Trump deploys tactics and language of war against perceived domestic threats

US President Donald Trump, seated between Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth, at the White House. Photo / Sarah L. Voisin, The Washington Post

Through public statements, orders and a little-noticed policy directive, Donald Trump has made it clear that he is eager to use the might of the United States military and the resources of the federal Government to crack down on what he sees as domestic threats: violent crime, illegal immigration, and the antifa movement.

Over the past two weeks, the President has called on the National Guard, the US reserve military force, to staff the front lines of his campaign against crime and undocumented immigration in four Democratic-run cities.

And he has increasingly used the language of war to describe domestic issues.

He has referred to Democrats’ refusal to pass a GOP spending bill as a “kamikaze attack”, characterised crime in American cities as a “war from within”, and told generals and admirals that US cities would become “training grounds” for the military in a highly partisan address that shattered norms of keeping the armed forces separate from politics.

His actions and rhetoric represent a dramatic shift in the use of the military and military language, which has been focused for most of American history on threats from abroad.

Historically, presidents have called on the National Guard, which was established to provide states with resources in times of emergency, when natural disasters or outbreaks of disorder and violence threatened to overwhelm local authorities.

Trump this month has looked to send the Guard to Chicago and Portland, two cities where local and state authorities have said local law enforcement is fully capable of managing any supposed threat and oppose federal intervention.

The last time an American president deployed the Guard over the wishes of the state’s governor was in 1965, when President Lyndon B. Johnson federalised the Alabama National Guard to protect civil‑rights marchers from Selma to Montgomery.

This time, the threat that Trump wants the military to address is diffuse and indistinct.

“We’re directly confronting the sinister threat of left-wing domestic terrorism or violence,” Trump said during a Cabinet meeting on Friday NZT. “Antifa is out of control in Portland and other places.”

Antifa, for “anti-fascist”, generally refers to a political protest movement of unaffiliated left-wing groups that militantly oppose fascism and right-wing ideologies.

Trump and Administration officials have sought to tie more-mainstream liberal groups to the movement.

Trump signed a presidential memo last month to “dismantle all stages of organised political violence and domestic terrorism”, though without explicitly calling for a military response.

The memo attributed political violence in the US to “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity; support for the overthrow of the US Government; extremism on migration, race, and gender; and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality”.

Trump signed the declaration in response to the killing of right-wing influencer Charlie Kirk, whose death intensified what the President and his top aides characterise as an existential struggle over the direction of the country.

One bullet casing recovered at the scene was engraved with, “hey fascist! CATCH!”

A senior White House official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the President’s thinking, drew a distinction between Trump’s efforts to crack down on crime and immigration and his fight against what he sees as dangerous, far-left ideology.

“What happened to Charlie is different than what happens in blue cities,” the official said. “But there is quite a bit of overlap.”

Others see the reaction to Kirk’s killing as a dangerous crackdown on free speech.

“They’re basically declaring that anybody who is opposed to the Trump Administration is a domestic terrorist, an insurrectionist, an antifa foe,” said Robert Kagan, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and author of Rebellion: How Antiliberalism is Tearing America Apart - Again.

“Even talking about enemies being anti-Christian is itself a repudiation of the secular nature of our system,” Kagan said.

“It’s a redefinition of America away from the universal and the secular to Christian theocracy … a very old tradition in American conservative thought.”

Illinois State Police officers look on as people protest outside an Ice facility on October 3 in Broadview. Illinois is one of several states in which state officials oppose federal intervention. Photo / Joshua Lott, The Washington Post

So far, the National Guard troops dispatched by Trump have acted primarily in a supporting role to Immigration and Customs Enforcement and other federal agencies’ operation against illegal immigrants. Federal law generally forbids the US military from taking part in civilian law enforcement.

The only legal exception is presidential invocation of the Insurrection Act, which allows the president to deploy military forces to suppress internal rebellion or foreign operations.

Trump has said he would consider invoking it and has laid the groundwork by describing US cities as “war zones” and those protesting against immigration raids as “insurrectionists”.

Trump faces immense obstacles to any attempt to turn troops against the American people. Some governors, including Illinois Governor JB Pritzker (Democrat), have refused to heed the President’s demands to call on their National Guards and turned to the courts to stop him.

In response to questions about whether Trump plans to invoke the Insurrection Act, White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson said: “Amidst ongoing violent riots and lawlessness, that local leaders like Pritzker have refused to step in to quell, President Trump has exercised his lawful authority to protect federal officers and assets”.

