Rosa Brooks on Trump’s National Guard deployment and using troops to police American streets. Plus: how Trump’s foreign policy is weakening America’s alliances and reputation.

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On this episode of The David Frum Show, The Atlantic’s David Frum examines how President Donald Trump’s foreign-policy decisions are undermining U.S. alliances and global credibility. He discusses incidents including the detainment of South Korean workers in Georgia and alleged covert operations in Greenland. Frum argues that these actions reflect ego-driven weakness rather than leadership, and explores the broader consequences for America’s international standing.

Then Frum is joined by the Georgetown law professor and former Pentagon adviser Rosa Brooks, who also served as a D.C. reserve police officer. They discuss Trump’s deployment of 2,200 National Guard troops to Washington, D.C.; the limits of militarized policing; constitutional concerns; and the dangers of masked, unidentified federal agents. Brooks warns listeners that such tactics could normalize authoritarian behavior and set troubling precedents for future elections.

Frum closes with a new book segment, with this week’s on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, where he discusses how the novel’s unreliable narrators highlight the importance of critical reading in an era of declining literacy.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

David Frum: Hello, and welcome back to The David Frum Show. I’m David Frum, a staff writer at The Atlantic. My guest this week will be Rosa Brooks, a professor of public policy and law at Georgetown University and an expert on American policing. We’ll be talking together about the startling deployment by President [Donald] Trump of the National Guard and other armed personnel in Washington, D.C., and other American cities, apparently with more such deployments to come. I can’t think of a more qualified person to talk about this startling development than Professor Rosa Brooks.

At the end of the program, I will be introducing a new segment where I’ll talk about a book of the week. This is going to be an experiment. I’ll see whether you enjoy it. I hope you do, and I hope you’ll stick through to the end to see that final segment. Before we get there, though, I want to offer some thoughts about some very startling, very recent developments that raise serious questions about the future of American leadership in the world under President Trump.

Federal agents raided one of the largest foreign investments—maybe the single largest foreign investment—in the state of Georgia, a car factory and an electric-battery factory about 30 miles west of the city of Savannah, Georgia. Agents detained some 475 people, of whom about 300 proved to be South Korean citizens in the United States to help ready the factory to open later this year or perhaps next. These 300 people were shackled, arrested, imprisoned, and then repatriated to South Korea. This incident, as you can imagine, has ignited outrage in South Korea. Three hundred of their fellow citizens who thought they were complying with President Trump’s demand for more South Korean investment in the United States, who are finishing a factory that would soon employ many, many American workers: They’re shackled, treated like the worst kind of criminals—“the worst of the worst,” as President Trump so often says—humiliated, exposed to view, their arrests videoed and included in propaganda for the Trump immigration-enforcement effort. The outrage has been shock, horror, dismay in a country that is already one of the most fiercely nationalistic countries in the world.

Now, exactly what happened here remains a little mysterious. Was this overzealous immigration enforcement? Was this some kind of backhanded political move? Remember the factory, the South Korean investment, was a crowning achievement of Georgia Governor Brian Kemp. Brian Kemp, of course, was the Georgia Republican governor who refused to steal his state for Donald Trump in 2020. Perhaps some kind of payback has happened here, or perhaps not. We will know more soon, I’m sure. But South Koreans already know all that they need to know.

And that’s just one of many incidents of these kinds of attacks on allies. Here’s another. In the last week of August, the Danish national broadcaster produced a report that three American nationals were active in Greenland on carrying out what the broadcaster called “covert influence operations.” These three Americans were apparently stoking separatist sentiments with an idea of ginning up some kind of movement to detach Greenland from Denmark, which is the sovereign over Greenland, and reattach Greenland to the United States.

This story in the Danish national broadcaster reached, of course, the ears of the Danish government, and the Danish foreign ministry summoned the American deputy chief of mission to the foreign ministry for a scolding. There is currently no American ambassador to Denmark. Now, the American DCM in Denmark is a very impressive person. His name is Mark Stroh, and he has served the United States in Iraq, in Pakistan, and he was embedded with U.S. forces in Syria. I have to imagine that a kind of patriotic, long-term public servant like this was as shamed as any American of proper feeling would and should be by the revelation of what was being carried out in Greenland: an act of skullduggery against a NATO ally that has hosted American forces on its soil since before the Second World War. The American presence in Greenland dates back to before Pearl Harbor and has always been welcomed by both Danes and Greenlanders. Yet that seems to be not enough. Not content with having full use of Danish and Greenland territory for the defense of the United States and NATO, the United States now seems to be fomenting some kind of scheme or plot in order to steal territory from our Danish ally. That’s the second story.

