Welcome to what might as well be called Trump’s “Deep Blue City Revenge Tour,” which has seen him using the power of the presidency — and then some — to confront liberal urban strongholds. In recent months, he’s dispatched the National Guard to Los Angeles and Washington, DC, and this week also authorized roughly 500 troops to Chicago, despite objections from state and local leaders. In a recent speech, he said he told Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, “We should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military.” He acknowledged critics who say he’s gone too far in using federal troops domestically, but brushed them off: “America is under invasion from within. No different than a foreign enemy, but more difficult because they don’t wear uniforms.”

This language — war metaphors, occupation logic — signals something larger than bog-standard conservative law-and-order politics. Since the assassination of Charlie Kirk, Trump has sharpened a moral vocabulary that fuses the populist Right’s fear of urban chaos with the militarism of a besieged empire, and declared a war against the “radical Left” in cities that once humiliated or opposed him. 

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We’re still distracting ourselves to death

By Ryan Zickgraf

Saving a city from invasion by invading it with out-of-state troops is a hell of a contradiction, but Trump’s game might be intentional bear-baiting. Indeed, as the National Guard enters Chicago this week, the city is caught in a perverse optics game. If it fights back too hard against the occupying troops, it becomes the poster child for instability. If it bows or accedes quietly, it concedes the logic of militarized control. Either path validates Trump’s claim that blue cities must suppress themselves or be suppressed.

Ironically, Chicago isn’t actually seething with unrest at the moment. Like much of urban America, it is quieter now than it was a few years ago — no George Floyd-era protests in the streets, no sky-high homicide spikes like those of 2022 or 2023. There are small pockets of resistance against ICE deportations and scattered Boomer-heavy “No Kings” protests, but the agitation remains marginal. The supposed “war zones” are mostly calm, or at least for now. 

But in Chicago, the instinct toward confrontation — for both better or worse — runs deep. Consider that for nearly its entire two-century existence, the city has been a stage for resistance and repression, from the 1886 bombing at a labor rally in Haymarket Square during a protest for the 8-hour workday, to the Pullman Strike, the largest-ever organized work stoppage in 1894. During the 1968 Democratic National Convention, the “whole world was watching” as thousands of Yippies and other anti-war protestors clashed with police; and more recently, Chicago roiled with widespread demonstrations, riots, and arson during the summer of 2020. Chicago may ultimately serve as Trump’s perfect trap because the city can’t not resist. But in doing so, it risks giving Trump exactly what he wants: the imagery of chaos, the spectacle of unrest, the “war from within” that justifies extraordinary measures. 

One undersung event that offers haunting parallel to the present is the fierce labor battle of 1877. That summer, railway workers went on strike in dramatic fashion, and President Rutherford B. Hayes invoked the Insurrection Act that Trump is reportedly also considering utilizing. Hayes sent federal troops to crush the uprising and reopen the rail lines, mobilizing some 45,000 militiamen from 15 states. As historian Eleanor Hannah noted, the presence of the National Guard may have exacerbated the situation in Chicago. “…They turned previously nonviolent crowds into frightening mobs. Urban crowds could outnumber the Guard companies by the hundreds and even the thousands. These crowds presented special challenges because the only real training guardsmen had for dealing with large, hostile forces was military — despite the name riot duty.”

The escalation ended in tragedy with the “Battle of the Viaduct,” fought two blocks from my old South Side apartment on Halsted Street. Guardsmen and federal troops who’d been fighting the Sioux turned their muskets and artillery guns on thousands of striking workers and sympathizers, mostly Irish and Czech immigrants, many of them under the age of 18, who wielded stones and clubs. The Chicago Police and troops suffered no fatalities and 18 injuries during the three-day uprising, while the protesters suffered roughly 20 dead and 200 injured. The city’s elite and industrialists responded by formalizing the Illinois National Guard and financing Fort Sheridan, an army base built specifically to deploy troops against labor. They even donated cannons and a Gatling gun to the city for the cause. 

