The Silence Of DC

Dispatches from the Occupied Zone

So this is how it happens: not with a bang or a whimper but with two MRAPs parked theatrically in front of Union Station with their empty turrets pointed at the entrance.

We are neck-deep in the Age of Spectacle and so of course Trump’s DC occupation looks like a scene from some dystopian action flick, complete with ominous clouds and ironic flags waving overhead. The most disturbing thing about it, on a gut level, is the lack of cinematic music. The purpose of a movie score isn’t just to set the scene. In a movie as distressing as this one, it serves to let us know that the director’s on our side. We’re all on the same page about who the bad guys are. But the Great Director in the sky offers no such reassurances. The only sound comes from the cars and empty tourist busses that circle the roundabout, the few visitors who exit alongside me.

Every military vehicle in DC that I encounter comes equipped with four members of the National Guard trying not to die of heat stroke in combat fatigues and body armor. A few of them carry batons on their hips, but are otherwise unarmed — something scheduled to change in the next few days. They are not authorized to arrest anyone; they are here to “deter violent crime with a visible law enforcement presence.” Spectacle. Showmanship. Million-dollar theater.

The soldiers are deterring something, all right. The wide, green expanse of the Washington Mall sits nearly empty. A few tourists circle the Monument, along with a noisy US Parks Services helicopter that makes low, slow loops around the obelisk and fills the air with mindless droning. I grab a bikeshare day pass and take a long, slow loop of my own. The Capital Building visitor’s parking lot is nearly empty. No lines at the Smithsonian buildings. Empty streets and footpaths.

The Lincoln Memorial is the busiest place here; a few dozen tourists climb the steps to pay their respects to this giant of a man whose fingers eternally grasp the sides of his enormous chair. His gaunt face and unquiet gaze speak to the burden he carried in life. Above him, a single sentence: “In this temple, as in the hearts of the people for whom he saved the union, the memory of Abraham Lincoln is enshrined forever.”

The National Parks Service is adding a museum beneath the monument, which is far from done but already adding to the experience. Without its scaffolding, visitors ascending the steps would be able to see the four enormous military transport vehicles parked the road next to the monument. The bored soldiers stand and talk and pose with tourists upon request. “Any crime?” someone asks with the faintest edge of anger. “Not since we showed up,” a sergeant replies. Yelling at the Guard feels like yelling at customer service. If they take a more active role in this occupation, that dynamic will change.

When, a few days after my visit, reporters asked JD Vance why the National Guard presence was so focused around the Mall and Union Station, he retorted that Union Station was in fact a terrifying crime-infested hellhole before the administration cleaned up the city. “A couple of years ago, when I brought my kids here, they were being screamed at by violent vagrants,” he said, then raised his voice louder so he could be heard over chants of “Free DC” from the growing group of protesters outside the Union Station Shake Shack. “In just 9 days, we’ve made it a place where people can walk around safely. They can bring their kids again.”

These days, I feel safer when people are screaming. It’s the silence I can’t stand, and the silence is everywhere downtown. Restaurant reservations are down as much as 31 percent compared to last year at this time. Foot traffic has dropped as much as 81 percent. America’s capital should not be a ghost town. People should not be afraid to come here. On that much, we agree.

“This is our country, not yours! This is our world, not yours!” a tall man with long red hair shouts into a megaphone. He paces in front of the police barricades in front of Heritage Foundation’s headquarters, a couple blocks away from Union Station. “Never give up fighting these fucking demons!” His vocal cords are shredding, he’s been shouting for a while. “You think you can make us hide in fear? Fuck fear! Fuck your tyranny! We will be out on the streets every goddamn day until we get our country back!”

This man is an activist with FLARE (For Liberty And Resistance Everywhere), and they do this every Monday. About 30 people beat drums and shout and chant and hold signs that say things like “Make Racists Afraid Again” and “Die Mad, Bootlickers.” People driving past honk their horns in approval — when the protesters begin to chant “Fuck all fascists,” a woman in an SUV honks her horn in time with the beat. In the ten minutes I stood there, only one person reacted negatively.