Now, a third. In May, India retaliated against Pakistan for an act of terrorism against Indians committed by a terror group that has enjoyed the protection of the Pakistani government. Twenty-six Indians were killed. India retaliated, and there was a four-day fight. At the end of the four days, a cease-fire was proclaimed. The United States apparently lent some good offices to the cease-fire, but the Indians are very insistent and you will hear—if you’re curious for more details, you can view my dialogue or listen to my dialogue with Indian politician Shashi Tharoor, who can explain the background that we did that in The David Frum Show a few weeks ago. Shashi Tharoor is an opponent of the present Indian government, but he agrees with the Indian government that India achieved this peace on its own terms for its own reason on its own timetable. And while they certainly appreciate that some Americans made some phone calls, it wasn’t America that did it.

Yet Donald Trump is demanding that India recognize him as the author of the cease-fire, and, in fact, that India nominate him for a Nobel Peace Prize for the work he didn’t do and that his subordinates did do but that wasn’t all that important, at least according to the Indians. And soon afterwards, Donald Trump imposed a 50 percent tariff on Indian goods. India and the United States have a close economic and strategic relationship.

Now, the Trump administration’s explanation for the 50 percent tariff was that they were punishing India for purchasing and refining Russian oil. This explanation, frankly, does not pass the laugh test. Donald Trump is not taking any action against Russia for its aggression in Ukraine. They didn’t say, Okay, we’re leaving the Russians alone, and in fact, the sanctions aren’t coming, and in fact, the United States is bending every effort to compel Ukraine to make peace with Russia on Russia’s terms. But even though we are not punishing Russia, we are so mad about the Russian war in Ukraine that we are slapping India, and it has nothing to do—trust us—with the fact that the president’s mad at India for not nominating him for a Nobel Prize. It’s, obviously, not true, and it’s, again, created a tremendous uproar in Indian politics. And while there has been some nice talk back and forth between [Narendra] Modi and President Trump, the structure of punitive sanctions on India remains in place.

American presidents since Bill Clinton have worked to build a U.S.-India relationship. The work has not been easy. There are many points of difficulty and difference between India and the United States. Yet India has achieved closer and closer military cooperation with the United States and its other major allies in the Pacific. And this is indispensable to American plans to counter China, and Donald Trump seems to have blown it up out of petty ego and vanity.

One of the biggest lies that MAGA supporters—MAGA media—tell their consumers is that Donald Trump is respected by the rest of the world. Well, there’s some surveys that show that he’s highly thought of in Nigeria. There are other surveys that show he’s highly thought of in the Philippines, and he seems to be popular in Israel and El Salvador, as well. But that’s about it. Elsewhere in the world, Donald Trump is feared as capricious and destructive, but he’s not respected, because who respects a man driven by vanity, ego, and petty personal concerns, and who seems to have no consistent reason for doing anything for any person other than himself?

In this second Trump term, the lethal combination of fear and disrespect that has surrounded Donald Trump in the outside world from the beginning is now attaching itself to the United States as a nation. The world might forgive the United States for electing Donald Trump once. They’re unlikely to do so for electing Trump twice. Trump has been elected twice and the second time more clearly and with more popular backing than the first. At this point, the rest of the world isn’t going to listen very hard when Americans say things like, or when future Americans say things like, This is not who we are.Donald Trump and the movement behind him: That’s an important part of who we are. And other people cannot afford to disregard it and pretend it’s not there. They have to manage their own affairs, understanding that the United States is capable of doing this, and you know it’s capable of doing it because it’s done it before and things that have been done before might be done again.

The United States advertises itself as Ronald Reagan’s city on a hill, but the more recent advertisement is Donald Trump imposing tariffs on people who refuse to flatter him and nominate him for prizes, for his own squalid motives of vanity.

