Is Trump’s DC Military Deployment the Start of a Slow-Motion Civil War?

What exactly is Donald Trump doing with the 800 National Guard soldiers, plus ICE officers, Drug Enforcement Authority officials, and US Park Police he deployed to patrol the streets of Washington, DC, almost two weeks ago? Attorney General Pam Bondi boasts they arrested 68 people on Saturday night, but the Metropolitan Police Department averages 68 arrests a day. In less than two weeks, Bondi claims, they’ve arrested 300 individuals on charges ranging from drug dealing to traffic violations. But based on its daily average, the MPD would have made almost 900 arrests on its own in the same period.

Although Trump justified his moves by citing the District’s allegedly escalating crime rate—crime of every sort is actually down dramatically in Washington—for better or worse, they’re not policing any of the District’s high-crime areas, residents complain. I say it might be better, because if they descended on Anacostia or other overly policed areas, they likely would criminalize and brutalize indiscriminately. Remember, these troops haven’t been trained in urban policing (not that such training always prevents brutal behavior). But it’s also quite bizarre, if Trump’s genuine focus was crime reduction. But it’s not. It’s intimidation.

Trump’s troops have mostly shown up in touristy places and lively neighborhoods, in what is largely a show of farce. They’re writing people up for public drinking, smoking weed, and broken tail lights. They’ve succeeded in reducing business at bars and restaurants by almost a third compared to the same period in August 2024. So much for the pro-business GOP.

Even though it’s so far been a waste of federal resources, GOP leaders are helping to escalate tensions in DC. Over the weekend, the Republican governors of South Carolina, West Virginia, and Ohio promised to send up to 750 of their own National Guard soldiers to the nation’s capital. Some red state governors briefly deployed National Guard troops, at Trump’s behest, during large-scale but peaceful George Floyd protests in June of 2020, but the news mostly flew under the radar. This time, Trump wants headlines about the red state invasion. (As I write, Mississippi announced it would send 200 soldiers. Good Ole Miss.) Military sources also told NBC that some Guard troops, who currently don’t carry weapons, might now be armed.

More than one observer on social media noted the somewhat chilling irony that it was South Carolina’s secession and attack on federal forces at Charleston’s Fort Sumter that started the Civil War. We should also remember that it was Ohio National Guard troops who fired on peaceful students at Kent State University in 1970, killing four. 

I think a lot about writer Jeff Sharlet’s conception of a “slow civil war” unraveling the US, especially since the Jan. 6 insurrection. On Bluesky he wrote: “I’m gonna say armed troops from red states descending on a blue city is just a few inches—or maybe one exchange of gunfire—short of a civil war’s opening stages.”

Anjali Dayal, an international politics professor at Fordham University, took issue with Sharlet’s post—at least the way she read it: “I respect Jeff’s work but we should be careful about what we forecast & how inevitable we make it seem. We are not close to a civil war, but I worry we are perilously close to a mass casualty event because of the undisciplined nature of irregular security forces & an extremely armed civil society.”

In an email to me, Sharlet made clear he essentially agrees with Dayal. Civil war is not “an inevitability,” he said, adding “I agree that ‘mass casualty event’ is the next big risk, and that the ‘grey and the blue’ is not a risk, but I’d argue that the simmer that we see, our years of lead, are a 21st century American slow civil war.”

It’s clear: the addition of 1,000 Red State National Guard troops to the 800 already in DC, all untrained in urban policing, raises the odds of a “mass casualty event,” at minimum. We used to say people who described Trumpism as “fascism” were exaggerating, though now even mainstream media regularly uses the F-word. Right now, we should be wary of talking blithely about “civil war.” But these moves on the capital by Trump and his red-state cronies seem like an acceleration of danger to democracy, meant to familiarize Americans with the site of federal forces patrolling blue American cities, as Trump has already said is coming.

Add the dangers posed by armed right-wing civilians and militias, along with the nearly 1,600 Jan. 6 felons freed from jail or prison by Trump on Inauguration Day, and it feels like we’ve veered toward escalating violence.