Even the men and women of the National Guard seemed flummoxed, at times, over what exactly they were supposed to be doing in the nation’s capital.“We’re the president’s patrol, ma’am,” one trio from South Carolina told us when we spotted them along the waterfront and asked what they were up to.“Just walkin’ around,” replied another gaggle—also strolling along the Potomac.“Smiling and waving,” a third group, up from West Virginia and stationed along the National Mall, told us.President Donald Trump’s decision this month to deploy the National Guard to the streets of Washington, D.C., unleashed a torrent of coverage, criticism, and fear, along with a smattering of muted praise from some residents. More than two weeks later, soldiers are still deployed throughout the city, a physical presence amid the capital’s greenery as summer fades into fall. Their mission is ostensibly to stop violent crime, but many here and beyond fear that Washington is being used as a test case—the blueprint for Trump to deploy the National Guard across the country as a paramilitary police force—and that Americans are being conditioned to accept authoritarianism. (Trump seemed to say the quiet part aloud Tuesday in a Cabinet meeting when he declared, “The line is that I’m a dictator,” before claiming that he’s succeeding in halting crime in the city. “So a lot of people say, ‘You know, if that’s the case, I’d rather have a dictator.’”)Trump’s federalization of the District has several parts: There’s the deployment of more than 2,200 (and counting) Guard members. But there are also the hundreds of federal officers from agencies such as the FBI and DEA who are helping enforce D.C. laws, the immigration-enforcement officers who have been empowered to detain anyone not in the country legally, and the D.C. police force over which the president has asserted control. Social media has been flooded with alarming videos:masked federal officers violently wrestling a food-delivery driver to the ground, kids having to push through heavily armed officers on their way to elementary school.The Guardsmen were initially unarmed, but Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Monday ordered them to start carrying their issued weapons. In most cases, it’s a small handgun on their hip. Photos have circulated of Guard members with assault rifles in some Metro stations and on their outdoor patrols. Defense officials told us these weapons can be used only in self-defense.[Read: Trump’s Farcical D.C. Crackdown]The occupation has chilled life in the city, especially in neighborhoods with large immigrant populations: quiet playgrounds, empty restaurants, fewer street vendors, fewer food-delivery scooters. Nannies have stayed home, and house cleaners have canceled. Some mixed-status families are keeping their children home from school or skipping work until the federal focus moves on, or they’re only leaving home when absolutely necessary. As D.C. public schools reopened this week, some local parent-teacher groups organized impromptu “walking buses”—volunteers willing to help walk to and from school kids whose parents don’t feel safe doing so.The National Guard has become the face of the occupation even though, for those who feel afraid, it’s in many respects the least of their worries. The Guardsmen themselves have generally behaved more like a notional guard than a national one.Their sudden appearance brings with it an absurdist sheen—their tasks quotidian (“beautification”), their backdrops farcical (a Dupont Circle Krispy Kreme), their very presence sitcom-esque (as if lifted from an episode of Veep). Alongside a video of troops engaged in light horticulture, one person wondered on social media, “National guardner?” It is not entirely surprising that the Justice Department paralegal who hurled a Subway salami footlong at a Customs and Border Protection officer—declaring, upon his arrest, “I did it. I threw a sandwich”—promptly became an icon of D.C. resistance, his act seeming, in its own implausible way, to epitomize the city’s collective reaction. But the banality of the National Guard’s daily patrols belies a far more complicated reality—for the city’s residents, the men and women of the National Guard, even the nation itself—colored by race, class, immigration status, lived experience, and, of course, personal politics. The absent nannies and missed house cleanings are a frustrating inconvenience for the families who employ them, but a physical manifestation of the sense of menace that their employees feel.The photos bouncing around social media and private text chains—of the Guard milling in front of the uber-trendy 14th Street brasserie Le Diplomate, for instance—might be easy fodder for gentle mockery. “National Guard members are deployed in DC to the “crime-ridden”…National Mall? Le Diplomate? Waste of money,” the Senate Judiciary Democrats posted on X Monday. But while homicide rates in D.C. have been declining in recent years, the city’s overall crime statistics offer a far more mixed picture, one in which the threat of violent crime still feels very real to many residents. That Krispy Kreme? Two teens were stabbed in Dupont Circle and one man was shot in June just steps from its entrance, amid the city’s Pride celebrations. And Le Diplomate, with its $41 steak frites and $76 Thursday special (Dover sole meunière)? A shooting in 2021, on a beautiful summer evening, sent diners fleeing. A more recent one this May, just a block away, left one man dead. And a disconcertingly large number of residents have personal crime anecdotes.During a news conference Wednesday, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser seemed to channel her own ambivalence, and perhaps some of her city’s as well. She credited Trump’s federal law-enforcement surge with reducing crime in the District, but she also expressed concern about the Guard presence and the immigration crackdown. Asked about “nervous Hispanic workers,” she pointedly said that she wanted to “express to them as a neighbor how very sorry I am that they’re living in this terror.”The particulars are no less complicated for the Guardsmen themselves. When the president first ordered their deployment to the nation’s capital, Pentagon officials told us that some Guard leaders asked: “Is this legal?” After all, the National Guard is usually deployed by governors to combat threats from nature—hurricanes or other natural disasters—or by the president to support U.S. military missions abroad, as it did in Iraq and Afghanistan. When the Guard shows up to protect Americans from fellow Americans, it is under extraordinary circumstances and for a limited mission, such as after the U.S. Capitol riot on January 6, 2021—the last time the government deployed the D.C National Guard to the city to address an emergency.In their initial doubts, what some Guardsmen were really asking was existential: Are we becoming something different? After all, the National Guard appears to have a new kind of mission, one that began in Los Angeles when Trump federalized the Guard over immigration concerns; moved to D.C. under the auspices of addressing “rampant violence and disorder”; and, according to Trump, could soon expand to Chicago and Baltimore.This ambiguity not only invites confusion and raises fears of troops conducting more police-like functions, but it also thrusts the National Guard into the middle of political disputes. The more often it is deployed in politically divisive missions—instead of the more routine apolitical assignments to disaster zones—the more perilous the Guard’s standing becomes among the American public.