That bloody history has never entirely faded. When Trump deploys troops today, under the same Illinois National Guard banner established in 1877, he is echoing ancient Chicago lore but with profound irony. The 19th-century industrialists wanted to suppress a genuine uprising. Trump, in contrast, appears to want to manufacture one using the same Illinois National Guard that once killed immigrant strikers.

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The fading American police officer

By Ryan Zickgraf

To be fair, this week’s deployment is a modest force compared to the 19th century or, for instance, the tens, if not hundreds, of thousands deployed in Iraq or Afghanistan. Still, it’s large enough to stage a show sufficient to create the kind of street-level confrontations that can metastasize into national spectacles and justify a further crackdown. The rise of recent lone-wolf violence — shootings, stabbings, random attacks — also gives Trump the rhetorical pretext he needs. He can frame each new violent act as a thread in a tapestry of urban collapse, to be contained only via the military, even in domestic neighborhoods.  

There are signs of resistance already. On Oct. 4, in Chicago’s Brighton Park neighborhood, Border Patrol agents shot a 30-year-old woman, Marimar Martinez, amid protests targeting increased ICE activity after she was involved in an alleged vehicle chase that ended in her ramming a CBP vehicle. Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker has sued to block the deployment, calling it part of an “authoritarian march.” Mayor Brandon Johnson signed an executive order barring ICE from operating on city-owned property and has publicly denounced Trump’s threats. When Trump posted that Pritzker and Johnson “should be in jail,” accusing them of failing to protect federal agents, both responded defiantly. Pritzker on X: “Trump is now calling for the arrest of elected representatives checking his power. What else is left on the path to full-blown authoritarianism?” Johnson replied, “I’m not going anywhere.”

Or is he? If the city meets force with force, Trump likely wins. If it retreats into anxious silence, he also wins. The challenge for Chicago, and for America’s liberal cities more broadly, is to find a language of defiance that denies him the spectacle he craves. The lesson of the city’s storied history isn’t that resistance is futile — it’s that resistance, without a strategy and strong allies, becomes fuel for repression. Trump is counting on that.

The unspeakable atrocity of innocent people being shot to death by a deranged mass killer continued last week. Two children were murdered and 18 other people wounded in an attack at a Catholic church in Minneapolis. The media coverage gradually devolved, as it always does, from conscientious reporting and outraged commentary to the usual money-driven spectacle. The Left called, as it always does, for gun control; the Right seized on the fact that the shooter was, apparently, a trans person. In The Brothers Karamazov, Ivan memorably said that he was returning his “entrance ticket” to God because he could not accept that He would allow the suffering of a single child. In America, the abomination of murdered children is quickly absorbed into helpless routines of commerce and cultural conflict.

And yet no one made the connection between the killing in Minnesota and Trump’s dispatch of the US military to Washington DC for the sake of preserving, he declared, law and order. Trump made it clear that he wasn’t stopping at DC, announcing plans to send the military into other cities, all liberal, as it happened, like Chicago and New York. But aside from sending condolences to the people stricken by the violence in Minnesota, Trump said not a word about mass shootings in America. The street crime Trump claims he wants to extinguish, as he has extinguished illegal border crossings, has been a feature of organized humanity since people began to congregate in numbers larger than two. The mass slaughter of innocent people for no other reason than that someone wanted to slaughter them — that is something new. Isolated detachments of soldiers are not sufficient to stop it. You would need soldiers everywhere.

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Donald Trump’s war on Washington

By Lee Siegel

If Freud was right, and depression is anger turned inward, then the statistics showing that a majority of Americans are clinically depressed might mean that, for some, homicidal rage takes the form of depression turned outward. The simple fact is that the origins of a mass shooting are buried in an individual psyche; they are impossible to prevent. That is perhaps why Trump is deploying American troops to American cities has not met the sort of resistance one might have expected. Rather, there is a feeling, among even the most liberal of us, that in a society where the mass killing of children, of innocents, has become a common occurrence, safety has to come from somewhere. I don’t know a single liberal not horrified by Trump’s profligate use of the American military to do the job of American police. But I don’t know many liberals who are either over the age of 50, or not the product of wealth’s elevations and exceptions (or both), who don’t, on some deep instinctual level, welcome the sight of a soldier in the context of a civil society that has become increasingly unstable.

