Armed troops at Washington Monument? This is not normal

America, your front yard has been militarised. Yet residents and visitors there hardly pay the troops any mind. It’s the normalisation of excessive federal force under President Donald 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 US 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.

Stephen G. Breyer

“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 LA 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.”