President Donald Trump’s federal takeover of Washington, D.C.’s law enforcement responsibilities has been met with both criticism and confusion, considering the administration’s reasoning. It is now being reported that the National Guard troops dispatched to the Nation’s Capital to stamp out crime are actually doing lawn maintenance and other activities unrelated to the reason they were called up.
Several stories this week have pointed to the National Guard’s time in D.C., including the morale of the troop as they largely have been standing around as life goes on, largely crime-free in the city. Furthermore, the troops have been positioned in areas such as the Georgetown neighborhood, a shopping district not known for violence.
To fill up the time, the troops have been ordered to help out with some lawn maintenance around federal buildings in the city, which doesn’t seem to be part of the job description for trained soldiers.
“As part of Donald Trump’s military deployment to address Washington DC’s so-called ‘crime emergency’, [National Guard] troops are being tasked with various groundskeeping duties around the United States capital,” writes The Guardian‘s Dave Schilling. “These duties include spreading mulch around cherry trees, picking up trash and general maintenance of public spaces. The president must have been too embarrassed to get Four Seasons Total Landscaping involved again, so he got the military to do it instead.”
CNN reports, “We haven’t gotten critically low on morale, but we’re falling fast,” said one soldier who, like others quoted in this story, spoke to CNN on the condition of anonymity because they’re not authorized to speak to the media and feared reprisal.”
USA Today added their perspective with, “Under the title ‘Joint Task Force Beautification,’ soldiers have scrubbed more than 3.2 miles of roadways, collected more than 677 bags of trash, and helped the National Park Service to dispose of five truckloads of plant waste since Trump first mobilized soldiers to Washington, according to a Sept. 2 update from Maj. Micah Maxwell, a National Guard spokesperson.”
Some 2,300 National Guard troops are in Washington at the moment, and Trump is floating the idea of sending troops to other states, curiously focusing on cities with large Black populations or Democratic Party leadership.
Not exactly the best use of time, but what do we know?
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Photo: Getty
