraordinary step of federalising the District of Columbia police under a presidential emergency declaration in an unprecedented assertion of executive authority in the city. Washington Mayor Muriel Bowser has acquiesced, albeit under protest.
Trump’s rationale, as ever, is vague. He has claimed “the murder rate in Washington today is higher than that of Bogota, Colombia, Mexico City or some of the places that you hear about as being the worst places on Earth.” However, this has never been about crime; otherwise, Republican strongholds with higher crime rates would have seen similar actions.
The timing of these deployments is not an accident, either. Trump still faces pressure over the Jeffrey Epstein scandal. The economy remains shaky, inflation is stubborn and job growth is anaemic. What better way for Trump to change the subject than to conjure a menace in the streets and present himself as a saviour?
However, this is not just a distraction. It is conditioning that started when he deployed the National Guard and the US Marines to Los Angeles, actions that US District Judge Charles Breyer ruled illegal on Tuesday, warning that Trump and Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth appeared intent on “creating a national police force with the president as its chief”. This ruling notwithstanding, Trump has been conducting a rehearsal for autocracy by normalising soldiers and federalised police on American streets.
Advertisement
The United States has always harboured a deep suspicion of standing armies. The country’s founders enshrined this in the US Constitution, with the Third Amendment that prohibits the quartering of troops in homes a permanent scar from British colonial overreach. Civilian policing, decentralised and local, was meant to be the American answer.