That doesn’t mean that America has become increasingly violent. As the liberal media is at great pains to point out, and justifiably so, crime rates have declined over the past few years. It just so happens that the regions where they remain elevated are in the West and the rural South. Crime is far higher in MAGA states like Tennessee, or Alabama or Mississippi, than in even the most violent blue cities.

But the reality of crime matters far less than cultural attitudes toward crime. For if violent crime is higher in the South than in the North, the way people think about crime in the two regions is radically different. In the South, antisocial behavior is habitually contrasted with the values of law and order, values rooted in the moral frameworks of family, religion and patriotism. The North, where the causes of crime matter more in terms of policy than crime per se, is regarded by the South as downright libertine. Telling the Right that their own regions experience more crime than the places in the country Trump is portraying as being under siege by criminals is irrelevant. In the eyes of many Republicans, those liberal places are under siege more by their “permissive” attitudes toward crime than crime itself.

If, however, the different parts of the country have different perceptions of their experience of crime, they all share the same condition. America’s rate of violent crime far exceed countries in Western Europe and East Asia. Taken as a whole, the United States is a violent place. All the while, the vast economic displacements of the past 30 years have introduced their own violence, as what remained of a manufacturing economy gave way to an information economy, which has now been subsumed by the digital world. In a situation of rapidly mutating norms, crime is not merely a fact, but the symbolic shadow of a wider malaise.

It is one of the peculiarities of being an American now that you don’t have to live in a city with a high rate of crime, like Washington or Chicago — or Memphis or Birmingham — to feel personally threatened. The presence of predation on the internet; the screen-abetted withdrawal of people into themselves; the dissolution of shared cultural experiences into countless, private streaming niches; the fractures produced by identitarianism; the blurring of fact and fiction, the personalizing and customization of the justice system; the displacements of human experience and human labor by AI — you could live miles away from anyone, yet still feel as as if you were living in an urban crime zone. It is no wonder that “weaponized” has become such a popular expression. When the most disparate experiences become turned into “weapons,” it means that mass murders — soul-murders, psyche-murders, feeling-murders, status-murders, murders by money, trauma, gaslighting, “subtle acts of exclusion” — are happening all around us.

In this sense, Trump’s war on the liberal cultural of negativity toward America might well turn against him if it is successful. Once negativity as a dominant cultural attitude subsides, his appeal starts to fade. The media’s relentless apocalypticism, its “weaponization” of everything under the sun, is what has people cheering, across the political spectrum when Trump sends troops into American cities. When America’s cultural institutions, from the media, to high and popular art, to higher education, constantly cry that the sky is falling, people are going to turn to whatever figure or force promises protection. Imagine that proverbial visitor from another planet, but one who comes with their family, and has a human biology. Within two hours of experiencing the news, our extraterrestrial immigrants would hear that climate change is bringing total destruction, the next terrifying pandemic is right around the corner, the races hate each other, men and women hate each other, something called artificial intelligence is wiping out the quality of being human, and your child’s genitalia are not as permanent as you thought they were back home. And because it is so hard to keep up with all these encroaching terrors, crime — the primordial human fear of being killed or violently assaulted by another human — embodies all of them.

If a few more car accidents than the average was enough for some people in Spain to wish for the return of Franco, violence in America is exponentially more consequential. As the perception of chaos rises, calls for safety, stability and protection will become naked and intense. A mighty state teetering atop a failing society, America cannot exist much longer without the imposition of order; from one side or another. As a parent leads a child across a busy road, American democracy will soon be guided by the firmest hand.