This is not the summer of 2020. There are no enormous nightly protests here, just a city of simmering rage that erupts when the opportunity presents itself, as it did on August 14th when DHS set up a checkpoint at the Columbia Heights Target. The shopping complex sits at a busy intersection two miles north of the White House, in the heart of a neighborhood known for its immigrant population. Armed, masked thugs stopped passers-by for crimes like busted tail lights and improper seatbelt use and detained two people for nobody knows what. DC was not silent that night: protesters warned oncoming traffic of the stop and told the officers to get the hell off their streets. Eventually, they did.

Columbia Heights was not silent when I visited either. Kids played and shrieked in a small fountain; adults shopped for necessities in the enormous air-conditioned complex or simply passed through while going about everyday life. These are the people who live in DC: they eat here, work here, pay their goddamn rent here. They can’t cancel their tickets or change their travel plans. They carry on because they have to.

The feds eased back last Sunday and Monday; I saw no agents outside the Washington Mall during the day. No one’s quite sure why, but Amanda Moore, a journalist who lives here and has covered this occupation from the start (and whose work you should read) has a theory. A lot of national journalists parachuted in to cover this occupation, which makes it tough to shape the narrative. Trump may be waiting for those out-of-towners to parachute back out again before pushing things further.

This invasion is spectacle, but it’s a spectacle the administration wants to script. Some things, like the SWAT-style raid on the man who threw a sandwich at some loitering FBI agents, are choreographed especially for us, right down to the cinematic music they hope strikes fear into the heart of anyone contemplating charcuterie-based crimes. When it comes to hurting people on the street, they’d rather not be recorded. Photojournalist Dominic Gwinn (whose work you should also read) has been chasing these guys for days. The FBI/DEA/DHS/etc mostly operate at night, he tells me. When they see cameras, they tend to stop whatever they’re doing: abandon their victims, leave the scene, and try again somewhere darker and more private. Silence is their element, and silence is their goal.

Last weekend’s pause was not a draw-down. Another 1200 National Guardsmen from Ohio, South Carolina, West Virginia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Tennessee were already enroute and are now boots on the ground in DC as you read this. Meanwhile, DC National Guard troops are being pulled off the line to qualify on the M-17 pistol so they can stand around with handguns instead of just batons — handguns known to go off without warning.

The administration is setting the stage for other, more worrying scenes. DC US Attorney Jeanine Pirro recently ordered her office to stop charging people with felonies for carrying long guns in the city. The decision does not come at an “unexpected time,” as the Washington Post claims, nor does it “complicate the White House’s boast of seizing dozens of guns as part of President Donald Trump’s surge.” This leaked memo is an invitation, and anyone who remembers the Portland protest scene from 2017 to 2021 knows exactly what kind of person will accept. We can tell you all about what happens when Proud Boy types carry long guns into your city and what it feels like to face them down — and that was before Trump 2.0, when prohibitions against murdering “communists” felt a lot more robust than they do now.

By Monday evening there are three more military vehicles at Union Station: two HMMWVs and another MRAP, each with their bored quartet of soldiers. A small team of DEA agents gathers around militarized gator trucks in front of the station’s main entrance. The air swallows all sound. The city holds its breath as the sun goes down.

I duck inside the station and grab some teriyaki chicken from the food court. Like everything else in the Occupied Zone it is virtually empty, save for a table of agents in body armor eating take-out and drinking Coca-Cola. By the time I return to the entrance, police cars are lining up around the perimeter. It seems pointless to watch them form up when I have no way to follow them when they leave, so I use my bikeshare daypass and set off for Columbia Heights again — an educated guess, nothing more.

As it turns out, there’s no need to travel that far. I find them on North Capitol street: a solid block of SUVs, end on end, all strobing silently into the night. At least 40 officers in body armor stand on the sidwalk beyond them, illuminated only by the flashing lights: an odd tableau of overkill. Most of them don’t seem to be doing much, but there’s a group of them at the center. I can’t make out what’s happening. If someone’s at the bottom of that scrum, they’re hopelessly outnumbered.

