Trump Is Nudging the US Toward a Genuine Police State

Earlier this month, President Donald Trump threatened to unleash the armed forces on more American cities during a rambling address to top military brass. He told the hundreds of generals and admirals gathered to hear him that some of them would be called upon to take a primary role at a time when his administration has launched occupations of American cities, deployed tens of thousands of troops across the United States, created a framework for targeting domestic enemies, cast his political rivals as subhuman, and asserted his right to wage secret war and summarily execute those he deems terrorists.

Trump used that bizarre speech to take aim at cities he claimed “are run by the radical left Democrats,” including Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, and San Francisco. “We’re going to straighten them out one by one. And this is going to be a major part for some of the people in this room,” he said. “That’s a war too. It’s a war from within.” He then added: “We should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military.”

Trump has, of course, already deployed the armed forces inside the United States in an unprecedented fashion during the first year of his second term in office. As September began, a federal judge found that his decision to occupy Los Angeles with members of California’s National Guard—under so-called Title 10 or federalized status—against the wishes of California Gov. Gavin Newsom was illegal. But just weeks later, Trump followed up by ordering the military occupation of Portland, Oregon, over Gov. Tina Kotek’s objections.

“I am directing Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, to provide all necessary Troops to protect War ravaged Portland and any of our ICE Facilities under siege from attack by Antifa, and other domestic terrorists,” Trump wrote on Truth Social late last month. And he “authoriz[ed] Full Force, if necessary.”

“When military troops police civilians, we have an intolerable threat to individual liberty and the foundational values of this country.”

When a different federal judge blocked him from deploying Oregon National Guardsmen to the city, he ordered in guard members from California and Texas. That judge then promptly blocked his effort to circumvent her order, citing the lack of a legal basis for sending troops into Portland. In response, Trump threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act—an 1807 law that grants the president emergency powers to deploy troops on US soil—to “get around” the court rulings blocking his military occupation efforts. “I think that’s all insurrection, really criminal insurrection,” he claimed, in confused remarks from the Oval Office.

Experts say that his increasing use of the armed forces within the United States represents an extraordinary violation of the Posse Comitatus Act. That bedrock 19th-century law banning the use of federal troops to execute domestic law enforcement has long been seen as fundamental to America’s democratic tradition. However, the president’s deployments continue to nudge this country ever closer to becoming a genuine police state. They come amid a raft of other Trump administration authoritarian measures designed to undermine the Constitution and weaken democracy. Those include attacks on birthright citizenship and free speech, as well as the exercise of expansive unilateral powers like deporting people without due process and rolling back energy regulations, citing wartime and emergency powers.

A Presidential Police Force

US District Judge Charles Breyer ruled last month that Trump’s deployment of federal troops to Los Angeles, which began in June, was illegal and harkened back to Britain’s use of soldiers for law enforcement purposes in colonial America. He warned that Trump clearly intends to transform the National Guard into a presidential police force.

“Congress spoke clearly in 1878 when it passed the Posse Comitatus Act, prohibiting the use of the US military to execute domestic law,” Breyer wrote in his 52-page opinion. “Nearly 140 years later, Defendants—President Trump, Secretary of Defense Hegseth, and the Department of Defense—deployed the National Guard and Marines to Los Angeles, ostensibly to quell a rebellion and ensure that federal immigration law was enforced… Yet there was no rebellion, nor was civilian law enforcement unable to respond to the protests and enforce the law.”

The judge ruled that the Pentagon had systematically used armed soldiers to perform police functions in California in violation of Posse Comitatus and planned to do so elsewhere in America. As he put it, “President Trump and Secretary Hegseth have stated their intention to call National Guard troops into federal service in other cities across the country… thus creating a national police force with the President as its chief.”

In the face of that scathing opinion, the president has nonetheless ramped up his urban military occupations, while threatening to launch yet more of them. “Now we’re in Memphis… and we’re going to Chicago,” Trump told a large crowd of sailors in Norfolk, Virginia, during a celebration of the Navy’s 250th anniversary earlier this month. “And so we send in the National Guard, we… send in whatever’s necessary. People don’t care.”

As October began, Trump had already deployed an unprecedented roughly 35,000 federal troops within the United States, according to my reporting at The Intercept. Those forces, drawn from the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, and National Guard, have been or will soon be deployed under Title 10 authority, or federal control, in at least seven states—Arizona, California, Florida, Illinois, New Mexico, Oregon, and Texas—to aid and enforce the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant agenda, while further militarizing America. Other guardsmen, being sent to cities across the country ranging from Memphis to New Orleans, are serving under Title 32 status, which means they will officially be under state control, a measure Trump uses in states with Republican governors.

National Guard forces deployed to Washington, DC as part of Trump’s federal takeover of the district in August are operating under the same Title 32 status. But with no governor to report to, the DC National Guard’s chain of command runs from its commanding general directly to the secretary of the Army, then to Pete Hegseth, and finally to Trump himself.

In September, a long-threatened occupation of Chicago began with an Immigration and Customs Enforcement operation targeting immigrants in that city, dubbed “Midway Blitz.” A month later, the state of Illinois and the city of Chicago sued Trump, seeking to block the imminent deployment of federalized Illinois and Texas National Guard troops to that city. A federal judge in Chicago blocked the deployment of troops in Chicago for at least two weeks. The Justice Department appealed but an appeals court ruled Saturday that while the troops can remain there under federal control, they can’t be deployed.

“They are not conducting missions right now,” a Northern Command spokesperson told TomDispatch on Tuesday, admitting that she didn’t know exactly what the troops were doing.

