https://www.city-journal.org/washington-dc-security

The political reaction to the January 6 Capitol riot has been swift, starting with a hasty second impeachment of Trump but quickly extending as well to a security presence of unprecedented might. Washington is now a “warzone,” says an elderly neighbor who survived the Holocaust and has lived in the city for more than four decades. “It’s terrible,” she told me by phone after surveying the elaborate measures defending the city’s center. “I never thought this would happen in the United States of America.” A broad swath of the city, including Capitol Hill, the Mall, the Tidal Basin, the White House, the State Department, Union Station, the blocks around them, the main bridges crossing the Potomac, and the entire riverfront to Georgetown, is blocked to all but authorized traffic. To the north and south of this Orwellian forbidden zone, designated “Red,” a smaller “Green Zone”—no sense of self-awareness relating to the one in Baghdad—allows limited traffic for local residents who are now asked for their papers in a grim evocation of entering East Berlin. All Metro stations within them are closed. Another Washington friend posted video of the city’s broad but empty avenues, which he described as “eerie.”

All of it is defended by 25,000 National Guardsmen sent from 13 states, supported by an additional 2,000 regular military servicemen and federal and D.C. law enforcement. They are enthusiastically supported by Washington’s mayor Muriel Bowser, who less than eight months ago angrily demanded that the National Guard withdraw from her city amid violent demonstrations of a different sort; she then named a street after those demonstrators.