Trump Has Given the National Guard Some Absurd Tasks in DC—but Don't Be Too Relied
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Given all the opportunities for undistilled panic in Donald Trump's America, one wants to sigh in relief at the revelation that the National Guard members feel in to police a militarized DC this past month have settled into their new life as glorified—if expensive — groundskeepers . While they were brought in theoretically to beat back the “crime emergency” in Washington, many of the 2,000-plus troops have been deployed to attack various “beautification” projects that range from garbage collection to raking leaves to mulching cherry trees .
It's tempting to chuckle. When Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, a former National Guard officer and Fox News host, brought up last December about the plan to refocus the “warfighting ethos” of the Pentagon on “lethality, lethality, lethality,” he probably wasn't thinking about light weeding. But don't let the orange reflective vests fool you—the fact that troops trained to respond to national emergencies are being insulted in the president's backyard isn't a signal that we've escaped an authoritarian threat. Indeed, the fact that the president and his defense secretary can insult the troops is part and parcel of a long tradition of disparagement and disrespect for armed service members—and this is all just another way of displaying military might in the nation's capital, without regard for mission, training, expense, or waste.
But in an interview this week on the Amicus podcast , Liza Goitein, senior director of the nonpartisan Brennan Center's Liberty and National Security Program, noted that there is nothing trivial or benign about deploying troops to do beautification work. “Yeah, it seems trivial to have members of the National Guard, you know, sodding the National Mall. But you also have to look at this in context,” she said. “Look at the countries in which leaders spend trillions of dollars turning their capitals into a showplace and gilding the capital. These countries all have something in common, right? And it's not that they're thriving democracies.”
When Donald Trump does things that chime in the key of “authoritarian,” it's always tempting to laugh at his clunky execution. The July military parade ; the photo banner of his glowing face plastered on DC buildings as featured in the Wall Street Journal this week ; the entire White House treated to a golden sheep dip— this is the dystopian movie iconography that signals to American that Trump (a poor person's idea of a rich person ) is actually just a petty tin-pot dictator's idea of a real dictator. But as Goitein points out, widespread beautification projects can be a hallmark of authoritarian power consolidation . Targeting the homeless —as law enforcement has been tasked with doing in DC this month —is a part of the same project. One of Trump's first executive orders signed back in January focused on “Promoting Beautiful Federal Civic Architecture,” demanding that federal public buildings “respect regional, traditional, and classical architectural heritage in order to uplift and beautify public spaces and ennoble the United States and our system of self-government.” This is not about clean streets or less graffiti, so much as it is an enforced cultural aesthetic of classical (white) Americanism.
But targeting the built spaces of Washington for the National Guard to serve is also part and parcel of the old Elon Musk bait-and-switch, in which Congress denied funding to DC , then complained the city was a crime-ridden “hellhole,” in Trump's telling, and then sent in the guards to repair it. As the Washington Post explained the need for military-grade mulching:
Typically, custodial work like this falls to the National Park Service, which was already facing staffing shortfalls when the Trump administration this spring directed additional cuts as it gutted the federal workforce. The service used to have 200 people assigned to maintain thousands of acres of trees and gardens in DC, and now there are 20, a Park Service official told The Post.
This is breaking a city to fix a city, the only play MAGA knows to centralize and privatize power. And we should be perfectly clear that the guard has been permitted to use force. In other words, all the yard work jokes serve to distract and deflect from the fact that the Pentagon has authorized those participating in the deployment to carry weapons . Claims that the streets are safe again as the guards feed the squirrels afford a certain sense of relief around the district. Thank heavens those leaves are being raked, and never mind that it also allows for normalizing the ethos of gun-toting troops at Union Station and Metro stops. Like the chandelier in the bathroom at Mar-a-Lago , or the threat to annex Canada , using the National Guard to commit both acts of yard work and threats of violence is vintage Trump, comedy that plays as tragedy and sheathed violence that reads like the Keystone Cops.
Those cheesy banners that feature Trump's face, and the Peter Sellers military parade, and now the flirtation with armed soldiers in the streets—it is all the stuff of high and low, of pastiche and pedestrian, of potential threat and offers of civil service. This is not a reason to quietly accept armed guardsmen from Louisiana and Mississippi on the streets and subways of DC as the new normal. Nor is it a reason to accept feints at “beautification” from a Trump administration that believes there is nothing more beautiful than tanks on city streets. The newly militarized national capitol is about performing control: control over members of the guard who would rather be home working and training for real disasters; control over the streets of the district; control over how the district presents itself to the country and the world. It is terrifying and silly at the same time, by design. And the silliness of beautification is as much a threat of violence as the armed troops.
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