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President Donald Trump has expanded his military campaign against the United States by deploying armed troops to yet another major metropolitan area, announcing on Monday that he is sending the National Guard into Washington, D.C., to “liberate” the city.
The D.C. operation, launched two months after the start of his Los Angeles crackdown, broadens a police-state-style domestic campaign that some senior Trump administration officials describe to Rolling Stone as a “shock and awe” show of force, a reference to the foreign war in Iraq that Trump has pretended to oppose.
It’s only going to get worse.
The president and his top government appointees are publicly stressing that this will not end with D.C. and L.A., that other military options are very much on the table. The facts, the laws, and data do not seem to matter: Trump and his team believe he can do whatever he wants, whenever he wants, including using the U.S. armed forces for domestic political purposes as well as intimidating his enemies. His team is privately putting together plans for him to do just that.
“Make no mistake, this is just the beginning,” U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro — a staunchly pro-Trump former Fox News host whom the president tapped specifically to “crack skulls” — said Monday night.
At a press conference Monday announcing that the federal government had seized “direct” control of D.C.’s police department and that the National Guard would soon occupy the city, Trump warned that if he and his officials decide they “need to,” he will deploy military forces to other Democratic cities, too. The president named a few, including Chicago, Oakland, and Baltimore. Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, a Democrat whom Trump attacked by name, compared Trump’s use of the military to the Nazis tearing apart Germany’s constitutional republic, per the Chicago Tribune.
Trump has long yearned to unleash the military on American soil for his political agenda, and the D.C. and L.A. deployments this summer are critical stepping stones in his increasingly authoritarian government’s vision for punishing his enemies Democratic area of the country, carrying out his brutal immigration agenda, and making life hell for unhoused people. Trump said on Monday that federal forces will work to remove “homeless encampments from all over our parks,” and that the unhoused will not be “allowed to turn our capital into a wasteland for the world to see.”
One of Trump’s biggest regrets from his first term in the Oval Office, according to former and current senior Trump advisers, is that he didn’t use military forces and other federal assets to crack down harder than he ultimately did in the summer of 2020. As the Covid-19 pandemic raged, and as racial justice protests spread throughout the country, one of the president’s big ideas was to shoot Black Lives Matter protesters near the White House. One reason this didn’t happen is that his Secretary of Defense at the time was not in love with the idea.
Rolling Stone reported in October 2024 that Trump and his team have been plotting a second-term takeover of the D.C. police for a long time — regardless of the actual level of unrest or street crime. The plotting extends far beyond the nation’s capital.
In recent months, according to government officials and other sources with knowledge of the situation, administration staff and lawyers have crafted detailed plans and menus of options for Trump to feed his desire for replicating and proliferating his militarized crackdowns — on immigrants and citizens alike — to different Democratic strongholds. National Guard troops are already mobilizing in D.C., and Trump has privately said, according to two sources familiar with the matter, that if he sees something that he feels crosses his line (like if street protests in the city grow too big or if he deems them a threat suddenly), he will gladly order larger numbers of troops to nation’s capital, as he did in Los Angeles earlier this year.
Trump has insisted to administration officials that it’s ridiculous that troops like National Guard members are not allowed to conduct various forms of domestic law enforcement, sources add. The president and his administration to some extent have had their hands tied on this due to the Posse Comitatus Act — which prohibits using the military for domestic law enforcement — though that isn’t stopping them from actively exploring ways around the law. “There are ways things were done, and that’s not always going to be how they should be done now or tomorrow,” a senior Trump administration official tells Rolling Stone.
The senior administration official, as well as other Trump officials, note that it is a priority of the president’s that these kinds of military deployments — in L.A., and now D.C., in times of relative calm —become normalized in American political culture. Trump has long believed he should be able to wield the might of military forces on American soil in ways more commonly associated with authoritarian states. He now has a government stacked full of loyalists who want to help him realize this goal. “He’s gonna do more of them,” another Trump administration official says, referring to siccing the military on deep-blue cities, using crime and immigrants as justification. “He promised he would do this, and now he’s following through on those promises.”
Administration figures are speaking openly about potentially expanding the use of federal forces into cities across the nation. “You look at Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston, and New York — they’re also facing record numbers of homicides and violent crimes. It’s natural for us to look at Washington, D.C. — if we can really clean this up and we can get rid of this plague of crime and violent activity that’s happening in our nation’s capital —could that be a blueprint and a model for other communities around the country?” Tricia McLaughlin, assistant secretary for public affairs at the Department of Homeland Security, said Tuesday on Fox Business. “It’s something I think President Trump wouldn’t shy away from. We’ll have to stay tuned.”
Trump and his administration’s justification for his D.C. operation — that homelessness and violent crime in the nation’s capital have spiraled out of control, following the recent assault of a Department of Government Efficiency lackey and Elon Musk protégé known as “Big Balls” — appears entirely pretextual. Public data show that violent crime in the district, whose political leaders did not request any help from Trump and whose residents and voters largely despise him, has dropped significantly following post-pandemic spikes in violence that occurred in both urban and rural American communities. (The administration is claiming that the crime data is fake, because the official position of the government is that any credible economic data or other stats that contradict Trump and the GOP’s feelings should be purged and demonized.)
There are, of course, actual ways to aid the homeless in D.C. and to help protect residents in the impoverished, higher-crime areas of the city. Trump and his administration are not interested in working to solve these issues. When asked on Tuesday about addressing the root causes of crime, Pirro scoffed and said she’s “not concerned about why they commit crimes,” only punishing them when they do.
Addressing the root causes wouldn’t include sending in the National Guard or federal agents for Trump’s “shock and awe” spectacle for the cameras, and sources say the spectacle-addicted president regularly checks in with how his military deployments are playing on TV — including on his favorite network, Fox News. Right-wing media, lawmakers, and members of his administration have been mobilizing this week to push the president’s narrative that military action is needed to address D.C.’s crime problem, casting the city as a hellscape of violent crime where it is not safe to walk the streets.
“President Trump is saving our nation’s capital after Democrats turned it into an absolute hellhole,” the Republican National Committee hysterically claimed in an email blast to the media on Monday. “Residents are being brutally beaten, murdered and losing loved ones. D.C. residents do not feel safe so President Trump will be declaring a Crime Emergency and mobilizing the D.C. National Guard.”
It’s hard to take Trump and his allies’ rhetoric about a “crime emergency” in D.C. seriously given that violent crime has been declining in the city. There’s also the fact that Trump pardoned hundreds of his supporters who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, including those who assaulted law enforcement.
None of this is about crime — it’s about power, and unlike in his first term, Trump now has a team around him with no qualms about using the full force of the military to help him obtain as much of it as possible.
