Donald Trump deployed camo-clad members of the National Guard to Washington, D.C., to pick up trash this week, a decision that is “bizarre on many levels,” Chris Hayes said Wednesday.
“Soldiers wear camouflage to conceal themselves from the enemy they want to kill,” Hayes said. “Safety vests are what municipal workers put on so you can see them at work.”
What Americans are witnessing is “the cognitive dissonance of soldiers doing the work of a municipal crew in a supposedly crime-ridden major American city,” he continued, something that is “bizarre on many levels, not least of which is the fact that Trump’s Secretary of Defense keeps saying that troops should be warriors and killers.”
The Trump administration “mobilized 2,200 National Guard soldiers from as far away as Louisiana, by the way, who have lives and jobs, to come to Washington and do the work of the National Park Service,” Hayes later said.
Those soldiers were sent to D.C. to theoretically “support federal law enforcement and local police, but in recent days those orders have expanded to encompass beautification tasks such as trash removal and groundskeeping around the National Mall and other federal properties.”
If this sounds like the type of work that another government organization should be doing, that’s because it is: “Now, typically, the Washington Post says this kind of work falls to the National Park Service, which would make sense, and was already understaffed when Trump and the so-called Doge Efficiency Project purged them this Spring,” Hayes continued.
Up to 90% of National Park jobs were cut for “no reason” and “they never saved any money.”
On top of that, DOGE is “mired in lawsuits with thousands of other workers” who were “illegally fired.”
Watch the segment from Chris Hayes in the video above.
