Pentagon is already calling National Guard in other states looking for units that could help in DC
Trump announced his decision to federalize D.C.'s police department at a White House press conference on Monday at which he was flanked by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who said that reinforcements could be called up if the Guard encounters resistance from protesters, adding that 'specialized units' might be included in their number.
However, a senior Army official has since told The New York Times that the current deployment of D.C. Guard is likely to be sufficient for the task in hand.
The Department of Defense has reportedly moved to ensure the Guard's duties in Washington are kept to a safe minimum, with one official telling the Times that 'soldiers with M-16s who have been trained to kill adversaries' will not be placed in policing roles.
The mission has nevertheless been criticized, with Dr Carrie A Lee, former chair of the department of national security and strategy at the Army War College, telling the newspaper: 'This is part of a pattern where the administration is using and appropriating military resources for nonmilitary domestic goals.
'Whether it's immigration or going against drug cartels or crime in Washington, it's very clear, to me at least, that this administration sees the military as a one-size-fits-all solution to accomplishing its domestic political priorities.'
Trump has previously dispatched the Guard to the U.S. southern border with Mexico and to Los Angeles in June to help quell anti-ICE demonstrations.
Guardsmen have since reportedly described that experience as bad for morale, obliterating much of the good will they had earned from helping to extinguish California's wildfires in January and expressed a fear it could harm future enlistment drives.
The step also had a negative impact on the president's own approval ratings.
At his press conference on Monday, Trump pledged to 'rescue' the city from 'crime, bloodshed, bedlam and squalor and worse,' despite the city's much-improved crime statistics suggesting there was no need or justification.
But the president nevertheless insisted: 'Our capital city has been overtaken by violent gangs and bloodthirsty criminals, roving mobs of wild youth, drugged-out maniacs and homeless people, and we're not going to let it happen anymore.'
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Reuters
a few seconds ago
- Reuters
Canada labor minister presses Air Canada, union to intensify talks to resolve dispute
Aug 15 (Reuters) - Canadian Labor Minister Patty Hajdu said on Friday that she met jointly with Air Canada ( opens new tab and the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE), urging both sides to work harder and remain at the negotiating table to reach a deal and avert a potential strike.
Daily Mail
a few seconds ago
- Daily Mail
Putin jabs Joe Biden by saying he would have never invaded Ukraine if Trump were in charge
Vladimir Putin pointed the finger at former President Joe Biden for allowing the war with Ukraine to materialize. The Russian leader confirmed that if President Donald Trump were still in office at the time in 2022, he wouldn't have started the war more than three years ago. Putin said during remarks at a joint press conference in Anchorage, Alaska on Friday that he warned Biden that he shouldn't let the situation progress to 'the point of no return when it would come to hostilities.' 'I said it quite directly back then that it's a big mistake,' Putin said, according to a real-time translation. He insisted: 'President Trump saying that if he was the president back then there would be no war, and I'm quite sure that would indeed be so, I can confirm that.' Putin's comments were the ultimate flattery on an impressionable president, who he was desperately trying to keep from fully embracing Ukraine and Europe's cause. Trump has repeatedly claimed that he would have been able to use his relationship with Putin to stop Russia from invading Ukraine if he were reelected in 2020. On June 16, 2021, Biden and Putin met in-person for a summit in Geneva, Switzerland amid rising tensions between Moscow and Washington, D.C. Just eight months later on February 24, 2022, Putin invaded Ukraine, kick-starting a deadly war that still wages on today and has left thousands dead and displaced. Trump's negotiations with Putin appear to be Ukraine's last chance to get an end to the bloodshed and land grab by Russia. European leaders have expressed concern that Trump will concede too much land, but Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has recognized that a peace deal might need to include handing over more land area to Putin's regime. President Putin said on Friday that having a good trustworthy business relationship with Trump makes him confident that 'we can come to see the end of the conflict in Ukraine.' Though the two leaders acknowledged there is still a far way to go. Additionally, no ceasefire was announced in their joint press conference. 'I have every reason to believe that moving down this path we can come to see the end of the conflict in Ukraine,' Putin said at the end of his remarks. And if the greeting between Trump and Putin was any indication of their relationship, it's very likely the two are chummy. The two were smiling as they saw each other in the flesh for the first time since 2018. With an abundance of physical contact and a round of applause from Trump for the authoritarian leader, body language expert Judi James tells the Daily Mail that he gave Putin 'the ultimate ego-stroke' by publicly treating him like a celebrity guest. Putin appeared visibly pleased with how the lengthy greeting went, and James said he was left 'purring' with delight. Experts warn that Trump already handed Putin a 'victory' by inviting him to U.S. soil for the first time in more than a decade and agreeing to exclude Zelensky. But James notes that the U.S. president's tone swiftly altered when they were in a room for their official talks. He took a more 'heavyweight, power pose' as it was time to get down to business, she notes. 'After the overkill cordiality of his greeting ritual Trump's grim expression and his tapping fingertips here suddenly gave him a tougher and less optimistic look,' James notes. After their nearly three-hour face-to-face meeting, Trump and Putin took turns speaking in a 12-minute joint press conference. They took no questions. The meeting was the first time they sat down in-person since Trump came back into office. It also was the first time that Putin stepped foot on U.S. soil since he was in New York City in 2015 for a United Nations General Assembly gathering where he also met with then-President Barack Obama.
