In an unprecedented power grab, President Donald Trump is turning the military against the American people, igniting fears of a second civil war and the final collapse of the republic.
The tanks are not yet in the streets, but the boots of American soldiers are.
Under Trump’s direct orders, thousands of armed National Guard troops now patrol the nation’s capital, a chilling preview of a planned occupation of American cities that legal scholars, local officials, and a terrified public are calling a blatant coup d’état.
Washington, D.C., is at the center of American democracy, but its residents—taxpayers, veterans, workers, families—are American citizens stripped of the right to self-government.
This is not a drill. It is the live-fire testing of authoritarian rule.
The administration, staffed by bootlickers like Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Vice President JD Vance, has launched what it euphemistically calls a “crime emergency” operation.
The reality on the streets of D.C. is a military occupation, evoking the specter of Kent State University, where Ohio National Guard troops opened fire on students on May 4, 1970, killing four and wounding nine.
Armed soldiers from Mississippi, Louisiana, and South Carolina now police Metro stations and public squares, their presence not requested by—but forcibly imposed upon—the city’s elected leaders.
“This is not law and order; this is the playbook of every tin-pot dictator in history,” said Lisa McCormick, a progressive Democrat in New Jersey, who noted that cities governed by Black women were the first targets of Trump’s political power grab. “We are watching America join the 70 percent of the world living under authoritarian rule. Trump is deploying the military to occupy our country because he knows he has lost the consent of the governed.”
The flimsy legal pretext is a house of cards built on the unique status of the District of Columbia, but a military intervention in Chicago would test the resolve of Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker and Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson.
“After using Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. as his testing ground for authoritarian overreach, Trump is now openly flirting with the idea of taking over other states and cities,” Pritzker said. “Trump’s goal is to incite fear in our communities and destabilize existing public safety efforts — all to create a justification to further abuse his power.”
“We have grave concerns about the impact of any unlawful deployment of National Guard troops to the City of Chicago,” Johnson said. “The problem with the President’s approach is that it is uncoordinated, uncalled for, and unsound.”
The administration invoked Section 740 of the D.C. Home Rule Act to federalize the Metropolitan Police Department, stripping control from Chief Pamela Smith and placing it under the command of Trump’s former critic-turned-sycophant, Attorney General Pam Bondi.
Bondi has presided over the Justice Department’s most convulsive transition of power ever, aggressively reversing policies, investigating Trump’s political adversaries, and replacing professional staff with outlandishly unqualified personnel.
Simultaneously, Trump has mobilized the D.C. National Guard, which he commands directly, exploiting a loophole in the Posse Comitatus Act, the 1878 federal law that prohibits the use of federal military personnel for domestic law enforcement or to suppress dissent.
Trump’s goal is clear: to manufacture a crisis, declare an emergency, and seize power.
This moment was years in the making.
Americans watched the previews: the tear-gassing of peaceful protesters in Lafayette Square for a Bible-held-high photo op; the threats to deploy active-duty troops in 2020; the chilling clemency granted to nearly 1,600 terrorists who participated in the January 6th insurrection—many of whom brutally attacked the very police Trump now claims to support.
“I believed then, as I believe now, that Los Angeles was a test case. I think DC is a test case as well,” said Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, warning that Trump’s incursions are a precursor to other illegal power grabs after barriers to such actions have failed.
Efforts to use the U.S. Constitution’s “insurrection” clause to stop Trump from running for the White House again were barred by the U.S. Supreme Court.
Since his return to the Oval Office, the courts and Congress have refused to block Trump’s numerous illegalities.
“He is the thug he accuses others of being,” said William S. Becker, a former senior official in the Wisconsin Department of Justice. “The real disappointment is the U.S. military’s capitulation. They are betraying their oath to the Constitution by following unlawful orders.”
Those orders are now escalating.
After initial deployments in Los Angeles to crush immigration protests and in the District of Columbia, the White House is actively planning for Chicago.
Pentagon officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, confirmed that plans are drawn to mobilize thousands of National Guard members to the Windy City by September, with discussions underway about using active-duty U.S. Marines.
The situation is a tinderbox waiting for a match.
Hegseth’s authorization for troops to carry firearms—with decisions on lethal force delegated to field commanders—creates a scenario where a single misunderstanding, a single nervous soldier, could trigger a massacre.
