Is Trump’s military deployment of DC of Trump the start of a civil war in slow motion?

What exactly Donald Trump does with the 800 soldiers of the National Guard, as well as ice officers, officials of the Authority of drugs and American Park police, he deployed to patrol the streets of Washington, DC, almost two weeks ago? The Attorney General Pam Bondi boasts of arresting 68 people on Saturday evening, but the Metropolitan Police Department has an average of 68 arrests per day. In less than two weeks, said Bondi, they stopped 300 people for trafficking in traffic infringements. But on the basis of its daily average, the MPD would have carried out nearly 900 arrests by itself during the same period.

Although Trump has justified his measures by citing the allegedly degenerated crime rate of the district – a crime of all kinds is actually considerably decreasing in Washington – for better or for worse, they do not take care of any of the high crime areas in the district, residents complain. I say it could be better, because if they descended Anacostia or other too police areas, they would probably criminalize and brutalized without discrimination. Remember that these troops were not trained in the urban police (not that such a training always prevents brutal behavior). But it is also quite bizarre, if Trump’s real goal was the reduction in crime. But this is not the case. It is intimidation.

Trump’s troops mainly presented themselves in tourist places and animated neighborhoods, in what is largely a farce show. They write people to drink the public, smoke grass and broken back lights. They managed to reduce business in bars and restaurants by almost a third compared to the same period in August 2024. So much for pro-business GOP.

Even if it has so far been a waste of federal resources, GOP leaders help to intensify tensions at DC. During the weekend, the Republican governors of South Carolina, Virginia-Western and Ohio promised to send up to 750 of their own national guard soldiers to the national capital. Some governors of the red state briefly deployed troops from the National Guard, at the request of Trump, during the demonstrations of George Floyd on a large scale but peaceful in June 2020, but the news mainly stolen under the radar. This time, Trump wants the headlines on the invasion of the red state. (As I write, the Mississippi announced that it would send 200 soldiers. Good Ole Miss.) Military sources also told NBC that certain guard troops, which are currently not wearing weapons, could now be armed.

More than one observer on social networks noted somewhat frightening irony that it is the secession and attack of Southern Carolina against the Federal Forces at Fort Sumter of Charleston who began civil war. We must also remember that it was the troops of the Ohio National Guard who shot peaceful students at Kent State University in 1970, killing four.

I think a lot about the conception of the writer Jeff Sharlet of a “slow civil war” hasted the United States, especially since the January 6 insurrection. On Bluesky, he wrote: “I will say that the armed troops of the red states descending on a blue city are only a few centimeters – or perhaps an exchange of shots – a program of the opening stages of a civil war.”

Anjali Dayal, international professor in politics at Fordham University, challenged the post of Sharlet – at least the way she read it: “I respect Jeff’s work, but we have to pay attention to what we plan and how inevitable we do it. We are not close to a civil war, but I am worried about us close to civil society and civil society without tolerance.

In an email for me, Sharlet clearly indicated that he essentially agreed with Dayal. The civil war is not “an inevitability,” he said, adding: “I agree that” the mass victim event “is the next big risk, and that the gray and the blue ” is not a risk, but I would say that the simmer that we see, our lead years, is a slow American war in the 21st century.”

It is clear: the addition of 1,000 troops from the National Guard to the red state to the 800 already at DC, all not trained in the urban police, raises the chances of a “mass victim event”, at least. We used to say that people who described Trumpism as “fascism” exaggerated, although even the consumer media regularly use the word F. at the moment, we should be wary of “civil war”. But these movements on the capital of Trump and his friends in the red state seem to be an acceleration of the danger for democracy, intended to familiarize the Americans with the sight of the federal forces patrolling American blue cities, as Trump has already said.

Add the dangers posed by right -winged civilians and militias, as well as the versions of almost 1,600 1,600 crimes released from prison or Trump on the day of the inauguration, and he has the impression that we have turned to the escalation of violence.