Travelers arriving at Washington’s Union Station can expect to walk upon the main hall’s white marble floors, past the 46 towering Legionnaire statues perched high above them and outside into the open air, where the U.S. Capitol dome stands glinting in the distance.
These days, though, you can expect additional elements of the experience: a military armored vehicle, camouflaged U.S. National Guard members and perhaps some military-issued firearms.
The vibe in parts of Washington this August is decidedly peacetime occupation, and, judging by the president’s recent comments, it may be coming to a city near you.
In recent days President Trump has floated sending troops into Chicago, Baltimore and other cities overseen by people who aren’t members of his political party. To ensure forces can be rapidly mobilized, he issued an executive order on Monday that appears to call for the creation of specially trained National Guard units in Washington and all 50 states to ensure “public safety and order whenever the circumstances necessitate.”
That’s troubling. Mr. Trump’s threats and actions involving the use of National Guard forces inside Democrat-led states already have little precedent. And yet there’s been no unified opposition to the worrying national campaign he’s threatening to escalate.
Many Democrats have criticized the moves, or potential ones. Republicans, who have long denounced federal overreach, have largely stood by and applauded the president’s crackdown. Active and retired senior U.S. military leaders, who have written several libraries’ worth of volumes about the need for a nonpoliticized military, have essentially remained silent.
It began in June, when Mr. Trump sent nearly 5,000 National Guard members and Marines to Los Angeles after protests broke out over his immigration policies. In August, Mr. Trump announced a public safety emergency in Washington, deploying troops into the streets while simultaneously placing the Metropolitan Police Department under federal control. Now we’re seeing that the situation in Washington is intensifying.
Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary, authorized Guard members last week to carry weapons in Washington without issuing a much in the way of public explanation or justification. A total of more than 2,200 Guard troops were deployed in the city as of Sunday, including many from Republican-led states, including Louisiana, Mississippi, Ohio, South Carolina, Tennessee and West Virginia. And while sending forces outside states is not problematic on its own, the situation in Washington is entirely different from how this arrangement typically works.
Usually, governors will send their states’ National Guard units into a neighboring or nearby state that’s encountering an emergency — often a mass casualty hurricane, wildfire or other natural disaster — when local forces are overwhelmed.
So should Americans expect to live under these sorts of “emergencies” in perpetuity?
On Monday, Mr. Trump said he was considering deploying U.S. military forces in Chicago. “We go in, we will solve Chicago in one week,” he said. He then hedged a bit on how he would proceed: “I think until I get that request from that guy, I’m not going to do anything about it,” he said, referring to the state’s governor, JB Pritzker.
At a news conference in downtown Chicago, Mr. Pritzker responded by saying that his state would work to legally block any Trump-imposed military deployment. “We will see the Trump administration in court,” he said.
Over the weekend, Mr. Trump posted on social media that he could send in the “troops” to Baltimore to deal with crime after Wes Moore, the Maryland governor, invited him to conduct a public safety walk through the city while discussing “strategies for effective public safety policy.”
Mr. Trump routinely attempts to justify his crackdown with claims of rampant crime and violence, but in places where there have been reported declines in homicides, for instance. Even if the crime trajectories were rising, Mr. Trump’s explanation that service members are necessary to help federal agents confront crime is peculiar. The military cannot act independently in a domestic law enforcement role because of the Posse Comitatus Act, which has generally prohibited them from doing so.
An argument can be made about the deterrent effect. The week of Aug. 12, when Mr. Trump first deployed troops in Washington, violent crime did decline by about 17 percent, according to the most recent public data.
While it’s good to see crime go down, those percentage points are coming at a high price if it takes patrols of uniformed service members on American streets to get there. It’s the sort of trade-off that would garner Benjamin Franklin’s full attention.
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W.J. Hennigan writes about national security, foreign policy and conflict for the Opinion section.
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