• United States

September 8, 2025, 11:16 AM View Comments ()

Last week, the Trump administration proudly posted footage of the U.S. military carrying out the apparent extrajudicial execution of 11 unidentified men on a boat in the Caribbean. At the same time, masked government agents are stalking, beating, and abducting people on the streets of the nation’s capital with impunity. The president has deployed armed National Guard troops with armored combat vehicles to Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., in a show of force, and he has promised to send more troops to Democrat-led cities that show insufficient deference.

This looks an awful lot like the arrival of the authoritarianism that many Democrats have been warning us about for the better part of the past decade. Now that even President Donald Trump himself is toying with title of “dictator,” why are so few Democratic leaders sounding the alarm?

Let’s consider what’s happening in the national capital. After declaring a “crime emergency” in D.C. on Aug. 11, Trump has deployed about 2,000 National Guard troops and 2,500 federal law enforcement officers to the city and asserted federal control over the city’s police department.

It is tempting, perhaps even reassuring, to dismiss the entire exercise as a made-for-TV performance for the MAGA base, a frantic attempt to change the subject from the Jeffrey Epstein files, or a distraction from economic woes. Battalions of National Guard members picking up trash and raking leaves in D.C. parks, the FBI and Secret Service teaming up with three other federal agencies to confiscate dime bags of marijuana, a guardsman ticketed for running a red light in Washington’s refined Capitol Hill neighborhood in a 14-ton armored vehicle (that nearly crushed an unsuspecting commuter) look more like scenes out of Veep than a threat to the republic.

But there’s nothing amusing about the disproportionate focus of the federal surge on immigration enforcement, which in practice means plainclothes Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents, often backed by other federal agents and the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department, tackling suspected undocumented immigrants (i.e., residents who look, in the judgement of an ICE agent, like working-class Hispanic people). This is now a daily occurrence in Washington.

Is Trump’s D.C. takeover a publicity stunt; an immigration crackdown; or, as the conspicuous domestic military deployments against the will of local communities suggests, a genuine attempt to establish authoritarian rule? There’s no reason that it can’t be all three. While guard members in D.C. are relegated to cleanup duty for now, the Trump administration is working steadily to transform the military into an effective tool of domestic repression. The deployment reinforces a narrative that the military can and should fight crime, and by deploying the guard in concert with ICE, Trump is associating the military with his crackdown on immigrants. That association will likely rupture the high trust that the U.S. military currently enjoys among Americans. But for Trump, the reputational risk to the armed forces is a feature, not a bug.

Blurring the lines between the military and ICE lends the military’s prestige to unpopular immigration crackdowns and further solidifies Trump’s dominance over the national security state, which eluded him during his first term. Repeated domestic deployments will build consent within the military to carry out his illiberal domestic agenda; the more that the military bureaucracy is assigned responsibility for domestic law enforcement, the more reluctant it will be to relinquish a high-profile mission that earns the praise of the commander in chief.

Trump has been clear that he not only intends to expand combined National Guard/ICE deployments to other blue cities (with Chicago at the top of his list), but also aims to expand the role of the guard in upcoming crackdowns. His Aug. 25 executive order directs all state National Guards to be “trained and ready to assist in quelling civil disturbances nationwide” and for the national guard to maintain a “quick reaction force for rapid nationwide deployment.” Trump’s federal agents have already attacked and arrested migrants, U.S. citizens, and even a sitting U.S. senator, and he’s trying to get the armed forces in on the game.

Last week’s strike in the Caribbean followed months of threats to use the military against drug cartels, proving that the administration’s tough talk must be taken as deadly serious. The Trump administration has long ideated about launching drone strikes and special operations raids against cartels in Mexico, which have also been labeled foreign terrorist organizations.

A war game organized by the Win Without War Education Fund earlier this year found that not only would U.S. military intervention in Mexico fail to stem the cross-border drug trade, but also that it would offer the Trump administration political cover to begin arbitrarily accusing U.S. citizens of material support for a terrorist organization if they had purchased theoretically cartel-linked products ranging from marijuana to avocados. For 11 unidentified figures in a small boat, that accusation carried a sentence of summary execution by the U.S. military.

