Trump’s Use of Troops for Policing Hasn’t Been Seen Since America Was Ruled by a King

The United States crept closer to becoming a full-blown police state yesterday when President Donald Trump made good on a promise to further militarize the nation’s capital. Trump threatened to employ similar tactics in cities across the country as the Pentagon evaluates plans for a “Domestic Civil Disturbance Quick Reaction Force” composed of hundreds of National Guard troops poised to surge into American cities.

The power grab in the District of Columbia, which bypassed the city’s elected leaders, follows deployments of federal troops from coast to coast, surges of masked federal agents around the United States, and consistent tyrannical use of executive authority in ways with little precedent in modern U.S. history.

“Our capital city has been overtaken by violent gangs and bloodthirsty criminals,” Trump said at a White House news conference on Monday, painting the city as a hellscape filled with “drugged out maniacs” and “caravans of mass youth” who “rampage through city streets” day and night. “I’m deploying the National Guard to help reestablish law, order and public safety in Washington, D.C.,” he declared.

As of Monday afternoon, Guard members had yet to be deployed. “They’ve got to muster in. They’ve got to do a little brief training and processing, and then they’re going to move out. But we do expect this to happen pretty rapidly,” an Army spokesperson told The Intercept. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said Monday that the Guard would be “flowing into the streets of Washington in the coming week.”

The timeline for the troop deployment is hazy. According to a memorandum Trump issued on Monday, National Guard troops will remain deployed until the president determines “that conditions of law and order have been restored.”

Justice Department figures show violent crime in the nation’s capital is at a 30-year low.

“If we look at both practically the way the Trump administration is using the military around the country and also formally, in what they are asserting about their authority — the ability to use the military anywhere, anytime, for any purpose — it’s absolutely unprecedented,” said Joseph Nunn, an attorney with the Brennan Center for Justice’s liberty and national security program who focuses on the domestic role of the U.S. military.

“The last person to assert that sort of boundless authority to deploy the military domestically and use it for law enforcement in this country was King George,” he told The Intercept, referencing King George III who lost the American Revolution.

“President Trump’s ever-expanding use of the military for domestic matters is beyond alarming,” Sen. Jack Reed of Rhode Island, the top Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, said in a statement criticizing the deployment. “Our military is trained to defend the nation from external threats and assist communities during disasters or emergencies, not to conduct day-to-day domestic policing. This deployment is a serious misuse of the National Guard’s time and talent.”

Approximately 800 National Guard soldiers were activated as part of the “D.C. Safe and Beautiful Task Force,” with about 100 to 200 of them supporting law enforcement at any given time, according to a statement provided to The Intercept by the Army. “Hey, that’s a real thing, man. I double-checked,” the Army spokesperson told The Intercept when asked about the name of the task force. “I was like, ‘That can’t be real.’ But yeah. It’s real.”

The Army said that the National Guard forces operating in the capital would perform “an array of tasks from administrative, logistics and physical presence in support of law enforcement.”

D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser said she did not believe it was legal “to use the American military against American citizens on American soil” at a press conference on Monday evening.

The White House did not respond to a request for comment regarding Bowser’s remarks.

The National Guard deployment is one facet of Trump’s efforts to put the District of Columbia under federal authority; he also declared that he is temporarily taking control of the city’s police department. Hundreds of officers and agents from more than a dozen federal agencies — including the FBI; Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives; Drug Enforcement Administration; Immigration and Customs Enforcement; and the U.S. Marshals Service — have also fanned out across Washington in recent days.

The federal crackdown on Washington was precipitated by the attempted carjacking of Edward Coristine, a 19-year-old software engineer and former Department of Government Efficiency staffer better known by his online sobriquet “Big Balls.” Police officers arrested two 15-year-old suspects, a boy and a girl.

Trump invoked a section of the District of Columbia Home Rule Act that grants him the power to temporarily seize control of the city’s police department. He said Attorney General Pam Bondi would oversee the federal takeover of the capital’s Metropolitan Police Department and, with Hegseth at his side, added that he was prepared to send the military into Washington “if needed.”

In a Monday memorandum, Trump directed Hegseth to coordinate with governors of states and “authorize the orders of any additional members of the National Guard to active service, as he deems necessary and appropriate, to augment this mission.”

Hegseth said that beyond the D.C. National Guard, the Pentagon was prepared to surge other military units into the capital.

“There are other units we are prepared to bring in, other National Guard units, other specialized units,” Hegseth said. “They will be strong, they will be tough, and they will stand with their law enforcement partners.” He added, “We will work alongside all D.C. police and federal law enforcement to ensure this city is safe. This city is beautiful.” 

The Pentagon failed to respond to questions from The Intercept about which units might be deployed, what would precipitate that, and when.

This is the second time this summer that Trump has deployed troops to a Democratically governed city. A federal trial began on Monday in San Francisco to decide whether Trump violated the law by deploying National Guard troops to Los Angeles in June without the approval of California Gov.r Gavin Newsom.