I stop at the end of the block and pull out my phone to find the nearest docking station; I’ll ditch the bike and return on foot to take pictures. A couple FBI agents walk past, avoiding eye contact. A few seconds later, a young Black woman on a Lime scooter stops beside me, eyes wide. Her voice is gentle and shocked. That's more cops than I've ever seen in my life, she says. I got off at Union Station and there were tanks there. Now this.

I can’t find the words to talk about it. Neither, it seems, can she. The silence stretches between us. “Stay safe,” she says at last. “You too,” I say, knowing that will likely be harder for her than it will be for me. No words for that either.

I find out later that this grim, block-long residential building is Tyler House, an “affordable living complex” that has, for decades, been infamous for its unsafe conditions, infestations, and gun violence. There is a Harris Teeter grocery store just down the block and high-rise condos all around; the complex is a sinking island of affordability in this sea of gentrification. The thing about broken appliances and roaches is, they keep the rent down. The thing about constant violence is, it's better than being homeless.

But no major crime took place at Tyler House that night — nothing that made the papers, nothing that explains the army of police we saw.

By the time I ditch the bike and make it back onto the scene, the cops are long gone. A group of feral teenagers assembles on the sidwalk in their place. One of them is laughing behind me: a horrible hyena sound that grows louder and louder, more and more unhinged, until it shreds into bitter, hoarse hysteria. I make no attempt to avoid the group and they imperceptively shift to make enough space for me to pass through: strangers in the night. There is no crime wave here, crime lives here and always has. All these masked invaders did tonight is subject the people who live in this troubled place to more brutality and more abuse. There are things we could do to help the residents of Tyler House but, based on the administration’s rhetoric, this occupying force does not see them as people at all. They are simply a problem: the filth Trump promised to purge.

By the time I return to Union Station, the military vehicles have vanished without a trace, leaving only katydids and crickets in their wake. Were they ever here? This whole thing feels impossible, seems impossible. A city, a country in shock.

People are afraid. They don’t know what to do. You got arrested in 2020: you got booked, fingerprinted, knocked around some, and then the National Lawyer’s Guild would bail you out and you’d grab snacks and cigs from the table outside the courthouse and go home. Horrible things happened to protesters at the hands of police that year: head injuries, broken bones, a few people snatched off the street and disappeared into unmarked vans. But they didn’t disappear forever. Everyone returned within a day.

That was five years ago. There’s no due process anymore, no mechanism to stop someone in a mask and body armor and no identification from disappearing you into the back of a military vehicle and plunging you into a system with no accountability or legal representation, no food or water or basic sanitation. People want to know why people aren’t out on the street every night in DC, but they already know why. It’s the same reason they’re posting instead of hitting the streets themselves.

We are witnessing a terror campaign: spectacle backed up by brutality intended to keep us quiet. Trump has found legal justification for all of it, he’s technically within bounds until the courts say otherwise, but this is an indictment of our system and not a permission slip. No piece of paper can take away our rights. There is no emergency in Washington DC save Trump’s military occupation; no unprecedented crime wave save his crimes against our people.

We cannot allow the silence of DC to take hold, within the city or outside it. Watch that press conference with JD Vance and Pete Hegseth and Stephen Miller. Watch how agitated they become as protesters dare to oppose them at their victory burger celebration. Watch how they try to downplay those protesters as “communists” and “90-year-old white hippies.” Behold their impotent rage as a few dozen people explode their story of a grateful populace and decimate their calm.

Be loud. Be rude. Do the little things that add up into big things. Don’t knuckle under. This is not normal, this is not OK, this is not American.

All the tinder in the world can’t light without a spark. Historically speaking, backlash begins with a precipitating incident: a moment when rage boils over. The events that ignite a population are seldom unusual or unprecedented, they just happen in the right place at the right time. As poorly-trained armed goons continue to stalk the streets and tensions ratchet higher, the chances of such an incident skyrocket. When that spark hits, it is incumbent upon all of us to go out, despite the fear, and create the largest movement this nation has ever seen. We must achieve critical mass so that they cannot stop or silence us, cannot arrest us all without destabilizing the economy and society itself.

This is our country. These are our rights. And we cannot stand silent.

****A big thank you to the premium subscribers who make trips like this one possible****