Opinion: DeWine complicit in Trump’s military occupation
Governor sending National Guard troops to Washington
What Pandora’s Box has Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine opened by joining other Republican-led states in sending hundreds of reinforcement National Guard troops to Washington, D.C. to join the 800 military already mobilized on the streets of the nation’s capital?
Whatever possessed the lame duck Republican governor to become complicit in Donald Trump’s authoritarian power grab to seize control of an American city with a manufactured “crime emergency” and boots on the ground?
DeWine must know the bizarre, militarized occupation of D.C. is based on fallacies about rising Washington crime debunked by data that proves otherwise.
To be sure, violent crime is a serious, ongoing problem in D.C. — as it is in other major U.S. cities — but Trump’s hostile takeover of the capital city is not about effective crime-fighting and prevention. It is a distraction. A stunt. Trump has to change the subject about the Epstein coverup with something surreal.
But deployment of National Guard troops in iconic Washington — whose number will nearly double in size after the out-of-state reinforcements arrive — is a gross abuse of power by a would-be autocrat whose favorite tactic is to assert fake emergencies (with no acute crisis) as cover for extreme action.
Trump has declared 11 of them since January to justify everything from turning the southern border into a military zone (and soldiers into de facto border police) to setting tariffs on every country in the world, promoting fossil fuel production and exerting police power (deploying National Guard troops, federal agents and actual military) in an appalling show of force and weaponry meant to strike fear first in Los Angeles and now in the District.
Tourists on the National Mall are greeted by active-duty soldiers on a domestic mission to surveil Americans and keep them law-abiding.
The troops have their marching orders from a charlatan drunk on power to look tough on crime as they sightsee in combat fatigues.
Many will soon be armed against enemy civilians who cross the line — a reversal of initial deployment directives that Guard troops would wear body armor but leave their weapons at the armory.
Tactical armored vehicles, developed for troops in Afghanistan, are parked throughout D.C. on apparent standby to combat falling crime. Newly erected barricades and random checkpoints conducted by masked federal law enforcement appear out of nowhere.
Outraged local residents have erupted into spontaneous “Free D.C.” demonstrations to protest the insane federal surge of law enforcement flexing its muscle and stopping people for no apparent reason.
The militarized patrols have had a chilling effect on free speech and the exercise of assembly, but that’s right out of the authoritarian’s playbook.
Trump uses his unchecked power as a weapon to crush the vulnerable into submission. His stated rationale for excessive use of force in D.C. is to rehabilitate “conditions of law and order,” which is rich coming from a convicted felon who praised and pardoned lawbreakers who violently assaulted police officers, rampaged through the U.S. Capitol and hunted the vice president to hang.
The performative theatrics of Trump’s military policing of Americans — in the ostensible land of the free — would almost be comical if the unprecedented siege of armed combatants against fellow citizens wasn’t so scary.
Trump has made no secret of his intentions to squash self-rule elsewhere, too. He has indicated troops could be deployed to other Americans cities such as New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Baltimore where, coincidentally, the mayors are all Black Democrats.
This is the dystopian hellscape we feared under construction. Trump is desperate to distract his base from his years-long relationship with an infamous pedophile accused of victimizing hundreds of teenage girls, so why not normalize military occupations in America with Republican enablers like Ohio’s governor?
“We’ve been asked by the Secretary of the Army to send 150 military police from the Ohio National Guard to support the District of Columbia National Guard,” read a brief statement from DeWine’s office Saturday night.
Ohio guard members will “carry out presence patrols and serve as added security,” the press release explained with an odd asterisk that none of the military police from Ohio were “currently serving as law enforcement officers in the state of Ohio.”
Wait, what? DeWine just dispatched Ohio soldiers to play cops on the beat in Washington but it’s okay?! My friends, we are deep down the rabbit hole.
Would the governor also welcome hundreds of troops to carry out presence patrols in Ohio cities with higher crime rates than D.C., as a few do?
Would that also warrant hostile federal takeovers by armed military rolling from Toledo to Dayton to restore “law and order” under Trump’s selective application of justice?
When word spread about DeWine’s decision to send military reinforcements — to be deployed against a nation’s own people — demonstrators gathered at the Ohio Statehouse to protest his offering of homegrown troops “to further militarize D.C.”
What if Columbus is next?
Could Ohioans count on their governor to be a bulwark against an authoritarian regime leveraging the military for control of Ohio’s “big three” cities, or would DeWine follow orders as a partisan invertebrate to the end and reinforce the takeover with more troops to suppress dissent, maintain power and project strength?
Ask the 150 Ohio soldiers on their way to D.C.
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Marilou Johanek is a veteran Ohio print and broadcast journalist who has covered state and national politics as a longtime newspaper editorial writer and columnist