Army Maneuvers
Washington D.C. is a pretty big city, with many of the amenities and some of the deficits. I’ve probably visited ten times so far, and our daughter worked there for a couple of years. It’s a spectacular place for museums and theater, and Jewish community life is highly developed. I would put it on par with Boston or Chicago. More experienced travelers will have their own opinions.
I’ve also found it safe and secure. Our daughter’s first job in education was at Jefferson Middle School in the general vicinity of the Hirshhorn Museum. Like all schools in the Teach for America network, it was high poverty/low performance in a unlovely neighborhood. But that doesn’t mean it was a dangerous neighborhood. My general impression was that our daughter was safe, or as safe as she would be in any big city, where people cross borders between different worlds. That is part of the pleasure of not living at Mar-a-Lago. You actually get to sample urban diversity.
So what is our would-be tyrant talking about? Trump claims that Washington is in full-blown chaos, with gangs of “maniacs” roaming the streets. Psychopaths and rapists have taken over the city, and swarms of homeless people have fouled the public spaces. His language is a slurry of near obscenities which foreground his traditional litany of obsessions: order, cleanliness, contamination, and sexual violence. The irony here is flagrant and stunning. A disorderly lowlife given over to sexual assault continues to lecture the country on predatory rapists. Homeless people, in his mind, pose no less of a threat.
Apart from the irony, there is the matter of facts. Violence has declined in Washington D.C. by double digits in every major category. After an unusual spike in 2023, it’s now at its second lowest level since 1966. It is not a cesspool or a lawless snake pit, but a metropolitan community that has taken its well-being in hand. Local officials have made this point while balancing on the knife-edge of Trump’s hostility. They are justifiably proud of the progress they’ve made, but they are working hard to avoid antagonizing the Sauron in the White House.
Yet despite these efforts, Sauron refuses to be placated. He has called up hundreds of National Guardsmen who will begin patrolling the streets this week. No matter that they have other responsibilities and their re-deployment to Pennsylvania Avenue will interfere with these portfolios. Trump has also promised further action, including the use of the Army to do the work of beat cops. All of this is supposedly justified by nearly never-used laws about public emergencies. There is a universal consensus that there is no emergency.
But that is not enough to satisfy this president, for whom “my generals” are personal playthings. The idea here, as with all authoritarians, is an intimidating show of force, the militarization of law enforcement in the civilian sphere, and the re-education of the populace on the terms of governance. Trump will use any excuse to send in the troops as a way of testing what American citizens will tolerate. Think of the National Guard in Washington as our own version of Kristallnacht: a way of determining whether we will resist or capitulate. So far, we seem to be doing little of the first, and a whole lot of accepting whatever Sauron deals out.