Reuters
a few seconds ago
- Reuters
Trump-Putin summit yields no deal on ending war in Ukraine
ANCHORAGE, Alaska, Aug 15 (Reuters) - A highly anticipated summit between U.S. President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin on Friday yielded no agreement to resolve or pause Moscow's war in Ukraine, despite both leaders describing the talks in Alaska as productive. During a brief appearance before the media following the nearly three-hour talks, the two leaders said they had made progress on unspecified issues. But they offered no details and took no questions, with the normally loquacious Trump ignoring shouted questions from reporters. "There were many, many points that we agreed on. I would say a couple of big ones that we haven't quite got there, but we've made some headway," Trump said, standing in front of a backdrop that read, "Pursuing Peace." "There's no deal until there's a deal," he added. The talks did not initially appear to have produced meaningful steps toward a ceasefire in the deadliest conflict in Europe in 80 years - or toward a subsequent meeting between Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, both goals Trump had set ahead of the summit. Putin said he expected Ukraine and its European allies to accept the results of the U.S.-Russia negotiation constructively and not try to "disrupt the emerging progress." "I expect that today's agreements will become a reference point, not only for solving the Ukrainian problem, but will also launch the restoration of business-like, pragmatic relations between Russia and the United States," Putin said. But Putin also repeated Moscow's long-held position that what Russia claims to be the "root causes" of the conflict must be eliminated to reach a long-term peace, a sign he remains resistant to a ceasefire. As the two leaders were talking, the war raged on, with most eastern Ukrainian regions under air raid alerts. Governors of Russia's Rostov and Bryansk regions reported that some of their territories were under Ukrainian drone attacks. Zelenskiy has ruled out formally handing Moscow any territory and is also seeking a security guarantee backed by the United States. Trump said he would call Zelenskiy and NATO leaders to update them on the Alaska talks. There was no immediate reaction from Kyiv to the summit. Ukraine's opposition lawmaker Oleksiy Honcharenko said on the Telegram messaging app, "It seems Putin has bought himself more time. No ceasefire or de-escalation has been agreed upon." Czech Foreign Minister Jan Lipavsky said in a statement that he welcomed Trump's efforts but doubted Putin's interest in a deal. "If Putin were serious about negotiating peace, he would not have been attacking Ukraine all day today," he said. The anticlimactic end to the closely watched summit was in stark contrast to the pomp and circumstance with which it began. When Putin arrived at an Air Force base in Alaska, a red carpet awaited him, where Trump greeted Putin warmly as U.S. military aircraft flew overhead. For Putin, the summit - the first between him and a U.S. president since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 - was already a big win, regardless of its outcome. He can portray the meeting as evidence that years of Western attempts to isolate Russia have unravelled and that Moscow is retaking its rightful place at the high table of international diplomacy. Trump hopes a truce in the 3-1/2-year-old war that Putin started will bring peace to the region as well as bolster his credentials as a global peacemaker worthy of the Nobel Peace Prize. Putin is wanted by the International Criminal Court, accused of the war crime of deporting hundreds of children from Ukraine. Russia denies the allegations, and the Kremlin has dismissed the ICC warrant as null and void. Russia and the United States are not members of the court. Both Moscow and Kyiv deny targeting civilians in the war. But thousands of civilians have died in the conflict, the vast majority Ukrainian, and the war has killed or injured well over a million people from both sides. Trump and Putin, along with top foreign-policy aides, conferred in a room at an Air Force base in Anchorage, Alaska in their first meeting since 2019. Zelenskiy, who was not invited to the summit, and his European allies had feared Trump might sell out Ukraine by essentially freezing the conflict and recognizing - if only informally - Russian control over one-fifth of Ukraine. Trump had sought to assuage such concerns on Friday ahead of the talks, saying he would let Ukraine decide on any possible territorial concessions. "I'm not here to negotiate for Ukraine, I'm here to get them at a table," he said. Asked what would make the meeting a success, he told reporters: "I want to see a ceasefire rapidly ... I'm not going to be happy if it's not today ... I want the killing to stop." The meeting also included U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio; Trump's special envoy to Russia, Steve Witkoff; Russian foreign policy aide Yury Ushakov; and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. Trump, who once said he would end Russia's war in Ukraine within 24 hours, conceded on Thursday it had proven a tougher task than he had expected. He had said if Friday's talks went well, quickly arranging a second, three-way summit with Zelenskiy would be more important than his encounter with Putin. Zelenskiy said ahead of Friday's summit that the meeting should open the way for a "just peace" and three-way talks that included him, but added that Russia was continuing to wage war. "It's time to end the war, and the necessary steps must be taken by Russia. We are counting on America," Zelenskiy wrote on Telegram.
