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Opinion|Trump Is Blurring the Line Between the Military and Law Enforcement
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/11/opinion/trump-national-guard-washington-dc.html
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W.J. Hennigan
Aug. 11, 2025
Mr. Hennigan writes about national security issues for Opinion from Washington.
To hear President Trump tell it, you’d think that Washington was a lawless dystopia where few live free from fear. “Our capital city has been overtaken by violent gangs and bloodthirsty criminals, roving mobs of wild youth, drugged out maniacs and homeless people,” he said on Monday at the White House.
This is why he formally declared a public safety emergency in the city in a pair of executive orders that placed the Metropolitan Police Department under the federal government control and directed 800 National Guard members into the streets. Mr. Trump opted to rattle off a series of anecdotes about local victims of violent crime, instead of talking about the recent data that shows it’s at a 30-year low.
From there, Mr. Trump went even further, seemingly soft-launching the case for potential federal intervention in more Democrat-led cities — Chicago, Baltimore, Oakland — “if they don’t learn their lesson” to address crime. “We’re not going to lose our cities over this,” he said.
The president’s words and actions served as the latest examples of his long-running fixation to exercise control over blue parts of the country through rarely used executive powers. In June, he sent nearly 5,000 troops to Los Angeles — mostly National Guard but also, much more unusually, several hundred Marines — after protests broke out over his immigration policies, blurring the line between the U.S. military’s role and domestic law enforcement.
National Guard units are typically called into service by a governor during natural disasters or emergencies. Mr. Trump has chosen instead to “federalize” the units against the wishes of state and local leaders for “emergencies” that few outside his administration can see, particularly as national ones.
In Los Angeles, for instance, Mr. Trump sent troops to help quell protests against ICE around federal facilities. But the troops weren’t involved in crowd control. They couldn’t arrest anyone. They were largely resigned to standing guard in or around two buildings where little was happening. There were instances of vandalism and looting, but the mass civil unrest didn’t materialize.
