WASHINGTON — Eight hundred National Guard troops deployed across the nation’s capital Monday morning under a presidential emergency declaration that administration officials privately conceded was field-tested in the only major American city whose 712,000 residents have no senator to lodge a complaint.
The executive order, signed Sunday between a brief Truth Social post and a longer Truth Social post, invokes Section 740 of the Home Rule Act to federalize the Metropolitan Police Department and place Guardsmen on the streets of a city that has, by every available metric, less violent crime than the caddie shack at the president’s home golf course.
“It’s a perfect testbed,” explained a senior White House official who requested anonymity to discuss what the official referred to as “phase one.” “Anywhere else, you try this and you’ve got two senators on cable news by lunch. DC, you’ve got Eleanor Holmes Norton, who can give a great speech but cannot vote on anything. Frankly, it’s the ideal jurisdiction.”
According to a planning memo described to reporters, the administration considered Chicago, Baltimore, and Philadelphia before settling on the District. Each was reportedly disqualified for what the memo termed “structural irritants,” including, in Chicago’s case, a sitting governor with subpoena power, a functional state attorney general, and a delegation of senators who answer their phones.
The Pentagon issued rules of engagement Monday morning instructing Guard troops not to engage with civilians, not to make arrests, not to direct traffic, and to remain at their posted locations near tourist landmarks for purposes of being photographed. One private at his post outside Union Station said he had been told the mission was “presence” and that he was now welcome to start performing it.
Mayor Muriel Bowser, who learned of the deployment from a Truth Social post forwarded by a staffer who learns everything from Truth Social posts, held a press conference at which she observed that violent crime in the District was down thirty-five percent year over year and that the federal government’s emergency response was therefore “pegged to a crisis we have actively not been having.”
Asked at a separate press conference whether the DC operation was a template for other cities, the president answered that it absolutely was not, then named four cities, gave each a nickname, and said the Guard would be “looking very hard” at them. Aides clarified afterward that the comments were aspirational, then declined to clarify further, then deployed an additional two hundred troops by sundown.
The Home Rule Act, passed in 1973, was designed to grant District residents a measure of self-governance. As of Monday afternoon, it had been used to remove that self-governance approximately four times faster than it took to enact it.