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.
Children watch a July Fourth Parade along the Walkway of Heroes and Independence Avenue on July 04, 2026 in Tappan, New York.
The Great American Grumpfest
Our nation’s 250th birthday party didn’t feel especially patriotic and wasn’t as much fun as the 200th anniversary was.
President Trump, who did his best to co-opt our holiday for his personal aggrandizement, was a major reason. The party he threw in Washington, D.C., was crankier than uplifting, and less about celebrating our shared past and a promising future than about reminding us how far we have strayed from our founders’ plan to create a republic that future Americans would keep in good working order.
Credit Trump this much. He has a singular gift for picking at scabs that other politicians would rather ignore and pushing us into reckonings we don’t need.
The thing is, Americans have seen all this before. Sometimes the makeover we were encouraged to undertake was more conservative, sometimes more liberal. Whatever direction we were pushing, however, the reckoning we had in mind this time had to be more forthright and the conclusion more definitive than it was the last time.
Our current discontents, the ones behind the reckoning President Trump has been trying to inspire, are not trivial. Included among them are immigration, birthright citizenship, exploding healthcare costs, election rigging, a gag-inducing national debt, how we educate our children, too many genders, racial differences we can’t move past, a lopsided economy that favors more well-off Americans, and historic levels of political corruption and graft. Add to these the several foreign adventures he has pushed us into or is anxious to undertake, and you have the makings of a national headache the likes of which we haven’t had in half a century.
All the elbow-throwing and overheated rhetoric we’re using today have begun to look almost normal in all the ways that bickering neighbors and feuding family members appear normal. But they have also made us look mean-spirited and have portrayed our differences as irreconcilable. To ourselves, of course, but also to many people outside the United States who might be forgiven for turning their heads and not looking at the national car wreck we Americans show no interest in avoiding.
The good news, as I suggested above, is that Americans have had a great deal of practice dealing with challenges and national car wrecks like these.
This essay begins to lay out the reasons why.
By way of illustration, we have our seemingly insatiable demand for more bad news about race in America.
Sixty years after being released from the legal constrictions that bedeviled both white and black Americans, many white people have come to believe the color that used to make them unassailable is now a sign of a moral inferiority born of a racial animus they can never wash off. Many black people, on the other hand, are insisting that America is as hopelessly stacked against them as the formerly unassailable white people’s ancestors used to tell their black ones.
The result is that many people today are buying into racist nightmares and mumbo jumbo that their black and white ancestors worked hard and effectively to put in each other’s heads.
This might be dismissed as crazy behavior if it weren’t so important to rituals Americans have long used to express their deepest fears about each other while figuring out what move they can make that won’t end with their world crashing down on everybody’s head.
Unfortunately, the kind of cultural sleight of hand we have used to ramp up our racial differences has been appropriated by people who have many other cultural fears and unresolved differences with each other. Their clumsy but culturally prescribed missteps are making all these other issues look as irremediable as our racial problems.
A good place to start an answer to how we back away from ledges is Alexis de Tocqueville’s writing on early-19th-century American democracy. He had an optimistic take on Americans’ unscripted displays of public bravado, recrimination, and payback.
For him, these were occasions when people tried to mitigate the effects of the unfair hand they were dealing someone else or had themselves been dealt by behaving in ways quite at odds with how they would otherwise be expected to act. These inversions of what Tocqueville called “the natural order of conscience” presented themselves as a loud but culturally muted challenge to the hypocrisies that people had built into the world they’d made together.
One of his favorite illustrations of early-American hypocrisy involved slave masters sleeping with their less-than-worthy slaves. To the best of my knowledge, he didn’t pick up on all the ways that slaves messed with their owners. Their well-chronicled and quiet resistance showed that even severely ill-treated people can exercise more control over their lives than outsiders appreciate.
Be that as it may, such inversions of a people’s “natural order of conscience” make a good public show of them wrestling with demons they can’t or may not want to shake off, but in any case, are nowhere close to figuring out how to cast out.
Implicit in these disruptions was the discomforting idea that people might flip the entire script and turn the world on its head in more permanent ways. That kind of flipping worked out better for us in our revolution against England than in our Civil War. These events taught us the value of stepping back from historically unprecedented ledges.
