this is not normal.
First Los Angeles, then DC, then Chicago - when does it end?
It hasn’t even been one year since Donald Trump took office, and he’s already called the National Guard into Los Angeles (alongside Marines), Washington D.C., and, soon, Chicago.
What makes it worse is that, according to the New York Times, Trump believes he has an unlimited array of powers to do whatever he wants - and he can deploy the National Guard wherever he wants as a result.
“You have a guy in Illinois, the governor of Illinois, saying that crime has been much better in Chicago recently and Trump is a dictator,” Trump said in a press conference. “Most people are saying, ‘If you call him a dictator, if he stops crime, he can be whatever he wants’ — I am not a dictator, by the way.”
And Donald “not a dictator” Trump is putting his money where his mouth is, with CBS announcing that, as soon as next week, we’re going to get a repeat of Los Angeles in June in Chicago - not only are the National Guard being deployed to “fight city crime,” but we’re going to see an increased presence of ICE agents across the city.
Politico reported August 28 that a number of Democratic governors are pleading with Trump to not deploy the National Guard into their cities. Many of them signed a letter urging him to cut it out. Now, there’s a lot to be said about how this is really just a symbolic waste of time that doesn’t represent any real action in preventing Trump from enforcing illegal operations in cities across America, but that’s not the real point here.
The real point is that NONE OF THIS IS NORMAL.
According to USA Today, six presidents have deployed the National Guard eleven times since 1957. But it had been 33 years since the last deployment when Trump sent the National Guard to Los Angeles - and he’s about to deploy them for the 12th time in 68 years. His THIRD TIME in seven months. There’s no real reason for this to be happening; I wrote a few weeks ago here about how crime has been plummeting across the U.S., and within Washington D.C. - but according to the New York Times, it’s ALSO dropped in Chicago. A city unfortunately known for its murder rates have seen murder rates drop by FIFTY PERCENT in just four years.
What’s absolutely surreal about all of this is that what follows Trump’s announcement he’s essentially invading these cities is an executive order that turns the National Guard into a “quick reaction force” for “rapid nationwide deployment” to “[quell] civil disturbances and [ensure] the public safety.” This is a drastic revision of what the National Guard is and what it should do, and yet it seems like nobody’s talking about it with the sense of urgency it deserves.
Which could be due to Democratic strategists urging its politicians not to talk about it, something revealed in a recent bombshell Rolling Stone report:
“Blue Rose Research, the firm led by Democratic establishment darling David Shor, produced a memo earlier this month digging into the effectiveness of various messages related to Trump’s takeover of Washington, D.C. The firm advised that messaging around Trump’s “rising authoritarianism” was “highly unconvincing,” while messages that say Trump wants to “distract” from his damaging tariffs or horrifying Medicaid cuts were more effective. Meanwhile, Republican messaging about how Trump is clamping down on gang violence tested through the roof.
The Aug. 15 memo, a copy of which was reviewed by Rolling Stone, could explain, at least partially, why Democrats haven’t exactly been going to the mat over Trump sending the military into the nation’s capital and him threatening to do the same in other liberal strongholds.
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) was asked Sunday on CNN what the party’s plan is to fight the president sending troops into Chicago. He only offered that Trump has no authority to do this, and that he supports the men and women working in law enforcement. He also, as the Blue Rose memo suggested is effective, cast the federal takeover as a “distraction” from Trump’s unpopular policies. Jeffries didn’t seem too worked up about any of this, delivering his talking points with a complacency that certainly did not bely that the United States is currently experiencing a militarized dismantling of representative democracy.”
It’s probably unrelated that despite the fact that Trump’s military invasion is VERY unpopular, Democrats are ALSO wildly unpopular right now, with Gallup finding Democrats’ approval rating being at 34%... the lowest ever recorded by them. This is a five alarm fire, and very few are rising to the occasion to put it out. Some states are redistricting to prevent Trump’s obvious attempts to rig the 2026 midterms, and some leaders are rising to the occasion to put stopguards up to prevent this however they can.
So - what’s next? If all we have are calls to “resist” and hope for the best in the midterms, what are we even doing here? There is a perceived lack of unity within the Democratic party right now, and voter registration for Democrats was down 2.1 million voters in 2024. It’s good to call out Trump’s place in the Epstein files. It’s good to call him out when he does and says weird shit. It’s good to report on the blatant corruption in his family.
It’s also good to hold Donald Trump’s feet to the fire when he is militarizing the National Guard and invading states with Democratic governors. It’s good for us to uplift Democratic candidates and protect democracy. And it’s good for Democrats to have a plan - a clearly identifiable plan that isn’t just shitposting on Twitter or reporting on everything that’s bad. Do I know what that is? No. I’m just a guy typing at a computer.
But while I was writing the ending to this sentence, a push notification from the Associated Press came up on my phone:
“Texas governor signs into law redrawn voting map pushed by Trump that gives GOP five more winnable congressional seats.”
Democrats need to get it together right now. We need to do more than talk and put a stop to this now.
I am so disappointed in Jeffries. I really thought he would be a better spokesman. Now we have 2 ineffectual leaders between him and Schumer. They are so wrong to not raise huge alarms over trmps actions. They are letting authoritarianism creep in. Shame on them. Dean, you, Parker, Santana, Eli...keep using your voices. Be loud, sound the alarm & keep changing minds!