One way to interpret what has happened in the United States since the election of 2024 is that Donald Trump is leading a retreat of Americans from the world. The world’s responsibilities asked a lot of Americans, and some Americans seem to resent that ask and don’t want to pay it anymore. And here’s a way that I think about what may be going on. The United States had a long history of racial discrimination and racial segregation. During the period after World War II, the federal government led a firm, slow, protracted, uncertain at first, but increasingly firm, response to force desegregation on the American states and localities that were unwilling to have it. An important motive for the federal government’s activism in the 1950s and ’60s on the civil-rights file was that the United States was concerned that racism at home was undermining America’s message to the world. In a speech to the nation in June 1963, then-President [John F.] Kennedy made the link explicit. I’m going to quote from the speech he gave on television, in June 1963. President Kennedy said, “This nation was founded by men of many nations and backgrounds. It was founded on the principle that all men are created equal, and that the rights of every man are diminished when the rights of one man are threatened. Today we are committed to a worldwide struggle to promote and protect the rights of all who wish to be free. And when Americans are sent to Vietnam or West Berlin, we do not ask for whites only.” Kennedy’s message: If you want to lead the rest of the world, you have to set a good example yourself.

President Trump’s message to the rest of the world is, Well, we’re not really interested in setting a good example anymore. We want to instead shackle South Korea engineers and executives who made the mistake of relying on American promises that they could work 90 days in the United States on a visa-waiver program.We want to behave badly, and if that means we have to forfeit our world leadership, that’s a price that Trump and those around him seem eminently willing to pay because what they are realizing is that they have a lot more scope for misconduct at home if they have less regard for the opinions of the rest of the planet.

And that’s why I keep insisting that far from an ideology of American greatness, far from a program of American greatness, MAGA is the ideology of American weakness and retreat. I think that’s why Trump’s one big foreign-policy idea is to fixate so much on Panama and Greenland. When America sought to be connected to the rest of the world, Panama and Greenland represented highways in the Arctic Ocean and at the Panama Canal, through which the world’s traffic flowed alongside and to the United States. And while it was very important to Americans that both Greenland and Panama be in friendly hands, it was equally important to the United States to uphold international rules of sovereignty and justice. The United States reached diplomatic agreements with the Danish government on behalf of Greenland and with Panama to ensure that Americans and others had free access to the waterways that were policed by those two territories and that the people who in those territories received the appropriate compensation and regard from the United States for the use of their landmass to safeguard the interests of the United States and those of others. But an America in retreat under Donald Trump wants Panama and Greenland not as connectors, but as barriers. Trump wants to seize them by any means necessary, no matter how clandestine or even thuggish, without regard to the opinions of others. He imagines America can withdraw from the world into its own walled-off neighborhood, its economy protected by walled-off tariffs, and still remain powerful enough to intimidate, even if it no longer leads or inspires.

That’s not a very appealing bet. It’s also not a very smart bet. America is too big, and the world is too small. There is, in fact, nowhere to hide. America will either be strong because reinforced by friends or vulnerable because alone and distrusted by ex-friends. When America abandons the world to the mercy of dictators, it will find itself at the mercy of dictators too. And not only the dictators abroad, but would-be dictators here at home.

And now my dialogue with Rosa Brooks. But first, a quick break.

[Music]

Frum: Our topic today is the Trump administration’s deployment of military personnel to police Washington, D.C. Our guest has truly unique insight into the startling convergence of military and police power. Rosa Brooks is a professor of law and public policy at Georgetown University Law School here in Washington, D.C. She served as a policy adviser to the Department of Defense during the Obama administration. Between 2016 and 2020, she developed a second career as a Washington, D.C., reserve police officer, and she wrote about her policing career in an amazing book that I highly recommend, published in 2021, called Tangled Up in Blue: Policing the American City.

Rosa, thank you so much for joining the program today.

Rosa Brooks: David, it’s good to be here.

Frum: Let me start by—just for those of you who have lost track of the story, just a few facts to get us on the right track. At about 3 in the morning, on August 3 of this year, a man named Edward Coristine and an unnamed female companion walked back to Coristine’s parked car. The couple had been out for an evening, apparently, and had left the car on Swann Street Northwest near the bars and clubs of Washington’s U Street corridor. The couple was approached by a group of teenagers, and according to the account given by Coristine to police, the teenagers demanded the key to Coristine’s car. Coristine helped his companion into the car, then turned to face the teenagers. In the ensuing encounter, Coristine was injured and his phone was stolen. A 15-year-old boy and a 15-year-old girl were subsequently arrested, both not from Washington, D.C., but from Hyattsville, Maryland, a plurality African American suburb to the northeast of the District of Columbia. Police are offering a $10,000 reward for help in locating a third person of interest in the case.