We are approaching the moment that former Vice President Kamala Harris warned of on the campaign trail in October 2024 when she said Trump would “use the military as his personal militia.”

Yet a few pugnacious Democrats—such as Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker—aside, most of her party is conspicuously silent. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries demurred and deflected last week when asked point-blank on CNN what his plan was to fight Trump’s guard deployments. Earlier last month, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer vowed to fight “tooth and nail” against Trump’s takeover of D.C. police, but then called it a “distraction,” echoing the assessment of leading “national security Democrat” Sen. Elissa Slotkin. A joint resolution to terminate Trump’s state of emergency in Washington has so far earned 83 co-sponsors—barely more than a third of house Democrats.

The problem is not only that Democrats embrace a right-wing framing of “law and order” politics, as policing expert Alex S. Vitale wrote last month in Current Affairs magazine. It’s also that they embrace the right-wing framing of national security in general, leaving them with little room for disagreement when the national security state is employed in illegal or illiberal ways.

When Trump bombed Iranian nuclear sites in June, bypassing the congressional authorization required for an act of war, leading Democrats focused on the unconstitutional nature of the strikes but rarely questioned the strategic recklessness or the international legality of bombing Iran. Jeffries’s first response was to declare that “Iran is a sworn enemy of the United States and can never be permitted to become a nuclear-capable power.” Former Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who now sits on the board of influential Democratic think tank Center for American Progress, penned an op-ed criticizing Trump’s rashness but was fine with the illegal, preventive strikes themselves (to the point of trying to claim credit for them if they worked).

Criticisms of Trump’s overreach at home have similarly focused on procedure over principle. Jeffries and even Pritzker have tried to push back against Trump by arguing that in Washington and Chicago, crime is on the decline—an argument that validates Trump’s framing and implies that deploying the military would be appropriate if those cities suffered from higher crime rates. MSNBC host Joe Scarborough recently took this reasoning to its logical extreme, suggesting that Pritzker should voluntarily partner with Trump to use the National Guard to fight crime in Chicago and that the Republican governors volunteering their troops for Washington or Chicago should instead deploy them to high-crime cities in their home states.

Common to the Democratic discourse on occupying U.S. cities and bombing foreign countries is the tacit acceptance that there is a dangerous threat out there and that it does need to be met with state violence. Absent is any substantial challenge to that paradigm of militarization and the corollary assumption that a heavily armed solution would be just and effective.

In the event of an actual foreign terrorist attack, we can only imagine how quickly the anemic resistance to this militarization would dissipate and how readily Democrats would embrace troops on the streets, even as Trump uses them to quash dissent.

Democrats should not dismiss people’s legitimate concerns about crime. Americans have a right to feel safe in their homes and communities. But they also have the right to know which approaches really work and which are just security theater. Instead of trying to calibrate the right number of badges and guns to inject into U.S. cities, Democrats should celebrate Baltimore’s stunning success in reducing homicides to a 50-year low over just three years by surging coordinated social services. And they should deride as unserious anyone who claims to be “tough on crime” while refusing to apply evidence-based strategies.

Likewise, instead of trying to find the most constitutional way to bomb Iranian cities, Democrats should state unapologetically that Trump’s policy has undermined our security, drawn us closer to large-scale conflict, and made the government of Iran more likely to decide to obtain a nuclear weapon.

Democrats chasing right-wing positions on security issues is nothing new. Former President Lyndon Johnson reluctantly expanded U.S. involvement in Vietnam because he was afraid that Republicans would call him weak. Indeed, the national security state that Trump is now wielding with abandon was perfected by the last two Democratic presidents, who expanded a brutal immigration infrastructure and established tenuous new legal precedents for dropping bombs on people—including U.S. citizens—all over the Middle East and Africa.

But with troops in the streets, the military prepared to blow up whoever Trump calls a terrorist, and Stephen Miller calling the Democratic Party itself a “domestic, extremist organization,” time is running out. Democratic leaders need to face reality, fight back, and abandon the logic of militarization before they become its next victims.