Let's Play: Is! It! Fascist!?!

Trump's Troop Deployments in American Cities

As a liberal I’m watching with lots of trepidation and more than a little horror as Trump deploys National Guard troops into American cities. Suffice it to say, if you’re worried about creeping fascism there are few things scarier than a leader who has talked about using places like Chicago and Portland as military training zones.

But it is also the case that Donald Trump was elected largely on promises to round up and deport illegal immigrants, which is well within his purview as president. Democratic leaders like Jay Pritzker have been quite open with attempts to defy and inhibit the (legitimate) power of the federal government under Trump to find, detain, and deport immigrants. State and local leaders of blue polities have done little to assist ICE in its (again, legitimate) mission to enforce immigration law. So is it creeping fascism when Trump deploys troops to those cities to protect federal buildings and ICE as it carries out its mission? That’s what I’d like to dig into today.

The Facts

So where has Trump deployed troops? How many? Has he abided by court orders that challenge his troop deployments? Let’s look at the numbers:

• 800 troops deployed to Washington DC to combat crime.

• 4000 California Guardsmen and 700 marines deployed in Los Angeles to protest federal facilities during sometimes violent protests.

  • A federal court found that the deployment violated the Posse Comitatus Act by involving troops in law enforcement, after which most of the troops were sent home with a force of 300 remaining to protect federal buildings. The Trump administration is challenging the ruling.

• 200 troops were to be deployed in Portland OR but that deployment has stalled after a federal judge ruled that the deployment was unjustified and would constitute a violation of the Posse Comitatus Act.

• 700 troops (300 federalized Illinois Guardsmen and 400 Texas Guardsmen) deployed to Chicago to assist in immigration enforcement and protection of federal property.

• An unknown as of writing number of troops deployed to Memphis to assist in immigration enforcement and crime prevention.

• Numerous injuries of protesters including gassings and shootings with rubber bullets but no reporting killings by federalized Guardsmen.

Trump has deployed troops to these cities and announced plans to deploy more to cities like New York and New Orleans, though whether those deployments actually occur remains to be seen¹. But the actual action on the ground is not all there is to it, because why troops are deployed matters as much as the deployments themselves. So let’s take a look at the president’s stated reasons for sending troops to American cities.

The Rhetoric

Donald Trump is no fan of American cities. He has made this abundantly clear, repeatedly stating that he sees them as virtual war zones filled with criminals and governed by feckless traitors. A brief sampling of his statements leaves no doubt how he views the places where most of the people he’s supposed to represent live:

• “We have two enemies. We have the outside enemy, and then we have the enemy from within, and the enemy from within, in my opinion, is more dangerous than China, Russia and all these countries. … The thing that’s tougher to handle are these lunatics that we have inside” - Fox News, October 2025

• “These Radical Left Democrats are sick of mind, hate our Country, and actually want to destroy our Inner Cities — And they are doing a good job of it! There is something wrong with them.” - Announcement of pending domestic military action, June, 2025

• “We’re under invasion from within, no different than a foreign enemy, but more difficult in many ways because they don’t wear uniforms.” - Quantico, September 2025

• “But it seems that the ones that are run by the radical left Democrats, what they’ve done to San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, they’re very unsafe places and we’re going to straighten them out one by one.” - Quantico, September 2025

• “And this is going to be a major part for some of the people in this room. That’s a war too. It’s a war from within.” - Quantico, September 2025

• “And I told Pete, we should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military National Guard, but military, because we’re going into Chicago very soon. That’s a big city, with an incompetent governor, stupid governor, stupid.” - Quantico, September 2025

• “Portland, Oregon, where it looks like a war zone. And I get a call from the liberal governor, sir, please don’t come in, we don’t need you. I said, well, unless they’re playing false tapes, this looked like World War II. Your place is burning down. I mean, you must be kidding.” - Quantico, September 2025

• “This is going to be a big thing for the people in this room because it’s the enemy from within and we have to handle it” - Quantico, September 2025

• “You know that phrase very well, that’s what the oath says, foreign and domestic. Well, we also have domestic.” - Quantico, September 2025

This is a sample, you can easily find more if you want. The speech he gave to the flag officers at Quantico was littered with references to the degeneracy of America’s largest cities and the need to use the military to police them. That crime has generally been declining in these cities for years doesn’t seem to factor into his calculus². Now I have been a consistent critic of disorder in American cities and plan to write about it more thoroughly as I believe it’s a major (and understandable) factor in America’s loss of confidence in Democratic governance, but it is also the case that post-COVID city leadership even in very progressive places like San Francisco are taking the problems of homelessness, property crime, and widespread anti-social behavior much more seriously.

The takeaway here is that while utilizing the military to protect ICE while they’re fulfilling their duties is most likely both legal and, if you buy that people should get what they voted for³, legitimate, that’s not really what Trump has indicated he’s doing. He has said repeatedly that part of what the military is doing is protecting ICE, but it is always in this context of fighting against Americans he categorizes as domestic terrorists. When blocked by one of his own appointees from deploying the Guard in Portland on the basis that it clearly wasn’t a war zone he contemplated invoking the Insurrection Act as a way to get around the ruling⁴. So how does all this add up?

The Verdict

Looking at the facts and the rhetoric, the conclusion I draw is that the actions taken thus far by the administration with respect to domestic deployments of troops are heavy handed and worrying but defensibly not fascist. The federal government is responsible for immigration enforcement, it is a crime to reside in the US illegally⁵, blue city and state leaders are by and large not doing a lot to cooperate with ICE, mostly focusing on crowd control of protesters, and to this point the National Guard has limited its mission to protecting federal property⁶. Trump has complied with the court order to remove most of the troop presences from Los Angeles and is not, as far as I can tell, actively violating the Posse Comitatus Act⁷. Despite his threats to do so the president has also not thus far invoked the Insurrection Act to circumvent court orders restricting his ability to deploy troops to Portland.

So while any deployment of federal troops on American soil is extremely serious, and while Trump’s statements are disturbing, thus far his use of the National Guard and Marines is not substantially different than past uses of the Guard by presidents such as Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Bush Sr. If he invokes the Insurrection Act to override the courts or if he openly defies rulings that ban military policing under Posse Comitatus that will constitute and authoritarian expansion of presidential power but it remains to be seen whether or not he will do so. All this is to say nothing of the tactics ICE has utilized which do stink of fascism, but that is a separate matter from the use of the military in blue cities. So do I believe that Trump’s troops deployments are non-partisan and have nothing to do with his resentments towards blue state officials? Of course not. The man is the walking embodiment of resentment. Do I think Trump revels in the possibility of soldiers beating up and potentially firing on leftist protesters? 100%. He has not been shy in expressing his delight at Democrats being physically assaulted. But despite his rhetoric his actions so far are in line with American law and domestic use of military force by past presidents. My verdict is:

Not Fascist

Thanks for reading.

1. Trump says lots of things. Only time will tell.

2. I know the right thinks all crime statistics that don’t support their narrative are made up, but this is because the right doesn’t believe in the existence of facts having made a decidedly postmodern turn with respect to epistemology and shouldn’t be taken seriously.

3. Which you should.

4. The Insurrection Act provides a broad exception to Posse Comitatus and would allow Trump to unilaterally declare an insurrection and send in troops.

5. How’s that for a tautology?

6. Washington, DC is a special case given that it is under federal jurisdiction and as such the president has far broader legal rein to utilize the military for law enforcement in the District.

7. Perhaps I shouldn’t relegate this to a footnote, but the Posse Comitatus Act strictly regulates the situations in which the military can be used for domestic law enforcement and is one of America’s most important safeguards against tyranny.