Just a day after a trio of arcade games satirizing the Trump administration’s war in Iran were erected at the D.C. War Memorial, members of the National Guard were spotted giving the fully-functional games a whirl.
Some 2,500 members of the National Guard were sent into Washington, D.C., by President Donald Trump last year as part of his purported crime crackdown in the nation’s capital. But for nearly eight months, the Guard has done little else other than beautify parks, shovel snow in the winter and stroll the National Mall alongside tourists when the weather is agreeable. Notably, crime was already declining in D.C. when Trump sent the troops.
The deployment in D.C. has no set end date. The taxpayer cost to keep the troops in town is more than $1 million a day, according to The Associated Press.
“We think it’s wonderful to see people serving the country enjoying the game,” Secret Handshake, the group behind the display of arcade games, said in a statement to HuffPost. “When we made this, we made sure that the comedy and the critique is wholly toward the administration, not the military and certainly not the people serving in it.”
The installation, according to the group, took three weeks to make and will only be at the D.C. War Memorial for a couple more days.
