The move suggests Donald Trump is doubling down on his claimed crime emergency in the nation’s capital after the election.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has authorized the National Guard to begin using boats, several dozen marked police cars, humvees and light medium tactical vehicles in the nation’s capital — an escalation of the troops’ presence that could further blur the line between their military and law enforcement role.
It’s not clear why the Trump administration is making the move now. The Oct. 29 memo obtained by POLITICO detailing the expansion doesn’t provide any further details beyond doubling down on Trump’s plan to use the National Guard to crack down on what he’s called a “crime emergency”in the nation’s capital.
The beefed-up presence, which will be in place through the end of the year, would see members of the National Guard driving vehicles typically used by U.S. troops on battlefields like Iraq and Afghanistan on city streets to support law enforcement officers making drug busts, though they are not allowed to pursue suspects or make arrests.
One of my guesses is that claims of cheating would result in investigations that might actually find cheating–their cheating. They just underestimated the margins they’d have to cheat by to win, but might have still left some evidence.
Another guess is they saw how baseless claims did more to hurt their position than to help last time (tbh I suspect they only made the claims to try to put their opponents in a corner where they couldn’t accuse them back the next time without looking like they are just doing the same thing to all the people only half paying attention). They might be looking for cases where such a claim might be plausible instead of just making noise and sacrificing some lawyers’ reputations.
Guess 3 is that winning the elections was just plan A but they are ok going with plan B, and increasing the national guard presence in Washington is a part of that. It might be prudent for his political opponents to not all be in DC at once, or try spending time with the troops there to form bonds and/or guage their sentiments.
Guess 4 is that they were surprised at the sheer amount of opposition that showed up to vote and might have lost confidence they can get away with pushing it too much right now, especially with how things are escalating in France and they can see that the usual big block of “if there’s any bad behaviour at all during a protest, that cancels out whatever position they have” is eroding.