Trump Has Turned the National Guard Into Mall Cops. Cost? $1 Million a Day.

Members of the South Carolina National Guard gather at the Washington Monument, Sunday, Aug. 31, 2025.Jon Cherry/AP Photo

When I went out to fetch lunch last Wednesday, three Louisiana Guard members were lounging outside the Mother Jones building, enjoying the perfect weather and watching dialysis patients spilling out of Metro access vans. The soldiers wore handcuffs on their belts and handguns strapped to their thighs, unaware that they were protecting some enemies of the people^[2] inside.

Later that afternoon, even more soldiers flocked to our building after a fire truck and ambulance pulled up to deal with a medical emergency. The Guard members stomped around, barking into walkie-talkies, but they contributed little more to the operation than the reporter and other rubberneckers on the sidewalk. They were back on Friday, clustered near the parking garage like smokers sheltering from the wind.

President Donald Trump has deployed more than 2,200 of these National Guard members to DC to execute his “historic action to rescue our nation’s capital from crime, bloodshed, bedlam and squalor and worse,” as he described it during an August 11 news conference^[3]. “This is liberation day in DC, and we’re going to take our capital back.”

City officials protested that crime in DC had fallen to near-historic lows. DC Mayor Muriel Bowser called the presence of the military in the city “un-American.”

Nonetheless, armored vehicles rolled in the next day and lined up in front of the Washington Monument. The initial optics of an occupied city were terrifying, the fever dream of a budding authoritarian. Several weeks later, however, the military “liberation” of DC looks a lot different from the war on crime that Trump had promised^[6] to bring to our city.

National Guard members here aren’t actually doing much. Groups of bored soldiers seem to wander aimlessly around the city like tourists, taking selfies at national monuments and enjoying our varied dining offerings. On Tuesday, when I was walking my dog, I ran into a few Guard members patrolling my local coffee shop. The regulars were chatting them up, while expressing polite outrage at the militarization of this quiet, historic, gayborhood.

The soldiers were from Louisiana, a state whose capital city boasts a crime rate twice as high as DC’s. In their civilian lives, one was a cop, another an “assistant chiropractor.” They seemed oblivious to the pressing local crime wave: cyclists in the nearby bike lane blowing through the stop light, a scourge endlessly decried by the café denizens.

The presence of all these soldiers in my orbit this week left me pondering something that had nagged me since they first arrived in DC last month: If I got mugged in broad daylight, what could those National Guard members really, legally, do?

I put the question to John Dehn, a West Point grad and professor in the national security and civil rights program at Loyola University Chicago School of Law. The answer, he explained, depends on the mission and “the specific operational plans that have been put in place.” These guidelines, he said, are spelled out in the “Rules for the Use of Force,” which Guard members are supposed to carry with them. Two weeks ago, a HuffPost reporter got one from a local Guard member and posted it online^[7].

The RUF and Rules of Conduct state that “This is a civilian SUPPORT mission.” The document emphasizes that the National Guard can’t arrest people. Nor can soldiers investigate anything or conduct searches and seizures, hostage negotiations, or extract a suspect from a barricade. Trump made a big deal recently about allowing Guard members to carry weapons, but the RUF says they are strictly prohibited from using those weapons except for self-defense and defense of others. No pulling a gun on a fleeing suspect. (“Warning shots are NOT authorized.”)

A JTF-DC spokesperson later confirmed that the National Guard “will not be conducting law enforcement.” However, the Department of Justice recently deputiz^[10]ed many Guard members as US Marshals. The DC Attorney General has argued in a lawsuit^[11] that deputizing them does, in fact, empower National Guard members to make searches, seizures, and arrests, and as such, violates the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act, which bans the military from participating in domestic law enforcement.

Given all the mixed messages, the Guard members I spoke with appeared somewhat confused about what the rules of engagement were. But they seemed to agree that if they witness a crime, they are mainly supposed to detain a suspect if possible, call for help, and wait for real cops to show up. “If there’s any concerns, we notify Metropolitan Police Department or the right personnel to make sure that the situation is taken care of,” US Air Force Maj. Jay Green, a chaplain with the 113th Wing, District of Columbia Air National Guard, explained in one recent Defense Department website^[12] posting.