Coristine is a man with powerful patrons. Better known by his nickname “Big Balls,” Coristine was one of the Elon Musk programming team. Outraged by the assault on “Big Balls,” President Trump imposed a form of martial government on the city of Washington. He deployed 2,200 National Guard to patrol the city, most of them from out of the jurisdiction and from as far away as Louisiana, Mississippi, and Tennessee. This follows on a similar deployment in Los Angeles and anticipates future deployments that Trump has talked about, perhaps in Chicago, perhaps in New York City.

One more set of facts, and then we’ll go into our discussion. According to the X account of Attorney General Pam Bondi, the Guard and other federal and local authorities in D.C. have, as of September 5, seized 198 illegal firearms. About four dozen homeless encampments have been broken up, including the large and conspicuous one near Washington’s Union Station. Since the deployment, Washington has recorded a decline in some crime, especially carjacking. The deployment costs an estimated $1 million a day and is now expected to last until the end of November.

Rosa, you work in more of the center of the city than I do. Have you encountered the National Guard?

Brooks: I have, yes. I’ve encountered a number of very nice young men and women from the Ohio National Guard.

Frum: And what has that been like? Have they asked you for identification? Have they asked you what you’re on your way to do, or do they just let you pass?

Brooks: No. Oh, they’re—I’ve mostly encountered them around the Wharf, which, as you know, is a very prosperous, touristy area. They’re usually in groups of two to five, and they’re sort of strolling around, looking a little uncomfortable, like they’re not quite sure what they’re doing there, and occasionally getting ice cream and things like that. And they’re really not doing anything. (Laughs.) I asked them how they were doing and where they were from, and I commented that they had been sent to, obviously, a crime hotspot. And they looked a little—they chuckled a little nervously.

Frum: When you were a police officer, how much time did you spend in places like the Wharf?

Brooks: I spent very little time in places like the Wharf because I was assigned to the Seventh District of the Metropolitan Police Department, which is the southern part of Anacostia. So occasionally, I would help out in other districts, such as the Wharf in the First District, but mostly I was in a very different part of the city.

Frum: And this is maybe something—I think a lot of people know this, but just in case—Washington is, like, the shape of a diamond with a bite out of it in the lower left-hand corner, which was land across the Potomac given back to Virginia before the Civil War. And Washington is bisected by a big park that runs almost exactly through the center of it, Rock Creek Park. And on the west of the park, the areas are mostly very low crime. To the right of the park, you get more crime, and in the farthest southeast corner is where you get the most crime. Is that right?

Brooks: That’s basically right, although different kinds of crime are more common in different areas. I mean, unsurprisingly, the more common kinds of crime in northwest D.C., which is the most prosperous part of the city, tends to be property crime. It tends to be people’s cars getting broken into or, occasionally, their houses getting broken into. Whereas in parts of northeast and southeast, in particular, that’s where you tend to see the highest levels of violent crime, particularly gun crimes, homicides, and so forth.

Frum: What does good police work look like, in your opinion?

Brooks: You know, this is actually one of our national problems, that we don’t really know what good police work is. I mean, I think we certainly know what bad police work looks like and what unconstitutional police work looks like. And we’re seeing some of it right now, frankly: you know, people being stopped with no basis, which I think courts are going to find is a violation of the Fourth Amendment prohibition on unreasonable search and seizure. That’s bad policing. Obviously, police beating people up, police engaging in profiling—that tends to be bad policing, no question.

But I think one of our problems is that we really don’t have a good handle on—this is surprising, right?—but we don’t really have a very good handle on what makes the difference in reducing crime in an enduring way. We have some theories. None of the theories have really been borne out about why we’ve seen crime go up, crime go down, not just in D.C. but nationally. You tend to see these large-scale national trends in crime going up, going down. People put forward all kinds of theories—everything from little kids eating lead paint, which has an impact on mental health and so forth and cognitive performance; to demographic changes (we do know that most violent crimes are committed by young men, from their teen years through their mid-20s); and demographic changes—but nobody really knows, which in turn means: If we don’t really quite know what reduces crime, we don’t know a whole lot of what the best kind of policing is.

