Recently Donald Trump had one of his dictator panty explosions threatening to sue the Center for American Progress for FIVE BILLION DOLLARS because it did a study that found that his National Guard deployments, which were on their face stupid and only appealed to fearful white idiots and losers who need to believe Big White Daddy is stopping The Crime, are actually not stopping The Crime.
It was a notable eruption, even more than his usual tantrums where he’s threatening to sue somebody who made fun of him and hurt his feelings. It felt more late-stage empire/late-stage brain syphilis, with the angry dictator threatening to OFF WITH THEIR HEADS! an organization for simply looking at data and refusing to bend reality to appease Dear Leader’s fragile emotions.
One of the major conclusions of CAP’s look at the data was that violent crime was already dropping in a big way, and that Trump declaring war on and attacking American cities “had no measurable effect on violent crime trends.” Trump’s lawyers clownishly claimed that Trump had suffered “overwhelming financial and reputational harm” because CAP hurt him so. (As if he has a reputation to harm, LOL.)
Now NPR is out with some journalism of a genre we imagine is going to become more and more common as time goes by, where members of Donald Trump’s and Pete Hegseth’s various failed deployments, missions, and wars begin to speak out — slowly and off the record at first — about the uselessness of their assignments, the hopelessness, the damage they’re being ordered to do.
We don’t expect to hear this out of ICE, necessarily, since they’re pigs, the least qualified of the least qualified. (We do expect to hear “BUT WE WERE JUST FOLLOWIN’ ORDERS!” from ICE, after the dictatorship, when they are on trial.) But we’re not entirely shocked to be hearing it from the National Guard, about its stupid thousands-strong attack on Washington DC, now that it’s been there for a year.
We’re going to focus here on letting these quotes speak for themselves. NPR spoke to three sources, again, of course, off the record, as members of the military certainly are not allowed to speak freely about such things. These are people who are no longer part of the mission. We imagine Secretary Shitfaced and other Trump regime oafs are already on a warpath trying to figure out how to find them.
“I will say very frankly that the bad taste that this mission left in my mouth, it actually embarrasses me to be involved in any way[.]”
“I don't want to think about the National Guard. I don't want to necessarily discuss my affiliation with the National Guard. I don't want to fulfill my normal National Guard duties just because of the abuses of the National Guard in this D.C. mission[.]”
That same person told NPR they never felt that way after other missions. (Presumably they had never been ordered to attack the American people because there was a white supremacist dictator in the Oval Office.)
NPR notes how in DC, like other places where Trump attacked the American people, violent crime was already at record lows and continuing to trend down. This was a Band-Aid for scared white people who live close to Buc-ee’s locations, who are scared of traveling into the big city proper, who infest local news comments sections. Nothing more.
The Guard members NPR talked to see that element of it:
“Now, with it being a year, it’s hard to feel like that justification holds any water,” said one guard member [referring to Trump’s excuse about there being a “crime emergency”]. “It feels like the guard is being exploited in a sense.”
Another said it feels more like a political stunt, pointing out the way the guard has been inserted into certain narratives by the administration, like being ordered to patrol the perimeter of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool following its faulty renovation.
“I hope that there will be some accounting someday — probably after President Trump is gone — about why we were there, and was it worth it? But none of that is gonna happen right now,” that member said.
One day.
There are more quotes, this is just the beginning.
About the beginning of the attack they were ordered to carry out:
“My very initial reaction was just, I guess, shock and feeling like this context and this situation just felt like a very authoritarian move that kind of felt uncharacteristic of something you would see in our country,” said one member of the D.C. guard, adding that the reasoning behind the deployment contributed to the confusion.
In the days and weeks that followed, Republican governors began sending members of their guard to help with the mission.
“Walking into it, we had no real specifics,” one guard member who was deployed from West Virginia remembered thinking. “The president is calling out the guard to make D.C. safe. Well, what the what the f*** does that mean?”
They said they were trying to be helpful, while not knowing what the fuck they were supposed to be doing. (Every city, it seems, has had stories of Guardsmen doing a lot of sitting around eating sandwiches, or patrolling areas that didn’t need patrolling, doing yardwork, or basically just being tourists.)
Some of the quotes from the sources NPR talked to are about the general stupidity of the amount of money the government is spending on these deployments, on hotel rooms and luxury apartments and whatnot. Some talk about how they felt when one of their fellow guardsmen, 20-year-old Spc. Sarah Beckstrom, was killed in the DC deployment.
“I remember feeling just really sad,” one guard member said, starting to tear up a bit. “And I kept thinking — did they have to be here?” […]
“The thing that really stuck out to me was how absolutely futile that death felt, and that was hard to live with,” he said, noting he still thinks about Beckstrom almost daily and sometimes visits the spot where she was shot, even though he didn't know her personally. “After her death, this mission became untenable for me emotionally.” […]
“We were made a target, and I don’t know that anybody did a very good job of planning for the worst-case scenario,” [one] said.
That’s three different sources in those quotes. Just wait until we start getting journalism like this from Trump’s forever-lost Iran war.
The article ends with NPR’s sources noting how in times gone by, the reputation of the National Guard was that it showed up to help, showed up when people needed it, after disasters. One worried that now, under Trump, “it's going to completely rebrand everything that was noble about the National Guard into being mundane at best and threatening at worst.”
Just another thing Donald Trump and his tiny hands and tiny ego are destroying about the United States of America.
[NPR]
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"I signed up to defend Ohio, not rake gravel in DC for some fascist traitor."
OT
https://bsky.app/profile/paleofuture.bsky.social/post/3mtvqt4f5ik27
The Idiot wants to rename another body of water. Lake Ontario will be Lake America. Fucking dimwit.