That seems to be what they’re doing in DC. The Washington Post recently sent out a team of reporters to observe troops during rush hour in the Metro system. Fanning out across various stations, Post reporters witnessed^[13] National Guard members standing around watching Metro police arrest a woman with an outstanding warrant. They did not assist.

In another station, a Metro rider mistakenly assumed the soldiers could help and told them someone was selling drugs on a stalled train. What did they do with that information? “One of the Guard members passed the details about the alleged drug dealer to Metro police,” the Post reported.

The Defense Department has published several puff pieces on military websites touting the National Guard’s work in DC. But even those official accounts indicate that when Guard members witness a crime, their main job is to call for help and wait for the local cops to arrive. Last month, for instance, Joint Task Force-DC proudly announced in an online release^[14] that two Guard members had “alerted local law enforcement to a potentially life-threatening situation involving a man brandishing a knife and threatening another man at the Waterfront Metro Station.”

“We showed our presence and then made sure that citizens around that area were safe,” said US Army Capt. Giho Yang, with the District of Columbia Army National Guard. “To do that, we had to partner up and communicate with the law enforcement officers that were nearby, making sure that we had eyes and ears on the situation to keep everyone safe.”

They didn’t mention whether any ordinary citizens also communicated with the nearby law enforcement officers or called 911, as they are wont to do when they see someone brandishing a knife in a subway station.

It’s probably a good thing that the National Guard isn’t doing more to fight crime in DC. They’re not trained for domestic law enforcement. Besides, DC has seen plenty of enhanced federal policing since Trump declared his crime emergency. Most of the action is driven by the city’s multitude of federal law enforcement agencies, such as the US Park Police, plus the stepped-up presence of ICE and Border Patrol. They’re the ones kidnapping and beating up DoorDash drivers, chasing drivers with fake tags and causing car crashes, and arresting people for drinking in public.^[15][16][17]

But using soldiers as props in Trump’s fake crime emergency seems insulting to people serving the country honorably. Indeed, deployed to a city whose crime rate was already plummeting, the National Guard has been filling the time by picking up trash and spreading mulch in federal parks. Social media wags have dubbed them “National Gardeners.” (“Fighting crime one weed at a time,” the local joke^[18] goes.)

National Guard doing landscaping right now in McPherson Square.
byu/sillychillly ineconomy^[19][20][21]

As humiliating as this might be for the troops, they are providing DC with a useful service. Some 200 US Park Service employees once helped maintain the city’s parks and gardens. But soon after taking office this year, Trump got rid of all but 20^[22] of them, leaving the city’s lovely green spaces seriously neglected. Of course, at the cost of $1 million a day^[23], the military troops make very expensive landscapers.

The pointlessness of sending the National Guard to pretend to fight crime in DC isn’t deterring Trump from planning to repeat the operation in other cities, even though a federal judge just ruled that it’s blatantly illegal. Trump appears intent on “creating a national police force with the President as its chief,” US District Judge Charles Breyer warned in a September 2 decision^[24], finding that Trump’s use of the military in LA earlier this summer violated the Posse Comitatus Act.

Because the District of Columbia is not a state, Trump has had more leeway in deploying the National Guard here. Nonetheless, on Thursday, the city sued^[25] the administration, arguing that the National Guard deployment in DC is illegal and runs “roughshod over a fundamental tenet of American democracy—that the military should not be involved in domestic law enforcement.”

Trump has claimed that DC “is very safe right now” since he sent in the troops, and that crime has plummeted. Even if that’s true, and it’s not clear that it is^[26], the ceasefire is likely to be short-lived.

“You can have a massive police presence that you put in the communities,” Elliott Currie, professor of criminology at the University of California, Irvine, told me recently^[27]. “They can really show some impressive optics when they do this… But history tells us you can never sustain this for very long.”

The DC National Guard recently announced^[28] that its deployment to the city will be extended through December. But eventually, the local criminal class seems likely to realize that the soldiers are no more of a threat to their activity than CVS security guards. And when that happens, Trump’s vaunted crime reduction may prove as ephemeral as his plan to end the war in Ukraine.