Hurry up and wait. Pick up trash. Paint rocks.

The National Guard ending crime in Washington D.C.: Fox News

I don’t know exactly where it is, but somewhere in the Bible, there has got to be a verse that says, First God created work; then he created make-work. It took exactly two weeks for the 2,200 National Guard soldiers deployed in Washington D.C. to hit the make-work stage. Today, uniformed National Guard soldiers were seen in the touristy areas of the District in orange and yellow safety vests picking up trash. More soldiers were laboring over near the Tidal Basin raking mulch. The Washington Post reported that 200 employees of the Park Service used to do those jobs, but Elon Musk and DOGE came to town and decimated the Park Service, and now there are only 20.

So, with a couple thousand Army guys standing around doing nothing, the White House said, let’s put them to use. Or maybe nobody had to say anything. That’s the way make-work works. Yesterday, at his three and a half hour Praise Our Lord Trump Fest of a cabinet meeting, Trump announced that he had solved the D.C. crime problem. Someone at the White House clearly noticed that there was starting to be some reporting, complete with pictures and video, showing soldiers standing around D.C. street corners and hanging around the Mall doing nothing. A bureaucratic tendency quickly came to life: What you do with vacuums containing nothing is, well, you fill them, and if you can’t come up with anything to fill the vacuums with, then you fill them with nothing, which is the very definition of make-work.

With a guy like Trump, that’s easy. If you’re an ass-kissing underling eager to make the boss happy – in other words, the entirety of the current Executive Branch – you quickly examine the boss’ obsessions, another thing that’s easy to do, since he comes up with a new one about every three minutes, and harps on his older obsessions during the two minutes in between. Our nation’s capital isn’t beautiful enough for him, so he’s been going on about “beautification.” There is trash on the streets and in the parks. Something is wrong with the “traffic medians” – he doesn’t say exactly what the problem is, but trust me, there is an entire floor of the Executive Office building trying to figure it out, so they can do something to fix “the medians” and make him happy.

The way it works in the Army is the way it’s working in Washington D.C. right now. What you do is, you clean and polish everywhere the boss is likely to walk, drive, or observe from a helicopter. Soldiers are dispatched to pick up trash along the road the commander drives to work every day. On Army posts, the “main drag,” as it’s called, from the post gate to the headquarters building, is groomed to within an inch of its life, the same with the roads taken by lesser commanders to their headquarters – grass cut to a measured height of inches, sidewalk edges trimmed, trash picked up, signs straightened so they’re perfectly vertical, fresh paint on every visible surface.

At the commanders’ headquarters, the nit-picking gets real nitty. Names of commander and staff are stenciled on parking spots; rocks chosen for the perfection of their size and roundness are painted white to line the sidewalks.

In Washington D.C. right now, metaphorically the National Guard is painting rocks. Trump’s obsession with traffic medians doubtlessly comes from the infrequent occasions he is stuffed into the back of his bulletproof SUV appropriately called “The Beast” and driven the few blocks necessary to get him to a location such as the Federal Reserve headquarters, to give a recent example. Traffic medians efficiently move the traffic from lane to lane. Trump’s security convoys create lanes and efficiencies of their own, of course, so medians must appear superfluous to him. Or perhaps they are unsightly. Or maybe he saw a Starbucks cup resting against a median curb one time. Who knows.

But he is the Big Boss now, boys, so we’re going to do what the Boss wants. Pick up that Starbucks cup! Groom that mulch! Move that median! It’s in the President’s way!

There is, believe it or not, an upside to Trump’s egotistical claims like his two-week “solving” of the D.C. crime problem. It has to do with his need for approbation and the worship of underlings. The astounding brevity of his attention span plays a major role as well. No problem is so difficult that it can’t be “solved” by Trumpian genius in the blink of an eye, don’t you know.

No matter what he does, Trump moves along to the next thing. Right now, it’s violent crime. Put some armed soldiers on the streets, and it goes away…at least where it’s visible to him, anyway. In Southeast D.C. on the other side of the Anacostia River, where no National Guard soldier has apparently yet set foot, and where actual crimes are an actual problem – well, it’s not on the route taken by “The Beast,” is it? Of course not, so forget it.

It's all a show, and it’s all for ratings. That’s the way Trump lived every day of his life in New York City. He had to be in the tabloid gossip columns in order to breathe. The way he measured “success” when he was on “The Apprentice” was by his ratings. Ratings and polls still rule his day, his week, his month.

He used to pick up the phone and call the desk at “Page Six” in the New York Post and pretend to be a publicist pitching himself as an item for that day. He dined at this restaurant; he was seen with that starlet; he made a deal; he was on the Forbes list of the richest Americans.

Now he picks up the phone and tells Hegseth to put two thousand National Guard soldiers on the street. Then he complains about the Starbucks cup he saw from the backseat of “The Beast” and 500 of those soldiers are carrying black plastic bags and picking up sandwich wrappers and Starbucks cups and soft drink cans.

Joni Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi” got it so right: “They paved paradise and put up a parking lot.” The only thing missing in that genius lyric is “at Donald Trump’s White House.”