It is more than passing strange. In the Soviet era, so-called socialist realism was enforced in the fine arts, which depicted happy collective farmfolk; academics portrayed the Russian Revolution in lectures and books as the dawn of the world’s first workers’ paradise. The media published one glowing economic report after another; posters depicting radiant construction workers hung everywhere; new composers vied to embed heroic anthems to communism in their symphonies. A few lines critical of Stalin in a poem by Osip Mandelstam that Mandelstam read to a small group of friends resulted in a betrayal, the poet’s arrest and his death in a gulag. “Only in Russia is poetry respected,” Mandelstam had once wryly written. “It gets people killed.”

A drab, Philistine approach to culture is essential to a repressive regime, and for the Philistine Trump and his band of intellectual and cultural mediocrities, attempts to coerce American institutions into an optimistic sameness blend seamlessly with the coarseness of their taste. From universities to the Smithsonian, Trump wants an official American culture that projects only the “greatness” of America, with no flaws or blemishes. He dismisses reporters who criticize him as “scum” or “evil”. He has made it clear that, from government agencies to private banks like Goldman Sachs, he desires economic statistics that report only positive news. Like a dime-store Lenin, his giant portrait now hangs in front of the Department of Agriculture building in Washington.

The official optimism of the Soviet era was the result of a complex ideology that sought to engineer a desired future by reconfiguring the past and lying about the present. Yet Trump’s coercive sunniness has nothing to do with an ideology born from historical conflict and oppression. It is the bright, blinding bluster of a businessman, delivered in the ominous tones of a demagogue. It puts you in mind of the recent trend of “creative” television commercials for insurance companies. They almost always follow the same model: they (other insurance companies) fail in this or that comical way; we give it to you straight, and honest, and effective. The Ur-commercial or advertisement has always depended, whether explicitly or implicitly, on planting in the viewer or reader’s mind the inadequacy and inferiority of the competition.

So when Trump, in a move that might have warmed the heart of Putin, the ex-KGB man, recently fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics in order to replace her with someone more likely to, in classic Soviet fashion, disseminate statistics favorable to the regime, he wasn’t acting like some modern-day Lenin. Lenin used the concept of “production propaganda” to heroicize workers and exaggerate both the success of Soviet industrialization and its revolutionary effects. That was the product of theory, rooted in history. Trump is marketing reactionary politics as though he were selling a car. As H.G. Wells put it in Tono-Bungay, his visionary novel about the role of commercially created perception in modern society: “the struggle for life takes the form of competitive advertisement and the effort to fill your neighbor’s eye.” Trump is, day after day, filling the American eye.

Trump’s reflex to send the American military into American cities, most recently into Washington D.C., coupled with his expansion of ICE’s deportation and detention activities, should be seen in this light. It is chilling, of course. It is, without doubt, an autocratic spasm, the likes of which are making ordinary Americans from every walk of life careful about what they say or write. But because Trump’s use of the military is rooted in a competitive attempt to manipulate mass feeling, and not in some iron idea or ideology, it comes across as a weird combination of Soviet-style repression and American mercantile ingenuity. “An intellectual hatred is the worst,” wrote W. B. Yeats. But Trump’s crude initiatives are, at bottom, pitches to commercial feeling: Look at their decaying, crime-ridden cities. Now look at our safe and shiny ones. Where would you rather put your money — and your vote?

I don’t mean to make light of what Trump is doing. He is destroying the fabric of American creativity and freedom — they are the same thing — in everything he does. Like a lot of people who define themselves by the money they accumulate, Trump seems mortally offended by qualities that are non-transactional and non-quantitative. More than one avid and earnest young person, speaking their heart out in an uninhibited moment, has looked up to see someone staring at them with daggers in the eyes, riven by envy of their inner freedom. It’s why Iago hates Othello. It’s why John Claggart hates Billy Budd in Herman Melville’s great story of the unfathomable, implacable hatred harbored by coarseness of fineness. It’s why Iago-Trump hates Obama-Othello beyond all reason or explanation. 