The president has also threatened to deploy National Guard troops to Baltimore, New York City, Oakland, Saint Louis, San Francisco, and Seattle.

“When military troops police civilians, we have an intolerable threat to individual liberty and the foundational values of this country,” said Hina Shamsi, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Security Project. “President Trump may want to normalize armed forces in our cities, but no matter what uniform they wear, federal agents and military troops are bound by the Constitution and have to respect our rights to peaceful assembly, freedom of speech, and due process. State and local leaders must stay strong and take all lawful measures to protect residents against this cruel intimidation tactic.”

“Living in a Dream World”

Trump’s Portland order drew pushback from Oregon’s Democratic lawmakers, local leaders, and outside experts, who said there was no need for federal troops to be deployed to the city. “There is no national security threat in Portland,” Gov. Kotek announced on social media. “Our communities are safe and calm.” Independent reporting corroborated her assessment.

After Kotek conveyed that to Trump in a phone call, the president seemed to briefly question whether he had been misled about an antifa “siege” there and the city being “war-ravaged.” As he recounted, “I spoke to the governor, but I said, ‘Well, wait a minute, am I watching things on television that are different from what’s happening? My people tell me different.’”

Days later, despite countless reports that there was neither a war nor a siege underway in Portland, Trump posted on social media that Kotek was “living in a ‘Dream World’” and returned to peddling lies about the city. “Portland is a NEVER-ENDING DISASTER. Many people have been badly hurt and even killed. It is run like a Third World Country,” he wrote on TruthSocial. “We’re only going in because, as American Patriots, WE HAVE NO CHOICE. LAW AND ORDER MUST PREVAIL IN OUR CITIES, AND EVERYWHERE ELSE!”

Judge Karin Immergut of the US District Court in Oregon issued a temporary restraining order preventing the Trump administration from sending 200 Oregonian National Guard troops for a 60-day deployment in Portland. As she concluded in her opinion, she expected a trial court to agree with the state’s contention that the president had exceeded his constitutional authority.

The Trump administration has also admitted that it’s waging a secret war against undisclosed enemies without the consent of Congress.

Trump immediately took aim at her—despite the fact that he had appointed her to office during his first term—saying that she “ought to be ashamed of herself.” He then claimed, without any basis, that Portland was “burning to the ground.” Trump then made further hyperbolic claims about the city and threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act. “Portland is on fire. Portland’s been on fire for years,” he said, describing the situation as “all insurrection.”

The same Northern Command spokesperson told TomDispatch on Tuesday that the federalized troops in Oregon were also in a holding pattern. “They are on standby,” she said.

The president’s Portland order followed a series of authoritarian actions that have pushed the nation ever closer to becoming a genuine police state. In August, reports emerged that the Pentagon was planning to create a Domestic Civil Disturbance Quick Reaction Force that would include two groups of 300 National Guard troops to be kept on standby at military bases in Alabama and Arizona for rapid deployment across the country. (That proposed force would also reportedly operate under Title 32.)

The Pentagon refused to offer further details about the initiative. “The Department of Defense is a planning organization and routinely reviews how the department would respond to a variety of contingencies across the globe,” said a defense official, speaking at the time on the condition of anonymity. “We will not discuss these plans through leaked documents, pre-decisional or otherwise.”

Earlier this month, Trump signed an executive order claiming to designate antifa—a loose-knit anti-fascist movement—as a “domestic terror organization.” He also issued National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, which directs the Justice Department and elements of the Intelligence Community and national security establishment to target “anti-fascism… movements” and “domestic terrorist organizations.” Such enemies, according to the president, not only espouse “anti-Americanism” and “support for the overthrow of the United States Government,” but also are typified by advocacy of opinions protected by the First Amendment, including “anti-capitalism,” “anti-Christianity,” and “hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.”

After referring to the “war from within” during his address to the military’s top officers, he cast his political rivals as subhuman and claimed that they needed to be dealt with. “We have to take care of this little gnat that’s on our shoulder called the Democrats,” he told the sailors during the Navy’s 250th anniversary celebration.

The Trump administration has also admitted that it’s waging a secret war against undisclosed enemies without the consent of Congress. According to a confidential notice from the Department of War sent to lawmakers, the president has unilaterally decided that the United States is engaged in a declared state of “non-international armed conflict” with “designated terrorist organizations” or DTOs. It described three people killed by US commandos on what was claimed to be a boat carrying drugs in the Caribbean last month as “unlawful combatants,” as if they were soldiers on a battlefield. And that was a significant departure from standard practice in the long-running US war on drugs, in which law enforcement, not the US military, arrests suspected drug dealers rather than summarily executing them.

As Brian Finucane, a former State Department lawyer and a specialist in counterterrorism issues, as well as the laws of war, pointed out, the White House’s claims that Trump has the authority to use lethal force against anyone he decides is a member of a DTO is extraordinarily “dangerous and destabilizing.” As he put it: “Because there’s no articulated limiting principles, the President could simply use this prerogative to kill any people he labels as terrorists, like antifa. He could use it at home in the United States.”

Police State USA

The Trump administration’s military occupations of American cities, its deployment of tens of thousands of troops across the United States, its emerging framework for designating and targeting domestic enemies, its dehumanization of its political foes, and its assertion that the president has the right to wage secret war and summarily execute those he deems terrorists have left this country on the precipice of authoritarian rule.

With Trump attempting to fashion a presidential police force of armed soldiers for domestic deployment, while claiming the right to kill anyone he deems a terrorist, the threat to the rule of law in the United States is not just profound but historically unprecedented.