“President Trump is exploiting his power and testing it in ways that could lead to more U.S. troops deployed on American soil. As we saw in Los Angeles, President Trump is willing to deploy U.S. military forces on American streets for inflammatory and political reasons,” said Reed, the Rhode Island senator. “Normalizing the use of U.S. military forces for everyday policing risks eroding the very freedoms our servicemembers swear to protect.”

In his first seven months in office, Trump has overseen the deployment of around 20,000 federal troops on American soil, including personnel from the National Guard, the Army, the Navy, the Air Force, and the Marines, according to the Pentagon. But the true number of troops deployed may be markedly higher. U.S. Northern Command has no running tally of how many troops have been deployed around the country.

These federal forces have been operating under Title 10 authority, or federal control, in at least five states — Arizona, California, Florida, New Mexico, and Texas — in service of the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant agenda.

More than 10,000 troops are deploying or have deployed to the southern border, according to Northern Command. Under the direction of NORTHCOM, military personnel have deployed under the moniker Joint Task Force-Southern Border, or JTF-SB, since March, bolstering approximately 2,500 service members who were already supporting U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s border security mission.

“Members of the National Guard should be under no illusions about what they’re being sent to do in Washington.”

One-third of the U.S. border is now completely militarized due to the creation of four new national defense areas, or NDAs: sprawling extensions of U.S. military bases patrolled by troops who can detain immigrants until they can be handed over to Border Patrol agents.

Around 5,500 troops — Marines and California National Guard members — have also been deployed to Los Angeles since early June. The forces were sent to LA over the objections of local officials and Newsom.

Experts say that the increasing use of military forces in the interior of the United States represents an extraordinary violation of Posse Comitatus, a bedrock 19th-century law seen as fundamental to the democratic tradition in America.

“Though the rhetoric is sometimes different, from Los Angeles streets to ICE detention centers to our nation’s capital, President Trump is repeatedly acting to turn the National Guard into the first-choice implementers of his authoritarian agenda,” Sara Haghdoosti, the executive director of Win Without War, told The Intercept. “Whether it is assaulting immigrant communities or seizing control of law enforcement in DC, his goal for these deployments is the same: using state violence to strip power, safety, and dignity from people. Members of the National Guard should be under no illusions about what they’re being sent to do in Washington.”

Many more troops, like the National Guard forces deploying to the capital, are operating under so-called Title 32 status, meaning they are under state, rather than federal, control, unlike deployments in Los Angeles and across the southern border. With no governor to report to, the D.C. National Guard’s chain of command runs from its commanding general to the secretary of the Army to Hegseth to the president. 

The plan for the Domestic Civil Disturbance Quick Reaction Force, which was first reported by the Washington Post on Tuesday, calls for two groups of 300 troops to be on standby for rapid deployment across the country, from military bases in Alabama and Arizona. The proposed force would also reportedly operate under Title 32.   

The Pentagon refused to offer further details about the initiative. “The Department of Defense is a planning organization and routinely reviews how the department would respond to a variety of contingencies across the globe,” a defense official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, told The Intercept on Tuesday. “We will not discuss these plans through leaked documents, pre-decisional or otherwise.”

“What worries me specifically is when you create a tool for a specific purpose you’re going to want to use it — in this case, inserting the military in routine law enforcement,” Nunn, the Brennan Center a attorney, said of the rapid response force. “Having a button you can push easily, so to speak, to deploy the military domestically will make domestic deployment of the military more frequent and more likely.”

Late last month, the Trump administration authorized the deployment of National Guard troops to immigration facilities in 20 states, further entwining the military in civil and law enforcement functions. The National Guard will be deployed in Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Iowa, Louisiana, Nebraska, South Carolina, Texas, Utah, and Virginia, among other states, according to a defense official who was not authorized to disclose the information.

On Monday, Trump took aim at numerous cities led by Democratic mayors in states with Democratic governors, threating authoritarian power grabs similar to his effort in Washington. “If we need to, we’re going to do the same thing in Chicago, which is a disaster,” Trump said. “You look at Los Angeles, how bad it is. We have other cities that are very bad. New York has a problem. And then you have, of course, Baltimore and Oakland. We don’t even mention that anymore. They’re so far gone,” said Trump. “We’re not going to let it happen. We’re not going to lose our cities over this. And this will go further.” 

The June deployment of troops to Los Angeles did very little and has largely wound down. Newsom warned then that Trump would target other states. “Who else saw that coming?” he wrote on X on Monday.

Last month, Trump also threatened a federal takeover of New York City if Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani is elected. “We have tremendous power at the White House to run places when we have to,” Trump said in July. “Maybe we’re going to have to straighten it out from Washington.” 

Nunn pointed to the risks of inserting the military in routine domestic law enforcement. “The deeper and more fundamental danger is that you don’t want the people with guns, tanks, and bombers to be looking inward, at their own country, and thinking of themselves as a domestic political actor,” he told The Intercept. “The military is and should be a fundamentally outward-looking entity. You don’t have to look very far around the world to see what happens when the military sees itself as a domestic political actor.”

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