Americans of late have been giving loud expression to a long list of things they don’t like about each other and the last makeover they started but didn’t finish a half-century ago. The outcome of our fights today will be as revealing as they are embarrassing to everyone who imagined they could recast our country in a way that privileged their favorite kind of Americans.
Their disappointment with the accommodations they strike will be palpable, but the middling results they achieve with all their pushing and shoving won’t be anything they can’t live with.
Anthropologists who have written about such moments in other cultures less “advanced” than our own show that people find ways to work around their seemingly irreconcilable differences without ever fully resolving them. Indeed, the patches and repairs people make have the unheralded effect of reinforcing rather than undermining the legitimacy of the practices and values they thought were fundamentally flawed.
For example…
White guilt and black pessimism do more good than putting cash into the pockets of professional shamers and handwringers. They give the rest of us who don’t feel guilty or powerless more time to make the world less racially unequal. Good news.
Regarding illegal immigration, the entrance requirements for future immigrants will remain stringent. Americans will applaud the continued detention and deportation of the few illegal immigrants who commit serious crimes. Good news.
All the people who came to the United States without being legally vetted and were locked up for a time will be released in numbers small enough to avoid serious media attention. Along with the several million other good people who snuck in but avoided capture, the former detainees will go to school, find gainful employment, pay their taxes, and stay out of trouble. Many will eventually become citizens. Good news.
Investigations into election tampering and Donald Trump’s 2020 presidential loss will come to an unceremonious conclusion the day after his second term ends. Many Americans will grumble about this, but there will also be some quiet partying, too. Good and bad news.
Congressional hearings into all the grifting accomplished by people tied to the Trump administration will end without anyone having to pay a dime back to the American taxpayers. Bad news, we’ll learn to live with.
New laws and regulations will be created in the hope that the kind of corruption practiced by President Trump will not be repeated for another 250 years. Good news, I hope we’ll live long enough to enjoy.
Show trials for people who allegedly vandalized the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, if they happen, will get big television viewer ratings. Good news.
Trials for pardoned Capitol insurrectionists who committed serious crimes after their release should get more attention, but won’t. Bad news.
We will continue to hear nothing from most of the people who were pardoned for crimes they committed in the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. They will keep their mouths shut and their heads down for the rest of their life. Good news.
The gold-gilded ornaments that Donald Trump had plastered all over the White House will be shipped to Mar-a-Lago, where the former president will sell them on eBay. Fun news.
American taxpayers end up paying for most of the new East Wing, the removal of the miniature gladiatorial arena that was built behind the White House, and the restoration of the White House rose garden. Bad news.
The Triumphal Arch was never built. Good news.
Trad wives and gay couples raise perfectly lovely children. Good but unsurprising news.
Trans men and women learn that most Americans can’t figure out who they used to be. No one gives a second thought to their use of “family bathrooms” or “unisex bathrooms” in public settings, businesses, and schools. Communities will sponsor athletic teams that have trans boys and girls just to show they can. Good news.
Budget deficits will be kicked down the road for someone else’s children to pay down. Bad news.
Federal agencies that had their budgets and employee ranks slashed during President Trump’s second term are getting some of the money and lost positions back. Good news.
Elite universities will buy their way out of DEI purgatory by competing for conservative scholars whose inflated salaries dwarf those of their liberal colleagues, who will think about suing their institutions for reverse discrimination but won’t be able to figure out who would pay for it or care. More fun news.
Okay. I’ve probably missed some ways that Americans will step back from the ledges they have been making noises about leaping off. But to the extent that my predictions pan out, the best and most important moral of the stories about us stepping away is this: everything we lost and took back, or had returned to us, will have happened without our government collapsing, civic traditions crumbling, or our people beating each other up.
The reason why is that the differences Americans have with each other really weren’t as irreconcilable as we made them out to be. The empty-sounding bromide that Americans have more that unites us than divides us turns out to be true, not just metaphorically but in fact.
Now that is really something to celebrate.
Daniel J. Monti (danieljmonti.com) is Professor of Sociology at Saint Louis University and the author of American Democracy and Disconsent: Liberalism and Illiberalism in Ferguson, Charlottesville, Black Lives Matter, and the Capitol Insurrection.