National Guardsmen patrol near the US Capitol, Friday, Aug. 22, 2025, in Washington.Rahmat Gul/AP
President Donald Trump’s DC takeover has proven to be broadly unpopular among residents and seemingly counterproductive.
But the president has never been deterred by facts—and he is now setting his sights on additional cities where violent crime has already been falling.
The Washington Post first reported on Saturday that the Pentagon has for weeks been developing plans for potential troop deployments in Chicago. The report came a day after Trump hinted at such a move himself, calling Chicago a “mess” and Mayor Brandon Johnson “incompetent.” Citing officials familiar, the Post reports that the plan could include mobilizing a few thousand members of the National Guard to take to Chicago’s streets by next month.
In a series of posts on X on Saturday night, Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker (D) said the Trump administration had not reached out to state officials to offer, or even ask if they needed, federal support. “There is no emergency that warrants the President of the United States federalizing the [Illinois National Guard], deploying the National Guard from other states, or sending active duty military within our own borders,” Pritzker said. “Donald Trump is attempting to manufacture a crisis, politicize Americans who serve in uniform, and continue abusing his power to distract from the pain he’s causing families.”
Johnson also affirmed in a statement Friday that the city had not received any indication from the federal government that such a deployment was in the works. He said it would be unnecessary, pointing to the fact that shootings, homicides, and robberies all declined by more than 30 percent in the first half of the year compared to last year.
On CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday morning, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) said Trump had “no basis, no authority” to send troops to Chicago and that he was trying “to manufacture a crisis.” And Rahm Emanuel, the city’s former mayor, said on CNN that such a deployment “would not be about fighting crime” but would instead be about facilitating Trump’s crackdown on cities with progressive immigration policies in pursuit of his mass deportation agenda.
Chicago is not the only city that Trump apparently has his sights on. In a Sunday morning Truth Social rant, the president floated the idea of sending troops to Baltimore after Gov. Wes Moore (D-Md.) wrote a letter to the White House this week inviting him to visit Maryland to “discuss strategies for effective public safety policy” and go on a “public safety walk.” Moore also noted that homicides have dropped in the state in recent years and that the Baltimore Police Department reported an approximately 20-percent drop in homicides and nonfatal shootings in the first six months of the year. On CBS’ Face the Nation on Sunday morning, Moore told host Margaret Brennan that Trump was living in “blissful ignorance” and invoking “1980s scare tactics.”
Indeed, it’s worth remembering that while Trump talks about cleaning up city streets and cutting down on crime, his administration has cut hundreds of millions of dollars to support victims of crimes; as my colleague Stephanie Mencimer pointed out, local organizations involved in violence reduction in DC lost more than a half million dollars as a result.