It is no wonder, then, that Trump is pushing a government initiative to pour nearly $100 billion private dollars into AI. That is how business replaces independent thought — how Claggart replaces Billy. The official sunny culture of the Soviet regime sought to replace independent thought with a kind of production-propaganda AI. Its algorithm of an inexorable march to utopia did the thinking for its citizens. In America, an AI washed and rinsed of all original insight, which is born out of original experience, is now doing the thinking — quantitatively, aggregately — for American citizens. America is not on the verge of totalitarianism. It is in the throes of businesstarianism. 

It would not be prudent to take with a grain of salt Trump sending the military into Washington to keep order as if the city were in flames. But it would be paralyzing to see it as an irreversible step toward authoritarianism. Rather it is Trump gussying up his Right-wing showroom in advance of the 2026 fall retail season — I mean, the midterm elections. They want the police to be engaged in “brokering and enforcing social cooperation”, in the words of Brandon del Pozo, a Rawlsian former chief of police and now assistant professor of public health at Brown University. We just want to put the bad guys in jail, where they can’t hurt you. You get a lot more miles per gallon with us.

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The new Cold War will divide the West

By Philip Cunliffe

It is not quite what Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini or any modern dictator pursuing the merciless logic of an historical equation had in mind. This American moment is the product of democracy’s meltdown, not of a rival political system to democracy. The old distinction between negative liberty (the state limits itself to protecting rights and ensuring safety)  and positive liberty (the state helps individuals realize their potential) has broken down. The social justice movement, well meaning as it is, has been indulging its own autocratic spasm in almost entirely drowning out negative with positive liberty. In a society where people are going to “realize their potential” — i.e. get what they want, any way they can —  a state that helps certain groups but not others to achieve that goal is going to be perceived as an oppression to everyone else. In a super-mega-hyper competitive society like America, social justice is seen by many as just another way for someone to get a leg up.

And in an American society where the idea of community never extended beyond where you lived, where religion has receded even where its rituals are observed, where the screen both causes and sanctions increasingly anti-social, or even incomprehensible, behavior, a lot of people respond to news of the military on American streets with shouts of “It’s about time!” As for Trump’s custom Italian-made heel on the neck of universities, the media, low and high culture, plenty of people don’t perceive it so much in its particulars as revel in its aggregate. Finally, they say, at a time when democratic freedoms have, in so many ways, tipped over into the type of freedom that alarms and threatens rather than inspires and transports, here is someone — true, a sociopathic and vindictive clown, but hey, he’s our sociopath — addressing the problem.

For these people, Make America Great Again means make America simple and safe again. On some fundamental level, that is a non-partisan desire. After all, echt-liberal democrat Kathy Hochul, governor of New York, also sent the National Guard into New York, specifically its subways. On Friday, Putin won’t be interested in negotiating about Ukraine; he only cares about what he wants. What he might wish to talk about, but wouldn’t dare to, is how Trump is bringing back Soviet-style conformism, but in Russia’s great rival, and combined with a spirit of American entrepreneurial chaos and greed.

Even so, President Trump has deployed the National Guard, along with several hundred marines, to Los Angeles — despite the objections of California Governor Gavin Newsom. This is the first time a president has invoked this authority since Lyndon Johnson sent them in to protect civil rights protesters in Alabama in 1965 when the governor George Wallace, a notorious segregationist and demagogue, refused to protect them himself. The circumstances in Trump’s case are dramatically different, and it’s far from clear that his decision meets the legal standard for federalising Guard troops. California Attorney General Rob Bonta has already filed a lawsuit.

Whether or not such action was legal, it was certainly indefensible. The protests over the weekend weren’t even particularly large, numbering in the hundreds, rather than the thousands, most of whom were demonstrating peacefully. There were a few reports of people who “threw objects” at ICE agents who were taking immigrant workers into detention, but I haven’t seen any claims of serious injuries. Nevertheless, Trump’s response was unprecedented in recent American history.

