August 15, 2025: The Stagecraft of Security
The arrival of federal forces in Washington began not with the sound of sirens or the weight of an unfolding emergency, but with the president’s portrayal of the city as a lawless expanse, gripped by “roving mobs” and “bloodthirsty criminals.” In the days that followed, a small detachment of National Guard troops appeared near the base of the Washington Monument.
Their vehicles were parked in full view, their uniforms catching the late light as they mingled with tourists and joggers. Some posed for photographs, leaning against Humvees or standing alongside visitors. Within two hours, they were gone. The scene was quiet, almost casual, yet it was not the departure that mattered. It was the image that lingered—a reminder that the leader could summon force at will, position it in the heart of the capital, and frame the moment as proof of control.
When force is staged this way, its purpose extends beyond any practical improvement in public safety. The immediate claim is to restore order; the deeper effect is to center the leader as the sole guarantor of that order. Security becomes a kind of theater, its audience the general public, its script written to highlight decisiveness and command. The visible presence of troops against a familiar civic backdrop offers a message as much about hierarchy as about protection: safety flows from the top, not from the steady functioning of institutions.
In such a system, the threshold for deploying force is no longer fixed to objective measures of risk. It can be triggered by an event that fits a chosen narrative, even when broader indicators—such as the city’s declining crime rate—point in a different direction. At the same time, far more severe incidents may be reframed, minimized, or even celebrated when they involve political allies.
The contrast is stark. The same authority that pardoned hundreds of individuals charged with assaulting police officers on January 6, and elevated their defenders to positions of power, now leads a federal security campaign in response to a single violent episode on a city street. What determines the use of force is not the nature of the act, but its utility to the leader’s political aims.
This selective application of law enforcement creates a hierarchy of security. Supporters are shielded from consequences applied harshly to others; opponents can be cast as existential threats. Troops and federal agents are no longer only instruments of policing, but have become tools for enforcing political boundaries, reminding both allies and adversaries of where power resides.
The structure of such actions carries certain warning signs. One is the bypassing of the local authority—in this case, seizing control of the capital’s police department. Another is the absence of defined conditions for ending the operation, allowing it to extend as long as politically useful. A third is the widening of the mission beyond its stated cause: sweeping homeless encampments, pressing for changes to local sentencing laws, and reshaping aspects of civic governance that have little to do with the incident used to justify the intervention. Each step concentrates authority at the top while narrowing the scope for independent decision-making below.
The cost of this shift is not measured solely in arrests or prosecutions. It is found in the gradual normalization of military presence in civic spaces, in the quiet recasting of policing as an arm of the executive rather than a public service, and in the erosion of the distinction between federal security power and political power. Over time, the expectation that force is accountable to the community can erode, replaced by the belief that it answers only to the leader who directs it.
These transformations rarely arrive fully formed. They advance in increments—each framed as temporary, each defended as necessary, each small enough to accept on its terms. Yet taken together, they embed the logic of performance into the system itself. Public safety becomes defined not by the steady and predictable application of law, but by the visible and repeated assertion of control.
The contradiction at the core of this approach is that it depends on the perception of instability to justify itself. The leader must keep danger in view—sometimes amplifying it—to sustain the role of protector. The spectacle of force must be renewed, even when its practical necessity is thin. The system’s survival depends on ensuring that the performance is never complete, that the audience is always reminded of the leader’s unique capacity to act.
When troops are stationed among monuments and museums, when the federal chain of command supplants local governance, when the boundaries between civic order and political power blur, the question is not only whether the action addresses the stated threat. It is whether the action is also rehearsing a future in which the presence of military force in civic life is no longer an exception, but an accepted feature of governance.
And if that rehearsal continues long enough to feel ordinary, what will remain of the distinction between the city and the garrison?