So apparently Washington D.C. is going to become an armed camp now. Donald Trump has taken control of the District's police force, sent a bunch of federal agents (from the F.B.I., D.E.A., etc.) out onto the streets, and has called up the National Guard, who will doubtlessly soon appear in full battle dress. All to solve a problem Trump is lying about. There really couldn't be a better argument for D.C. statehood, really, because if it were an actual state it would have an actual governor who might object to such tactics (to put it mildly).

This is more of what might be called "performative militarization" of the police, which Trump introduced in Los Angeles (again, to solve a problem Trump was lying about). The big difference here is that there were only a couple of buildings in L.A. that were federal property, so we had the spectacle of 4,000 National Guard soldiers and 700 U.S. Marines guarding a couple of buildings. It was preposterous on the face of it. But all of the District of Columbia is federal property, so Trump doesn't have to be so restrained.

The problem -- the one that Trump is lying about -- is street crime. Fox News has been sensationalizing this problem for years now, since virtually all big cities in America are run by Democratic mayors. It's a way to score cheap political points, in other words -- doubly so for cities in blue states with Democratic governors to kick around as well. Fox News hypes inner-city crime in two ways, one general and one specific.

The specific way this is hyped happens during and immediately after protests in the streets turn even the tiniest bit violent. This is immediately equated to: "The city is on fire! They are burning it to the ground!" The video clips of the violence are shown on an endless loop, from as many angles as possible, so that Fox viewers get the impression that this is what is happening within these cities -- all the time, everywhere -- even when it is limited to a couple of downtown blocks on a couple of nights.

The generalized way this is happening is to paint the cities (even without videos of riots to show) as being absolutely besieged by crime. "Crime rates are skyrocketing! Crime is through the roof! The streets are not safe anymore!" are the refrains for this generalized fearmongering.

The reality that contradicts these lies is completely ignored by Fox and other rightwing "news" purveyors. Crime rates everywhere in America hit their highest points during the 1980s and 1990s (while the crack epidemic was raging). Since then, crime is down. Way down, in fact. Crime rates did spike a little bit (nowhere near what the earlier highs had been, though) during the COVID pandemic, as criminals devised ways to make all the COVID restrictions work for them (and also, probably due to all the "cabin fever" of people spending all their time in their own homes). These pandemic-induced crime rates have now come down -- significantly. This includes Washington D.C.

Trump doesn't care. He leans into the rhetoric "Crime rates are through the roof," even when they just aren't. He feels he can lie with abandon, since all his followers watch Fox and the other rightwing networks, therefore they are already primed to believe that any American city is some sort of Mad Max dog-eat-dog post-apocalyptic hellscape. So even though they are not necessary, we get troops on the streets. Maximum militarization, with plenty of shots of them on the evening news. That's what Trump wants, and that's what he'll doubtlessly get.

Then (assumably) at some point, Trump will declare "Mission accomplished!" and pull the troops back out again. This is what happened in Los Angeles, at any rate.

But there's a much more sinister plan in the works as well. Because Trump is also apparently considering setting up a permanent force of National Guard troops to be ready for immediate deployment in any city that has protests Trump doesn't approve of. That way, Trump could do what he's doing to D.C. right now to anywhere he liked, at the drop of a hat. The Washington Post has the story today, after someone leaked the plan to them:

The Trump administration is evaluating plans that would establish a "Domestic Civil Disturbance Quick Reaction Force" composed of hundreds of National Guard troops tasked with rapidly deploying into American cities facing protests or other unrest, according to internal Pentagon documents reviewed by The Washington Post.

The plan calls for 600 troops to be on standby at all times so they can deploy in as little as one hour, the documents say. They would be split into two groups of 300 and stationed at military bases in Alabama and Arizona, with purview of regions east and west of the Mississippi River, respectively.

. . .

The National Guard tested the concept ahead of the 2020 election, putting 600 troops on alert in Arizona and Alabama as the country braced for possible political violence. The test followed months of unrest in cities across the country, prompted by the police murder of George Floyd, that spurred National Guard deployments in numerous locations. Trump, then nearing the end of his first term, sought to employ active-duty combat troops while Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper and other Pentagon officials urged him to rely instead on the Guard, which is trained to address civil disturbances.

This is problematic for all kinds of reasons, the first and foremost being that Trump would show absolutely no restraint in using such a force if it were easily available to him. The article includes some criticism of this plan, the first from "Joseph Nunn, an attorney at the Brennan Center for Justice who specializes in legal issues germane to the U.S. military’s domestic activities."

The strategy is further complicated by the fact that National Guard members from one state cannot operate in another state without permission, [Joseph] Nunn said. He also warned that any quick-reaction force established for civil unrest missions risks lowering the threshold for deploying National Guard troops into American cities.

"When you have this tool waiting at your fingertips, you're going to want to use it," Nunn said. "It actually makes it more likely that you're going to see domestic deployments -- because why else have a task force?"

The proposal represents a major departure in how the National Guard traditionally has been used, said Lindsay P. Cohn, an associate professor of national security affairs at the U.S. Naval War College. While it is not unusual for National Guard units to be deployed for domestic emergencies within their states, including for civil disturbances, this "is really strange because essentially nothing is happening," she said.

"Crime is going down. We don't have major protests or civil disturbances. There is no significant resistance from states" to federal immigration policies, she said. "There is very little evidence anything big is likely to happen soon," said Cohn, who stressed she was speaking in her personal capacity and not reflecting her employer's views.

Doubts were also raised within the leaked document itself. One big worry was that it would "significantly impact volunteerism," meaning fewer people would sign up for the National Guard if they saw it being used in such a fashion. There was a list of bullet points of other concerns as well:

• Reduced Availability for Other Missions: State-Level Readiness
• Strain on Personnel and Equipment
• Training Disruptions: Erosion of Core Capabilities
• Budgetary and Logistical Strains
• Public and Political Impact

These all add up to: "It's a bad idea, in general, for all sorts of reasons." But that's not going to be enough to stop Trump from agreeing to the plan, obviously. Trump is already threatening to take over the police of many other American cities that he doesn't like (all with Democratic mayors, of course). While the District of Columbia is a federal enclave (which permits Trump to do things like take control of the police and National Guard), other cities are not. But again, that's probably not enough to stop Trump from trying. He obviously likes seeing the images of soldiers patrolling American cities, so he'll probably want to expand his experiment in performative militarization of police forces to a lot of other places.

-- Chris Weigant

Follow Chris on Twitter: @ChrisWeigant