A group of soldiers with the National Guard patrol Washington, DC's Union Station on August 29, 2025.Samuel Corum/Sipa USA/AP
Thanks to President Donald Trump, the residents of Washington, DC, are now safe from the horrors of fallen leaves and errant litter. Otherwise, as the US commander in chief threatens to send National Guard troops to Chicago, the usefulness of Trump’s DC deployment has been doubtful.
“They just see us as little toy soldiers to put on the street to show some muscle.”
On August 11, Trump declared DC’s violent crime rate higher than some of “the worst places on Earth”—likening the US capital to Baghdad and Bogota, Colombia. In fact, DC’s violent crime rate is at a 30-year low. No matter: In a show of fealty to Trump, six Republican states sent troops to DC.
So far, their work has not gone exactly as planned. Last week, soldiers deployed to fight a “crime emergency” instead found themselves completing “beautification” duties on Capitol Hill and patrolling Krispy Kremes. Users on the r/NationalGuard subreddit were quick to give their colleagues a new nickname: National Guardeners.
The joke shows an undercurrent of dissent within the guard as Trump has unleashed members on major American cities. Alex, a National Guard recruiter from one of the states that sent troops to DC who requested anonymity to speak freely, told Mother Jones that the DC mission has deterred potential recruits and pushed already disillusioned soldiers to their breaking points.
“I think people have hit their limit. This is an encroachment on everything we signed up for, and it feels like a violation,” Alex said. “They just see us as little toy soldiers to put on the street to show some muscle. There’s no clear mission or understanding of that mission.”
Trump’s moves have also drained budgets. Experts estimate that the DC deployment is costing roughly $1 million a day. The recent Los Angeles deployment cost $134 million. The lack of money, Alex said, puts retirement for some members at risk.
In order to receive retirement benefits, National Guard members generally need to acquire at least 20 “good years” of service. This means committing some time to the guard each month. Often, this takes the form of practice drills. But shortly after the DC deployment, Alex said, they received instructions not to drill for the rest of the fiscal year (which ends September 30).
“It generally gets like this at the end of the fiscal year; money’s always tight, but not to the point where I’m not able to drill,” Alex said. Without additional drills, some will not be able to log a “good year” toward retirement. Alex put it succinctly: “I’m missing work for the Army because the state ran out of money because they decided to send military police to DC.”
National Guard morale already fell after the deployment to LA, but it has sunk to new depths after the DC call to arms. Increasingly, Alex said, soldiers are worried that they may be called upon by the current administration to commit unethical acts. On September 2, a federal judge ruled that Trump had illegally used armed military troops to squash civilian protests in June. (The Department of Defense did not respond to a request for comment.)
Like in DC, while the 40-day military occupation of LA was a chilling show of force, many troops largely sat around doing nothing. Alex said guard members have been frustrated to see money spent on “performative” deployments in LA and DC, a military birthday parade that “nobody cared about,” and an anti-woke campaign to change back military base names—all while “soldiers’ barracks are falling apart” and the Department of Veterans Affairs is cutting personnel. “They don’t feed these soldiers anything worth a damn, the infrastructure is dilapidated, and they don’t pay them enough,” Alex said.
On social media, the mood is dour, too. One user on r/NationalGuard posted a text alert allegedly from the Department of Defense’s public affairs division, encouraging “Capital Guardians” to use the hashtag #DCisMe to participate in a “Picture of the Day Contest.” (“Lamest activation ever,” someone commented.) On Instagram, military meme pages parodied the request, posting memes making fun of the DC takeover with the hashtag #DCisMe.
On Reddit, underneath a video reposted from r/Army and captioned, “[Joint Task Force-DC] soliders [sic] now taking landscaping orders from men in suits,” one user said: “Sorry. As a retired NG officer, this makes me sick. We don’t even have Soldiers doing routine grounds maintenance on Army posts, and yet, we’re doing this in public now?” Another user noted: “It was humiliating enough going to the Inauguration to assist the police only to end up standing around on streets wearing absolutely nothing but road guard vests. It’d be straight up demoralizing to be called up to just pick up trash and rake leaves.” One person asked, sarcastically, “Why are [National Guard] retention numbers so low!?” (Mother Jones was not able to independently verify whether these posters were members of the National Guard.)
Amid a yearslong military recruiting crisis, Trump has repeatedly claimed that Biden-era diversity, equity, and inclusion programs were to blame for the shortfalls, and he recently took credit for an enlistment bump that began before his reelection. But in the National Guard, Alex said, it is the current administration that has proven particularly odious to potential new recruits—in particular, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who once paid $50,000 to settle a sexual assault accusation and declared that women should not be in combat roles.
“We are losing candidates left and right,” Alex said. “Certainly, people are watching this and making decisions—not only to not join, but plenty of people within our ranks who are pushing toward retirement are deciding they’re done, and they are leaving before it gets too bad.”