Frum: Well, President Trump or, at least, the people who are running this deployment seem to have a theory. And tell me if you think I’m overstating this. So their idea is that the way you should police Washington, D.C., is: You deploy a lot of heavily armed (mostly) men, some women, in the most public areas of the city—the tourist areas, the monuments, the Wharf, which is this fancy condo-and-restaurant area near the Potomac River. You have a heavy presence, and that frightens away criminals. And then when you see somebody who looks like he might be suspicious, you chase him and you grab him and you handcuff him, and then you find out who he is. And if he is here in the country illegally, you detain him, or if there’s an arrest warrant for him, you detain him. But you don’t actually deploy that many people to the areas where the poor citizens live, and you wait, sort of, for the criminals to come to you. That seems to be the main idea of the Trump deployment.

Brooks: Yeah. So there are two pieces to that. One is: Does flooding the zone with armed people reduce crime? And the other is: Are they flooding the right zones, even if that does work?

But on the first part of that: Yes, if you put a whole lot of armed people with arrest powers into an area, you will see crime go down. Absolutely. We know that. We know that with police—it doesn’t have to be National Guard; it’ll be police. And that often happens that there will be a couple of homicides in a particular place, the police will flood the zone for a few weeks, crime will miraculously drop because, of course, criminals are not completely stupid, right? They say, Well, okay, maybe I shouldn’t go commit a crime where all those cops are standing around.

The problem with that—there are a couple problems with that approach. One is: It’s not enduring. The minute you take those cops away, whatever underlying stuff was creating that high-level crime in the first place are going to come right back. And so unless you’re prepared to permanently have vast numbers of armed people standing all over the place, it doesn’t address any of the root causes of crime—which, of course, as I said, we don’t have a great theory, but they’re probably pretty boring and long term, and they probably are not susceptible to that kind of quick fix. So it’s a temporary fix. And indeed, unless you can have armed people in the whole city, what you typically get is the kind of Whac-a-Mole problem of Okay, you’re not going to have crime in that neighborhood. The crime’s going to pop up in a different neighborhood. And what Trump is trying to do is just have so many armed people that there’s no place for it to pop up.

The irony of this, by the way: I should mention that D.C., even before this National Guard deployment—or deployment of additional FBI agents doing street-level policing, ICE, etcetera—was already, in terms of the ratio of police to people, one of the most heavily policed cities in the world because we already had so many different federal-police agencies.

But the second piece of this: I don’t think it is a great mystery, but it does not appear that they’re deploying any of these Guard troops, etcetera, FBI agents to do street policing in southeast D.C., which has the highest rates of violent crime and homicide. Those areas are very poor. They’re almost entirely Black. They don’t seem all that interested in solving actual crime.

Frum: The particular crime that seems to have befallen “Big Balls”—and again, there’s a lot of murk about what exactly happened, but something does seem to have happened to him—that seems to be a highly opportunistic kind of crime.

Brooks: Yes.

Frum: The area where it took place is a pretty affluent area, but trafficked with a lot of, like, pleasure-seekers there. You know, Swann Street, where they parked the car, is a fancy street—

Brooks: Yeah, 2 in the morning or something.

Frum: Yeah, 3 in the morning. And you’re near the bars and clubs of U Street, which are, again, very popular but at 3 in the morning probably get a little rougher than they would be at 11 o’clock at night.

Brooks: You get a lot of drunk people wandering around, a lot of people on various substances wandering around.

Frum: Right. And then you have this group of teenagers who are under 18, who don’t seem to have been allowed—who probably would not legally have been allowed—into the clubs or bars but are looking for some kind of fun. And it’s 3 in the morning, and the ones who are making good decisions have probably gone home. And the ones who are making bad decisions are still there. But unless you had a National Guard person on that corner at that moment, it’s pretty hard to know how policing prevents that kind of crime.

Brooks: No, that’s right. I think one of the challenges for all police officers everywhere is that whatever the root causes of crime, policing doesn’t necessarily have a whole lot to do with them. Police are not very good at preventing crime unless they happen to be standing there at that exact moment. They’re reasonably good at solving crimes. They’re reasonably good at finding the people who committed the crime and arresting them. But they’re not so great at preventing crime.