[Read: How Does Trump’s Federal Takeover End?]There is also the concern that the Guard is not actually making much of a difference. To wit: On Wednesday around 3 p.m.—less than a week after Trump declared on social media that “Washington, D.C. is SAFE AGAIN!”—a woman was stabbed near a major intersection along the city’s H Street corridor. Guard members had been passing through the intersection all day, and a trio happened to be finishing lunch on the patio of a taqueria directly across the street when the stabbing happened. Still, the suspect managed to flee. The Guard declined to comment.“So safe,” a neighborhood resident texted us.To some—especially undocumented immigrants—the Guard presence is disconcerting at best, terrifying at worst. But to others, they are more curiosity than conquerors, more tourists than tormentors.“They’re giving ‘Hey, pal’ vibes,” one woman whispered to her companion this week, observing Guardsman ambling along the waterfront.Often, the Guard presents with a certain Boy Scout earnestness. On Tuesday, military officials shared that the troops had completed “beautification projects,” describing the efforts not unlike a merit-badge mission: First, Guardsmen collected driftwood while clearing the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial. The following day, they turned that wood into mulch and wielded wheelbarrows as they spread it around the Tidal Basin. (Before their weapons orders came down, some—like Cub Scouts in training—were armed with only their trusty metal water bottles, jammed deep into their cargo pockets.)Hegseth has repeatedly described his desire to create a U.S. military force focused on lethality. But Christopher Le Mon, a former Biden- and Obama-administration national-security official, joked to us that the troops’ landscaping duties seemed more like a focus on “leafality.” The use of troops for such missions is “ridiculous and wasteful,” he said, adding more seriously: “Meanwhile the Chinese military probably is training to invade Taiwan.”More than half of the troops hail from outside of D.C., and the tourism vibe is strong. On Monday, some Guard members sat resting in a patch of shade in front of the Washington Monument, alongside a group of tired schoolchildren. A few minutes later, a different group of Guardsmen boarded a charter bus, as if readying for their next sightseeing stop. At the city’s Wharf, one Guardsman obligingly took a photo of a couple before two of his comrades in arms joined the couple in the picture.“You guys are so sweet!” the woman enthused.Yet, again, the reality is far more complicated. Yes, the Guard has demonstrated instances of admirable sweetness; one Capitol Hill resident and father of two recounted to us how troops on the Mall allowed his 4-year-old son to press the buttons on their walkie-talkies. But, this person continued, on Monday he had gotten off the Metro at the Eastern Market stop and found that a group of fare-jumping teens who regularly hop the turnstiles had been halted by a combination of Guardsmen and police officers. He said that he’s long found the fare-hoppers to be a frustration of city living, yet added, “I don’t know that this was a problem that rose to the level of Let’s deploy the National Guard with their long guns.”A lawyer who lives on Capitol Hill told us that she had observed something different at the Eastern Market stop Monday, when most D.C. Public Schools opened for the new year: A scrum of moms—or possibly teachers—standing in front of the Guard, holding up signs. “At first I thought the group of women were protesting the Guard,” she told us. “But then I looked at the signs and they literally said things like First day of school! and You got this!”“It just struck me as an example of why this is such a farce and so unnecessary,” she continued. “This is a community where moms stand outside and encourage kids on the first day of school.” The District, she said, “is not a community that needs to be militarized.”At Union Station, in the shadow of the Capitol, the troops got a decidedly mixed reaction as we looked on one afternoon this week. Some commuters held up phones as they passed by, recording out of curiosity or for posterity. A woman in workout gear was more confrontational, filming the Guardsmen at close range and repeatedly demanding, “What’s your mission?” Others were quietly supportive: One woman flashed a quick thumbs-up, and another slipped a sentry a rose-colored Vitamin Water.At one point, a man, head shorn, sidled up to a police officer and a Guardsman to offer explicit praise. The man said that usually at Union Station, “every breath was weed,” but he hasn’t so much as smelled a hint of marijuana smoke since the Guard stationed itself in the area. He said he also normally witnesses at least a handful of fare-jumpers every trip, and enthused that those, too, have disappeared. He hoped the Guardsman were hearing the praise they deserved, he said.By the time we headed home, after several hours spent wandering the city’s various quadrants, it was clear that almost no one felt particularly good about the arrangement: not the National Guardsmen, many of whom clearly didn’t want to be there, leaving their families and jobs in order to spread mulch and pick up trash; and not the residents, many of whom were furious with the occupation of their city or, worse, terrified of what the military’s presence portended for them and their loved ones. Even those residents who welcomed the troops did so from a place of discontent, so fed up with crime and quality-of-life issues that they felt relieved that someone was finally doing something, anything to help.[Read: Trump’s Dreams for D.C. Could Soon Hit Reality]Earlier in the day, sitting on a bench at the Wharf, we watched a lone man in fatigues wander by, earbuds in. “Where’s the rest of your trio?” we called out, by now accustomed to seeing Guardsmen in groups of three. “Where are your other two?” He stopped, took out his earbuds, and leaned toward us, revealing the patch on his uniform that stated his military branch.“I’m Space Force,” he offered cheerily. He looked blissful, as if in the weeks since Trump deployed the military to Washington, he had come to understand that managing the cosmos was less complicated than being responsible for even a few blocks of the capital.