Trump’s Troop Deployment for Policing Resurrects Tactics from the King’s Era”

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The United States crept closer to becoming a full-blown police state yesterday when President Donald Trump made good on a promise to further militarize the nation’s capital. Trump threatens to employ similar tactics in cities across the country as the Pentagon evaluates plans for a “Domestic Civil Disturbance Quick Reaction Force” composed of hundreds of National Guard troops poised to emerge into American cities.

The power grab in the District of Columbia, which bypassed the city’s elected leaders, follows deployments of federal troops from coast to coast, surges of masked federal agents around the United States, and consistent tyrannical use of executive authority in ways with little precedent in modern U.S. history.

“Our capital city has been overtaken by violent gangs and bloodthirsty criminals,” Trump said at a White House news conference on Monday, painting the city as a hellscape filled with “drugged out maniacs” and “caravans of mass youth” who “rampage through city streets” day and night. “I’m deploying the National Guard to help reestablish law, order and public safety in Washington, D.C.,” he declared.

As of Monday afternoon, Guard members had yet to be deployed. “They’ve got to muster in. They’ve got to do a little brief training and processing, and then they’re going to move out. But we do expect this to happen pretty rapidly,” an Army spokesperson told The Intercept. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said Monday that the Guard would be “flowing into the streets of Washington in the coming week.”

Justice Department figures show violent crime in the nation’s capital is at a 30-year low.

“If we look at both practically the way the Trump administration is using the military around the country and also formally, in what they are asserting about their authority — the ability to use the military anywhere, anytime, for any purpose — it’s absolutely unprecedented,” said Joseph Nunn, an attorney with the Brennan Center for Justice’s liberty and national security program who focuses on the domestic role of the U.S. military.

“The last person to assert that sort of boundless authority to deploy the military domestically and use it for law enforcement in this country was King George,” he said, referencing King George III who lost the American Revolution.

“President Trump’s ever-expanding use of the military for domestic matters is beyond alarming,” Sen. Jack Reed of Rhode Island, the top Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, said in a statement criticizing the deployment. “Our military is trained to defend the nation from external threats and assist communities during disasters or emergencies, not to conduct day-to-day domestic policing. “This deployment is a serious misuse of the National Guard’s time and talent.”

Approximately 800 National Guard soldiers were activated as part of the “D.C. Safe and Beautiful Task Force,” with about 100 to 200 of them supporting law enforcement at any given time, according to a statement provided to The Intercept by the Army. “Hey, that’s a real thing, man. I double-checked,” the Army spokesperson told The Intercept when asked about the name of the task force. “I was like, ‘That can’t be real.’ But yeah. It’s real.”

The Army said that the National Guard forces operating in the capital would perform “an array of tasks from administrative, logistics and physical presence in support of law enforcement.”

D.C. Major Muriel Bowser said she did not believe it was legal “to use the American military against American citizens on American soil” at a press conference on Monday evening.

The White House did not respond to a request for comment regarding Bowser’s remarks.