When presidents deploy the National Guard, it’s usually to handle hurricanes, riots, or disasters. Donald Trump has found a darker use for it: punishing political opponents.
Over recent months, Trump has sent federalized Guard units into Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., Memphis, and now Chicago—where roughly 300 Illinois Guardsmen have been federalized and another 400 troops brought in from Texas. He calls it “law and order,” but the pattern is clear: Democratic-led cities are being targeted as enemy territory. Governors and mayors have objected, but Trump is testing how far he can stretch Title 10, the section of U.S. law that allows the president to federalize the National Guard in limited cases of invasion or rebellion—a law meant for national crisis, not political theater.
Weaponizing a Policy Tool
Title 10, which lets the president federalize the Guard during invasion, rebellion, or when “regular forces” can’t execute the law, has never been used to send troops into cities over protests or immigration disputes.
Title 10 lets the president federalize the Guard during invasion or rebellion, or when “regular forces” can’t execute the law. No president has ever used that clause to send troops into cities over protests or immigration disputes. Trump’s lawyers now argue his administration can’t “execute the laws of the United States” because local leaders resist immigration enforcement—a claim legal experts call “contrived.”
Courts are split. In Oregon, Judge Karin Immergut blocked Trump’s order, ruling that protests “did not pose a danger of rebellion.” In Illinois, Judge April Perry allowed deployments to continue while the state’s case proceeds. Governor J.B. Pritzker called the move “unlawful and unconstitutional,” accusing Trump of using troops as “political props.” Attorney General Kwame Raoul warned that Americans “should not live under the threat of occupation simply because their city or state leadership has fallen out of a president’s favor.”
Trump remains defiant. “We have an Insurrection Act for a reason,” he told reporters. “If I had to enact it, I’d do that.” Speaking to military commanders, he called “civil disturbances” the enemy within and even floated the idea of using “some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military”—as if U.S. troops were pawns on a partisan chessboard, pushed forward in a grudge match between the president and his political opponents.
Federalism on Life Support
Trump’s use of the Guard echoes his broader pattern of consolidating power—continuing resolutions and Schedule F weren’t isolated tactics but part of the same impulse to bypass local authority and concentrate decision‑making in the executive branch.
By invoking Title 10, Trump cuts governors out of the chain of command. What was once a shared institution—the citizen-soldier Guard—becomes an arm of presidential control. It mirrors the rest of his second term: centralized budgets through continuing resolutions, civil service purges under Schedule F, and government by executive order rather than legislation. This is not cooperation—it’s coercion.
This isn’t federalism; it’s federal occupation. The message to Democratic mayors and governors is simple: submit or be overrun. Each time Trump blurs the line between state autonomy and national command, he normalizes a presidency that treats dissent as rebellion and tramples the very Constitution he swore to uphold.
The Insurrection Act Looms
If Title 10 is a warning shot, the Insurrection Act would be a constitutional earthquake. The 1807 law lets presidents deploy troops domestically without state consent, even for arrests and searches. It’s been used sparingly—most notably in 1992 during the Rodney King riots. Trump now treats it as a standing option, saying he’d invoke it “if people were being killed and courts or governors were holding us up.”
Legal scholars see danger ahead. Georgetown’s Stephen Vladeck warns that courts have never clearly defined limits on this authority. “We’ve been fortunate for 230 years not to have to draw that line,” he said. “That luck has run out.” (NPR,Trump’s power to deploy National Guard, explained)
The New Face of Authoritarianism
Taken together, the executive orders, budget maneuvers, and troop deployments reveal a clear pattern: Trump doesn’t govern; he performs. The military and federal agents serve as stage props in his made‑for‑TV presidency. In Chicago, Border Patrol agents recently shot a civilian during a raid, and elsewhere federal teams rappelled from Black Hawk helicopters in televised arrests. Each episode blurs the line between policing and occupation.
This is more than strongman theater—it’s a stress test for the Constitution. When a president can redefine dissent as rebellion and courts hesitate to intervene, the balance of power that anchors American democracy begins to crumble. Meanwhile, the GOP‑led Congress stands by as Trump shreds the constitutional fabric.
What’s at Stake
The power to send troops into any city without state consent turns federalism into submission. It teaches future presidents that military force is just another political tool. Courts will eventually rule, but executive action moves faster than judicial restraint. That imbalance—between how quickly a president can act and how slowly democracy can respond—is how republics fail.
Trump isn’t merely expanding authority; he’s militarizing politics. Each time he crosses a line without consequence, the line disappears. The U.S. may not be under martial law yet, but for millions in cities branded “lawless” by their own president, it’s starting to feel that way.
Congress, dominated by partisans too afraid to challenge Trump, has become an enabler of this creeping militarization. But citizens don’t have the luxury of complacency. Civil society must step in where institutions falter: watchdog groups can document abuses; journalists can expose deployments for what they are—political theater, not public safety; and local communities can organize legal defense funds, support whistleblowers, and demand state-level protections against federal overreach. Democracy isn’t self-cleaning—it survives only when ordinary people defend its guardrails.
Robert Cropf is a professor of political science at Saint Louis University.
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.