Needless to say, the other problem with the Let’s just flood the zone with armed people: You do that enough—there was very little crime in [Joseph] Stalin’s Moscow. If you want to have armed people on every street corner, stopping everybody and searching them without cause, you absolutely can keep crime low for a really long time, but you’re going to sacrifice a whole lot of other things.

Frum: One of the big left-right divides in our society, and this is a place where I think Donald Trump—in a lot of places, he’s aberrant from where traditional, conservative thought has been—but here’s a place where he does seem to be lined up with traditional conservative views: What do you do about people who are not actually committing a crime at that moment but who are breaking down public order?

And the classic example is the homeless encampment. There are laws against camping on public places, but they’re not criminal statutes. You’re not a criminal if you pitch your tent in a public park or near a train station. But if you or I were to do it, we’d get a ticket; we wouldn’t be charged. But if a hundred people—many of them mentally ill, many of them on drugs—do it, they really degrade the attractiveness of the neighborhood for every lawful user. And right-wing people, like me, say that’s bad and should be stopped. And left-wing people tend to say—I don’t want to exaggerate—Well, it’s not good, but it’s not their fault, and they shouldn’t be punished. And there has to be another answer beyond telling them to move along.

And Donald Trump, and this is a case where I think he’s onto something, says, Well, move along is the first step on the way to a solution. How do you think about that? How should we think about the problem of these encampments in front of places like Union Station?

Brooks: I have very mixed feelings. You know, I don’t think homelessness is the fault of most homeless people, right? That when you talk to homeless people and you find out their stories, they’re often terrible tragedies, right? They’re often the sort of series of mishaps that would knock anybody down, just the one thing after another. And yes, sometimes there are also bad choices, sometimes there’s mental illness, sometimes there’s substance abuse—but not always. You also have homeless families living on the streets because a succession of bad things happened to them. And things that end up trying to solve that problem by putting people in prison, that just compounds the tragedy.

That being said, yeah, it’s both—it’s not just unsightly; it’s dangerous, both from a public-health perspective, in terms of disease and hygiene, but also from a crime perspective. When you have a lot of desperate people and you’re walking through desperate people, people feel scared. People feel like this is not a good place to be.

I am not an expert on housing and homelessness. I don’t have a solution to this, a long-term solution to this. I think clearing out the encampments sometimes can have a good effect if you have a place for those people to go. But if you don’t have a place for those people to go except prison, that doesn’t seem like the right solution either, you know?

So I worry that what we’re seeing right now is this kind of, again, cosmetic Okay, well, we can put a lot of troops on the street. We can make these homeless people go somewhere else. And look—magic, presto: We’ve got you this beautiful city. We’ve solved crime; we’ve solved homelessness. But in fact, you haven’t solved anything. You’ve just put the problem somewhere else, and you may in the process of having done that been violating people’s rights in all kinds of ways.

Frum: Yeah. Well, let me put this even more bluntly. Homelessness is a chronic problem of urban society. In the 1890s, there were hobos. There was a terrible depression in the 1890s, and you had these men who would show up in cities riding the rails. This has now all been romanticized and sometimes treated as a kind of period-piece humor. But it was a serious problem then, as now. You would have men who are shaken—mostly men—from the existing structure of society. They’re detached from home, they’re detached from family, they’re detached from work, and they needed somewhere to go.

And the old answer that American society would be, Okay, well, we’ll have zones, which are undesirable zones. Skid row—which, I think, the first was a place in Seattle, and that the name spread—you can go to a skid row, and we’ll leave you alone, but you can’t go to the train station, you can’t go to the good neighborhoods, you can’t be in front of the library. And somewhere along the way, that previous rule broke down. And cities, especially in the more liberal states, said, You know what? The train station, the airport, the bus station, the libraries—that’s exactly where you should be. And, in fact, not only can you be there but services will be provided there. And so what used to happen in skid row now happens at Washington’s Union Station.

Brooks: I’ve spent a lot of time in desperately poor countries where there are enormous shanty towns around big cities, just tin-roofed shacks and shacks made out of cardboard. And in the United States, by and large, we don’t have that. And it has often seemed to me—we also, as you know, have an incarceration rate that is wildly higher than almost every other country in the world. The reason we don’t have shantytowns is—even pre-Trump—because we lock so many people up. That so many crimes that are linked to poverty, well, our solution has been: Well, we put people in prison. And again, that gets them out of the way. Yes, it does. It makes the city nicer for the rest of us who haven’t been arrested.

