Armed troops at the Washington Monument? This is not normal

America, your front yard has been militarized. Yet residents and visitors there hardly pay the troops any mind.

It’s the normalization of excessive federal force under President Trump, just seven months into his reign.

America’s Front Yard is what the National Park Service calls the National Mall, the grassy expanse that knits together the neighborhood that’s home to the U.S. Capitol and the iconic monuments to Presidents Washington, Lincoln, Jefferson and Franklin Delano Roosevelt; veterans of World War II, Vietnam and Korea; and Martin Luther King Jr.

For decades I jogged here (one morning literally running into Jimmy Carter, long gone from the White House). I introduced friends and family to the Mall’s delights and the museums that open onto it. I attended festivals, concerts and Fourth of July fireworks displays. On a gorgeous, sunny Labor Day this year, I returned. And for the first time, I saw armed, camo-clad soldiers among the tourists.

As I left the World War II memorial, five soldiers emerged nearby, marching in single-line formation to join about two dozen more beside three vans under trees near the Reflecting Pool. At the pool’s opposite end, nearer the Lincoln Memorial, another dozen soldiers milled. Tourists mostly ignored the shows of force, except for the two park policemen on horseback along separate sides of the Reflecting Pool. Tourists wanted photos with them.

As I approached the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, five more soldiers circled a statue dedicated to women who served in Vietnam. The men studied the sculpted figures and read the inscriptions — just like tourists.

“They’re bored,” a park ranger told me. “They’d rather be home with their families.”

I and most Washingtonians (8 out of 10, according to a mid-August poll for the Washington Post) also would rather have them home with their families, wherever home is. Six states headed by Republican governors, ever-eager to please Trump, have sent hundreds of National Guard troops to supplement those from blue Washington, who, unlike in the states where governors hold sway, are under the president’s direct command.

Heading to a restroom on my way to the Tidal Basin and Jefferson Memorial, I passed three hulking black SUVs. Despite their darkened windows, I could vaguely make out men inside. Only the vehicles’ license plates identified them: “DHS,” Department of Homeland Security, the tip of Trump’s antimigrant spear. Perhaps these secret agents were awaiting a dispatcher’s call to nab another Latino delivery driver or raid another restaurant’s kitchen to drive up the numbers for Trump’s immigration crackdown.

What you see out in the open — 2,200 uniformed soldiers and additional federal agents patrolling the nation’s capital — is bad enough. It’s what you don’t see, or can’t identify, that’s more disturbing in the land of the free. Like masked agents in unmarked cars stopping and searching residents without evident reason, as videos on social media regularly capture.

Either way, Trump’s takeover of the District of Columbia using National Guard troops and federal agents from the DHS, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and from the FBI and other agencies — together with his threats to Chicago, Baltimore and other cities — amount to “creating a national police force with the President as its chief,” as a federal judge proclaimed this week in ruling against troops acting as cops in Los Angeles.

“Why is the National Guard still around?” an exasperated Senior District Judge Charles R. Breyer (brother of retired Supreme Court Justice Stephen G. Breyer) demanded last month during a trial in the L.A. case. “What is the threat today? What was the threat yesterday or two weeks ago that allowed it? I’m trying to see whether there are any limits, any limits to the use of a federal force.”

Those were my questions in Washington as well, during my Labor Day stroll and a drive through downtown and various higher-crime neighborhoods.

That same day, Trump boasted on social media that, three weeks into his policing of the nation’s capital, Washington is “NOW A CRIME FREE ZONE.” Yet he’s vowed to keep boots on the ground beyond a legal 30-day limit next week, which would require Congress’ assent.

The fact is that Washington, like any city, still has crime, though the rate was at a 30-year low before Trump’s executive order Aug. 11 citing a nonexistent “crime emergency,” and it’s fallen more since then, as Democratic Mayor Muriel Bowser has acknowledged. The issue isn’t whether there is crime that needs to be policed. It’s who does the policing. In America, that’s historically been the states and local jurisdictions — unless, as federal law requires, they prove incapable of doing so. Which they haven’t.

If more police is an answer to crime, as Bowser and most mayors of either party would agree, then Trump should quit cutting federal funding — Washington is short a full $1 billion in this fiscal year — and instead do what former President Clinton did amid high crime in the mid-1990s: increase money to states and cities to hire more local cops. That helped in Clinton’s time, if not so much as he liked to claim.

What’s worse is that Trump’s bid to take charge in U.S. cities extends mostly to states led by Democrats, despite high or higher crime in red state cities including Memphis, St. Louis, Indianapolis, Louisville, Jackson and Birmingham. Sending red-state troops to police unfamiliar blue cities can only exacerbate polarization. So does a president who spurs on those troops and agents by denigrating U.S. cities as “unsafe and dirty and disgusting” (Washington), “hell holes” (Chicago and Baltimore) and “terrible” (L.A.).

This is not normal, not in America’s front yard or anywhere else in this nation. Nor will it ultimately be accepted, as Trump takeovers spread and protests expand with them. I fear this is just what the Great Divider wants: an excuse to dispatch more troops.

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