Throughout Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign for the presidency, he repeatedly indicated his desire to deploy National Guard troops into the “crime dens” of American cities and against the “enemy within.” This promise, at least, he has kept. Over the past four months, the president has sent the Guard into the streets of Los Angeles and the District of Columbia. Now Trump is pushing to do the same in Portland, Oregon (which he recently described as “a burning hellhole”), and Chicago (“probably worse than almost any other city in the world”).

Trump’s eagerness to send troops into American cities is at odds with the country’s well-established antipathy toward domestic military deployments. In a ruling last week barring Trump’s deployment of the Oregon Guard into Portland, Judge Karin Immergut of the U.S. District Court for the District of Oregon wrote that the United States “has a longstanding and foundational tradition of resistance to government overreach, especially in the form of military intrusion into civil affairs.” Trump’s arguments for deploying the Guard “risk blurring the line between civil and military federal power,” the judge warned. Likewise, at a press conference yesterday, Illinois Governor J. B. Pritzker, a Democrat, argued that Trump “wants to justify and normalize the presence of armed soldiers under his direct command.” Trump’s deployments of the National Guard, while clumsy, are best understood as an effort to erode the nation’s sense that such use of the mil