You know, I’m completely with you. I don’t think just saying, Oh, well, I guess the entire center of the city and the train station and all the public spaces—I guess it’s cool for them to be full of people who, because they’re so desperately poor and because many of them do have mental-health issues, they’re peeing there, all sorts of bad drug use is going on. I don’t think that’s good. I do think cities should have the ability to keep public spaces clean and safe, even if that means saying to people, No, you can’t be here; you’ve got to be somewhere else. But I also think that cities—not just cities, but states and the federal government—have an obligation to try, difficult as it is, to find safe places for those people to go other than prison.

Frum: Let me put us on a slightly different track and ask what this deployment is doing to the National Guard. Now, you and I have been part of group discussions about the fate of the Guard in the second Trump administration, and one of the big facts about the National Guard is, unlike the regular military, it’s really easy to quit if you don’t like the work you’re being asked to do.

And if major economic sacrifices are being imposed on the Guard’s people—and the Guard has crucial, indispensable roles to play in protecting their neighbors against natural disasters. There are disproportionate numbers of police and firefighters and EMT people who serve their neighborhood and make some extra money by giving one weekend a month to the National Guard, with the understanding: I’m on call. If there’s some disaster, I can help. But they’ve signed up for particular—they often have other jobs. They often have families. And they’ve signed up for something on one set of expectations, which are now being challenged. Do you worry, or do you have thoughts on what Trump is doing to the Guard by these kinds of deployments?

Brooks: No, I think it puts a huge strain on the Guard. And it puts a strain on their home communities, as you say, partly because these are people who are parents; these people who are taking care of older parents themselves; they’re taking care of spouses, etcetera, in addition to having jobs. And when you take them out of their community for extended periods of time for any reason, you are not only denying that community access to the services that they provide in their work—and, as you say, yes, a disproportionate percentage of people in the Guard are first responders in their own communities, not just available for emergencies, but they work full-time as police, as firefighters, as EMTs, as nurses, and similar jobs. And so you’re taking them out of their home community, but you’re also taking them out of families. And that’s a real challenge for their home communities.

I think it potentially has—and we’re seeing this already—can be really demoralizing if they’re sent to do something that they either feel is pointless or they feel is unconstitutional. You’re really putting them in a bind. And one thing, going back to your friendly criticism of liberals, David, I do really worry about: This isn’t liberals; this is more radical groups that are very hard to control, and individual people who are also very hard to control, responding to their displeasure with Trump, which is totally appropriate, by shouting at Guard troops they see in D.C. or spitting at them, things like that. They didn’t ask—these folks did not ask to be here. They’re doing their job.

And I, actually, would like them to go home and say to their neighbors, or call home and say to their friends and family, Boy, I don’t think I’m needed here. Maybe the president, who said there was a crime emergency in the streets of the Wharf and the National Mall, maybe not everything the president says is true. And by the way, these people here are really nice, right? So I’m kind of appalled at the people taking it out on the Guard.

Frum: We often in Washington have Guard deployments. I mean, every four years there’s a presidential inauguration, and the Guard is here. And I think they, by and large, have a pretty good time. They get to see some American history. They have a good view. (Laughs.)

Brooks: David, I actually, as I think you know, was a police officer on duty at President Trump’s first inauguration. And we also get police departments—

Frum: I forgot that.

Brooks: —from all over the country coming. And yes, they have a very good time. They come in for four or five days. They get deputized as deputy federal marshals. They go to bars; they get very, very drunk. They see a few sites, and then they go home again.

Frum: And when they have been here for real emergencies—I mean, I remember very vividly the massive Guard deployment here after 9/11. And again, they’re made to feel welcome: People thank them, the merchants send out coffee and soda, and they’re received as they are in hurricane and flood sites as your protectors and people who are doing a good deed at a time of need, so thank you. I mean, I really do hope everyone is polite to them and nice.