When the Guard was deployed on Saturday, the Twitter account of the Customs and Border Protection agency sternly posted that anyone “who assaults or impedes a federal law enforcement officer or agent in the performance of their duties” will face “life long consequences”. It’s a threat difficult to take seriously coming from the Trump administration, which mass-pardoned rioters who assaulted Capitol police officers on January 6. This included rioters who had attacked cops with flagpoles and bear spray. Surely this is far worse than the friends and colleagues of terrified workers making desperate attempts to save them from ICE?

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By Mary Harrington

It’s even harder to believe that such ostentatiously cruel roundups of unauthorised immigrant workers are a necessary part of a populist effort to protect native-born workers from low-waged competition. The Trump administration has been waging an all-out war against organised labour, attempting to abolish the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) and shredding the collective bargaining agreements of federal workers. They’ve promoted Medicaid cuts, gutted regulatory agencies, and torn up workplace safety standards. But we’re supposed to believe that the administration is terrorising migrant workers because it wants to protect the living standards of the working class?

Los Angeles has been the site of massive and destructive riots at various points in its history, such as the Watts Riots in 1965 or the explosion following the Rodney King trial in 1992. But the level of destruction we’re seeing now is the kind you might expect from a sports riot in a Midwestern college town. It’s hard to shake the impression that Trump’s goal is to heighten tensions. After all, Los Angeles is a big liberal city that conservative commentators often treat as a byword for crime, homelessness, and political dysfunction. California is one of the most solidly Democratic states. Trump might see several advantages to engineering a dramatic showdown in a city and state run by his political enemies.

He also probably wants to posture for his base as a tough and decisive leader. His most hard-core supporters believe that his first administration was obstructed by feckless moderate Republicans who took key roles in the White House. For them, this explains all the gaps between rhetoric and reality. After all the hype about “building the wall” along the Mexican border, for example, less than 50 miles of new border fencing was constructed during Trump’s four years in office.

The incentive to pander to his base might be particularly strong in this case because the underlying issue is immigration. When Trump assumed office, he promised to deport “millions and millions” of unauthorised immigrants, but his administration has struggled to deport anything like that level. By sending the marines to Los Angeles to stop protesters from blocking ICE vans, perhaps Trump is seeking to symbolically compensate for the gap between rhetoric and reality.

There are other plausible explanations which are far more disturbing. Is Trump hoping that inflaming tensions will provoke a violent response from Angelenos extreme enough to justify seizing further emergency powers? Or could it be a trial balloon: an opportunity for Trump to gauge how much authoritarianism he can get away? That would fit the pattern of the rest of his second term, during which he has sent deportees to a prison in El Salvador without trial, and ignored a judge’s explicit order to turn back deportation flights that were already in the air. (Administration lawyers argued that the order wasn’t binding because it hadn’t been delivered in writing.) Why did Trump bother doing that? It’s not as if much rested on those particular planes making it to their destination. But perhaps he thought that establishing that the administration could get away with ignoring the courts would be a useful precedent going forward.

Something similar might be going on here. While senior White House aide Stephen Miller has explicitly used the word “insurrection” to describe events in Los Angeles, Trump has so far stopped short of using the i-word. Perhaps this time he won’t go so far as to invoke the Insurrection Act, which would allow him to use the marines and guardsmen in LA to engage in law-enforcement activity such as arresting rioters. Instead, the marines and the guardsmen will stand outside federal buildings looking intimidating. Even so, this sets a precedent: that marines can be sent to sites of domestic unrest. And this might make the public and the press a bit less rattled if Trump ever does invoke the Insurrection Act in the future.

Trump, though, tends to act on impulse. Few presidents have been less consistent in their decision making: administration officials and advisors come and go, the President’s moods change, and everyone has to scramble to keep up. But while he fumbles in the dark, acting on instinct, many of those instincts are deeply authoritarian. Testing how far he can push the limits of presidential power is par for the course. And the best hope for the health of American democracy is for the public to signal, loudly and clearly, that enough is enough.