“President Trump will not turn a blind eye to the lawlessness plaguing American cities.”

Jackson pointed to cities including Washington DC and Memphis, where local leaders have co-operated with the President’s deployment of the Guard, as proof that Trump’s approach is making cities safer.

However, Trump’s use of military forces in US cities carries clear political risks.

A recent Washington Post-Ipsos poll shows Americans disapprove of Trump’s performance on crime by a 10% margin and oppose him ordering the Guard to cities other than Washington, DC, by a four-point margin. The president controls the DC National Guard by law.

As Trump has pressed to use the military to address urban crime and disorder, his Administration has also moved to tackle a broader target: An alleged conspiracy of wealthy elites funding a network of far-left domestic terrorists.

The September 25 presidential memorandum - drafted by Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, the White House counsel’s office and members of the Justice Department, among others, according to a senior White House official - outlines a strategy to “investigate, prosecute and disrupt” individuals and groups considered to be contributing to what the President describes as a wave of leftist-driven political violence.

“A new law enforcement strategy that investigates all participants in these criminal and terroristic conspiracies - including the organised structures, networks, entities, organisations, funding sources, and predicate actions behind them - is required,” the memo said.

White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller has been at the centre of Trump Administration efforts to deploy federal resources to American cities. Photo / Sarah L. Voisin, The Washington Post

The memo directs the Justice Department to make doxing campaigns, swatting, rioting and looting, among other behaviours, a “domestic terrorism” priority and tells the Treasury Department to investigate and disrupt funding streams associated with the groups.

Last week on Truth Social, Trump shared links to several articles recounting times when presidents deployed troops on US soil.

The most recent was in 1992, after the Los Angeles police officers who beat Rodney King were acquitted, triggering riots that left more than 60 people dead.

Trump also posted a picture of a 1963 letter that federalised the Alabama National Guard to enforce the desegregation of the University of Alabama.

Michael Waldman, president of the Brennan Centre for Law and Justice at New York University Law School, said Trump’s deployment of troops is different from deployments in decades past.

“It’s a military language used by the Government against its own people at a time, in fact, of relative tranquillity,” he said.

“That’s really damaging, and it’s really rare.”

At the same time, Waldman said, the Trump Administration’s “rationale for the use of the troops keeps shifting. Is it to defend federal buildings? Enforce immigration law? Fight crime?

“Now, it’s liberal foundations,” he said, citing the language of Trump’s presidential memo.

A second White House official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive conversations, pointed to injuries to Ice agents and attacks on police officers during protests by people who they said supported antifa or other left-wing groups.

The White House last week hosted a two-and-a-half-hour roundtable, where conservative and independent media members discussed violence they said they witnessed or experienced at the hands of antifa, which Trump has threatened to declare a foreign terrorist organisation.

The Trump Administration’s increased focus on the military was on display late last month when Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth convened a meeting of top generals and admirals from around the globe.

It was then that Trump, speaking to the officers, announced that US cities would become “training grounds” for the military.

Trump has singled out Chicago and Portland, Oregon, as particularly in need of military intervention. He said that the two cities, both run by Democrats, have failed to protect journalists and Ice agents from people who he sees as left-wing domestic terrorists. Elected leaders in both places have sharply refuted Trump’s claims.

Pritzker and Johnson filed a lawsuit to stop Trump from sending an additional 400 National Guard troops from Texas to Chicago - a highly unusual deployment of one state’s Guard troops into another against the host state’s wishes.

Texas troops began to arrive in Elwood, Illinois. But after a hearing, a federal judge blocked Guard troops from being federalised or deployed anywhere in Illinois for now.

Yesterday, the Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit said Trump could not deploy the National Guard in Illinois, though he could federalise the Guard for now as the court still had to decide on that.

And in Portland, a federal judge blocked the Trump Administration’s efforts to deploy troops, ruling there was not sufficient evidence to support Trump’s portrayal of Portland as “war-ravaged”.

An appeals court panel heard arguments about that ruling but did not immediately issue a decision.

Miller called the judicial decision to block troops in Portland a “legal insurrection” - a rhetorical attack that Waldman said was “something no administration would dream of”.

Waldman said it’s unclear whether Trump will ultimately prevail in his effort to launch a widespread operation with the National Guard.

“Courts generally are deferential to the government and the executive on many of these things,” he said.

“Now, the question is, is this all just background or has it changed the way the system works? It’s the great constitutional issue of this moment.”

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