But they didn’t sign up to pick up trash, and many of them are making an economic sacrifice to do this. And they’re going to be here ’til, it looks like now, November. And so if you’re a police officer back in your hometown, or a nurse, or a retired police officer now having a second career doing something else, and you’re making more money, you’ve had to say goodbye to your employer, say goodbye to your income stream to make whatever they pay the Guard to clean up the trash in Washington, D.C., that’s gotta seem crazy to people. And it invites resignations.

Brooks: It does. And the other time that we saw a real recruiting crisis, of course, was the height of the Iraq War, when we also started sending Guard troops and Reservists to Iraq and Afghanistan, and for extended deployments and sometimes repeat deployments. And there, again, these were folks who maybe signed up for the Guard because they wanted money for their educations or because of the health insurance, or it was just a little bit of extra income and they wanted to be serving, but they were not expecting to be shipped off to Iraq for a year, and then another year, and so forth. And often they were put in positions there, too, for which they didn’t have the appropriate training.

I mean, some of the National Guard troops deployed to D.C. are MPs in the Guard—military police—so they at least have some policing, law-enforcement experience and hopefully some training and knowledge in constitutional protections from a criminal-procedure perspective.

But many of them are not. And one thing I do worry about in D.C. is: You get a whole lot of armed people, and they don’t necessarily coordinate very effectively with each other, right? Guard troops, DEA agents, D.C. Metropolitan Police Departments—they have different training, different sets of assumptions, different rules of engagement. And then, there’s something scary that happens, and you’ve got a whole lot of armed people who don’t communicate well and haven’t trained together—really bad things can happen. So that’s something I worry about as well.

Frum: There’s a famous set of rules for policing that—I don’t know if they were actually written by Robert Peel, but they’re attributed to Robert Peel, who was a British politician of the early 19th century who created the first professional police force in the Western world, in London. That’s why London police are called bobbies, after Robert Peel. And he—or whoever wrote them—had a series of principles, of which No. 1 is: We police by consent.

And that’s the reason why you don’t confuse military and police, is because the military, at least if you’re winning, they’re not there by consent. They’re advancing into the other guy’s terrain, and the people don’t want them there. That’s how you know you’re winning. Whereas the police are there, or should be there, in a democratic society because people want them.

And it was very striking during the George Floyd protests, when Washington was suddenly policed by all these strange officers from the Bureau of Prisons. And they weren’t wearing proper uniforms. They had strange—one of the things that you could tell was they all had their own shoes, that if you looked at them at foot level, you’d see everyone had different [shoes], so you knew they weren’t proper police in a proper police uniform, which comes with a standardized shoe.

Brooks: Well, you’ve got to go buy your own boots. But as long as they’re black, you don’t have to pick a specific brand.

Frum: No, these, they were wearing dad shoes. They were wearing dad shoes. And many of them didn’t seem to be in great physical condition. And they were then masked, like this phalanx. And the idea was that they were trying to—they didn’t look very intimidating one by one, but as a group they looked hostile.

Brooks: Yeah.

Frum: And they challenged the notion of, you know, Who are you here? Are you here to protect me, or are you here to protect somebody else from me?

Brooks: Right. I really strongly disapprove of the effort to, quote-unquote, unmask federal police officers by identifying them personally and using AI and facial recognition and putting their names on the internet, for the same reason I would like people to be nice to the Guard troops who are here. I think that individualizing this and personalizing it and making it about Joe Schmo, We’re going to harass you because you are here; we saw you on the streets of D.C. wearing a mask. And in many cases, again, these people don’t necessarily even want to be here. Many of these people strongly disapprove of what they’ve been sent to do. And I think that’s the wrong focus of anger.

That being said, I think it is totally appalling and counter to every principle of democratic accountability to have masked, unidentifiable people with the power to scoop you up off the street for any reason—or no reason—and we don’t know who they are, and we don’t know why they’re doing it, and we don’t know where they’re taking you. That epitomizes a police state. And if they’re not going to have people’s faces visible—and I understand the concern about people being harassed individually. You can have badge numbers; you need to have agency names on their uniforms. And we’re seeing that right now. We’re seeing the National Guard troops are identifiable. We know who they are. They’re wearing uniforms. Their faces are clear; their names are clear. But we do have an enormous number of federal agents who seem to be involved in most of the actual arrests, and we have no idea who these people are.

Frum: Do they, in fact, have the power to arrest you?

Brooks: Well, it depends on who the “they” are. But yeah—it depends on who the “they” are.

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