What Trump is really up to in Washington

You do not need the strongest powers of observation to see that crime is a pretext -- and not the main reason -- for the military occupation of Washington, DC, by federal agents and soldiers from the National Guard.

If the president cared about crime, he would push House Republicans to restore the $1 billion Congress cut from the city's budget, so that Washington could fully staff its Metropolitan Police Department and pay for the services and personnel necessary to keep the city safe.

He might fill vacancies at the US attorney's office in Washington and on the local Superior Court, to help federal and municipal officials bring cases to fruition. Looking beyond Washington, he might also have kept federal agents assigned to actual criminal cases, rather than move them to immigration enforcement or saddle them with investigations of his political enemies. If the president cared about crime, he would not have pardoned the Jan. 6 rioters, many of whom have gone on to commit violent crimes in their communities.

Still, President Donald Trump's obvious indifference to the actual work of preventing criminal victimization has not stopped some professional political observers from defending the occupation of Washington on the grounds that there is crime in the city. "I have no doubt that Trump enjoys targeting Democratic-controlled cities for embarrassment," Michael Powell wrote in The Atlantic, conceding that this deployment is pretextual. But, he added, "I also have little doubt that a mother in Ward 8 might draw comfort from a National Guard soldier standing watch near her child's school."

Ward 8 is a disproportionately low-income area of Washington that covers the southernmost quadrant of the city, where the violent crime rate is significantly higher than it is in other parts of the city. One assumes that there are actual residents of the area you could speak with to understand their view of the situation. There's no reason to ventriloquize an imagined person when there are real ones with thoughts to share.

To this point, my newsroom colleague Clyde McGrady spoke to people in Congress Heights, a neighborhood in Ward 8. "If Trump is genuinely concerned about the safety of D.C. residents," one resident said, "I would see National Guard in my neighborhood. I'm not seeing it, and I don't expect to see it. I don't think Trump is bringing in the National Guard to protect Black babies in Southeast."

You won't find the National Guard in any of the city's high crime areas. The vast majority of soldiers and agents deployed to Washington are stationed in the vicinity of the White House and other high-profile sections of the city. There are soldiers patrolling the National Mall; armored vehicles parked at Union Station; and Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents manning checkpoints on U Street, an area known for its bars, restaurants and nightlife. They're not there for safety, but for show.

It is a truth of this administration, in fact, that much of it is for show. Hardly a day goes by without a new transgression against democratic norms or a fresh assault on the constitutional order. Each represents a serious threat to the American experiment in self-government, and yet each is also highly performative.

The president's use of military force in Los Angeles, for instance, did nothing but give the White House additional footage to use for its social media accounts. The nationwide ICE raids have put thousands of immigrants, many with legal status, in detention centers around the country. But this is a far cry from the "mass deportation now" promised during the presidential campaign. Many of the president's executive orders have been blocked by federal courts, and his tariffs have done little other than begin to raise prices. There's been no manufacturing renaissance, no reinvigoration of the economy, no return to the prepandemic world.

If we turn our attention to the president's foreign policy, we see something similar. The much ballyhooed attack on Iranian nuclear facilities? A tale full of sound and fury, signifying nothing other than a modest setback for the Iranian nuclear program. The president's recent summit with President Vladimir Putin of Russia in Alaska? It appears to be a dud, an exercise in national embarrassment with nothing to show for either the United States or Ukraine.

Even his most dangerous actions -- his plans to investigate his political rivals and turn the force of the national government against them -- seem to fizzle out. It's as if the point is to get the right headline and hope that it intimidates the right targets.

At this moment, several states are sending National Guard units to bolster the president's occupation of the city. This is a dangerous escalation, especially since the president has threatened to deploy troops to other Democratic-led cities. Americans have, throughout their history, been occupiers but rarely have they been occupied. The paradigmatic example, in our past, of the American military occupying American cities is during and after the Civil War, when the Union Army occupied much of the South as something like a conquered territory. White Southerners, at least, understood themselves as a conquered people.

And of course the goal of Union occupation was not to subjugate the South but to start the process of reconstructing and reintegrating the former rebels into the national community. It was to extend the rights of citizenship to every American under the flag and defend those rights in the face of violent resistance from vigilantes and vengeful ex-Confederates.

This occupation has a different purpose and sends a different message. It tells the people of Washington -- and of other, similar cities -- that they're less equal citizens under an elected government than subjects of a capricious ruler. It tells them that their freedom to live their lives free of harassment from masked federal agents is a function of their loyalty to that ruler. And it tells states that they can't expect fair treatment from the White House; reject his demands, and the president will send an occupation force, with support from regime-friendly governors.

It is all for show; most of these troops will spend most of their time around the same tourist-friendly areas where most of the National Guard in Washington has already been sent. But just because it's for show does not mean, to use a term favored by Democrats, that it is a distraction. The president isn't trying to shift your attention as much as he is indulging his grievances and pursuing, however impulsively, his political goals. And at the top of that list, as he's made clear in many different ways, is seizing as much power as he can to rule the United States as a strongman.

The clumsiness, the hollowness, the occasional silliness of the president's actions should not distract you from the reality that even as he's putting on a show, he's also doing everything he can to reach his ultimate aim.