Donald Trump's D.C. Takeover Has National Guard Soldiers... Picking Up Trash?

Yet the president seems to be itching to send troops supposedly to help crack down on crime in other American cities.

We’re in our third week of President Donald Trump’s takeover of public safety in the nation’s capital, and here’s what it’s like: mostly the same.

Since there was no “crime emergency” to start with — the usual bad crime, yes, but no crescendoing crisis — things are not much different.

That’s why the National Guard soldiers started picking up trash over the weekend. Perhaps they’re deterring crime by their mere presence, but they’re not actively assisting with police work since they’re not supposed to under federal law.

Federal law enforcement officers have been busy, though, tagging along with D.C. police on traffic stops and stuffing immigrants into unmarked vehicles. I watched a group of Drug Enforcement Administration agents back up D.C. police after they pulled over a drunken driver one night last week on H Street NE. On another night, I watched DEA agents and D.C. police peer into a parked car they said belonged to someone with some sort of gun record. They decided not to tow the car.

Scenes of D.C. residents watching and filming federal officers have become common, and feds have been aggressively arresting moped delivery drivers. As a result, the mopeds that were ubiquitous on city streets three weeks ago are now mostly gone.