“What would happen if we put thousands of heavily armed soldiers into the streets of major American cities to enforce laws… even though the troops had no significant training?” Becker asked, ominously referencing the Kent State shootings of 1970. “What would happen if armed provocateurs showed up in this volatile mix, intending to trigger a second civil war in America? We know the answer. We saw an example on Jan. 6, 2021.”
The administration is counting on the chaos. Their rhetoric is designed to incite it.
Trump has publicly threatened D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser.
“I’m tired of listening to these people say how safe it was before we got here. It was unsafe. It was horrible. And Mayor Bowser better get her act straight, or she won’t be there very long, because we’ll take it over with the federal government run it like it’s supposed to be run,” Trump said on Friday.
He has promised to export this model of federal takeover to Chicago, New York, Baltimore, and Oakland.
In response, a deep and dangerous rift is tearing through the country. As evidence of their fanaticism, Republican governors are sending citizens in uniform to occupy a Democratic city. Democratic mayors are preparing legal and physical defenses against their own federal government.
From Boston to Los Angeles, big city mayors remain defiant.
“Stop attacking our cities to hide your administration’s failures,” said Boston Mayor Michelle Wu, a Democrat.
“Sending in the National Guard could destabilize our public safety efforts and would be counterproductive to rebuilding trust between residents and law enforcement,” said the Chicago Mayor, who accused Trump of “stoking fear and division while criminalizing poverty.”
Polling shows 80% of Washingtonians oppose the deployment, but their voices are meaningless in a district denied statehood and voting representation. Their autonomy is being strip-mined for a political stunt, their city used as a petri dish for authoritarianism.
The military itself is at a crossroads. The Uniform Code of Military Justice obligates every soldier to reject an unlawful order. The ghost of General Mark Milley’s apology for his role in the 2020 photo-op hangs heavy over the Pentagon.
Will current officers have the courage to refuse? Or will they, like Hitler’s generals at Nuremberg, hide behind the excuse of “just following orders”?
The Trump administration is not making cities safer.
It is making a conscious choice to make them battlefields. It is pulling FBI and ATF agents off counterterrorism and narcotics investigations to play dress-up as soldiers in a war against the American people. It is pardoning violent seditionists while handcuffing local police.
This is not about crime. Crime is falling. This is about power. Pure, unadulterated, despotic power.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has been collecting crime data and statistics through the Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program since 1930. The UCR data includes annual counts of offenses, including murder, rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, larceny, auto theft, and arson.
The other major source of national crime statistics is the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) conducted by the Bureau of Justice Statistics.
The nationwide crime rate has generally decreased since 1991, about 18 years after the US Supreme Court’s landmark Roe v. Wade decision.
Stanford Law School Professor John J. Donohue and University of Chicago Professor Steven Levitt presented evidence that the legalization of abortion might be the single most important factor in reducing crime.
The theory motivating that analysis is simple. Decades of research show that unwanted children are more likely to become criminals. By reducing unwanted births, legalized abortion led to a subsequent drop in crime.
The occupation has begun. The lines are being drawn.
Historians, scholars, and critics have drawn parallels between Trump’s rhetoric and actions in the United States and those of authoritarian figures like Nazi and Communist leaders.
Trump’s language describing political opponents as “vermin” who should be “rooted out,” echoes the dehumanizing rhetoric used by dictators such as Adolf Hitler.
Trump’s consistent attacks on journalists and the free press, labeling them the “enemy of the people,” are comparable to tactics used by authoritarian regimes to silence dissent and control information.
Scholars have even said that Trump’s demand for personal loyalty from his followers and officials exhibits characteristics commonly associated with mob bosses.
After meeting with Vladimir Putin, who endorsed the president’s wild lie that mail-in voting enables fraud, Trump announced a new effort to seize control of American elections.
At Trump’s urging, Texas Governor Greg Abbott called a special session to gerrymander the state’s congressional maps, explicitly aiming to secure five new Republican seats in 2026.
Any domestic military operation that turns the armed forces against American citizens should ring every alarm—but when it’s championed by an overt authoritarian like Trump, it demands nothing less than full-throated, emphatic, and resounding resistance.
The question is no longer if a conflict will come, but when the first shot will be fired—and whether the American people and the institutions they rely on will have the courage to fight back against the tyrant in the Oval Office.