On Friday, President Donald Trump threatened to extend the current military occupation of Washington D.C. to other major US cities, including Chicago, San Francisco, New York and Los Angeles. His threats to essentially impose martial law on major American cities came the same day the Pentagon confirmed that the over 2,000 National Guard soldiers currently occupying D.C. would begin carrying weapons of war.
Speaking first at the Kennedy Center and again inside the Oval Office, Trump, wearing a red hat with the phrase “Trump Was Right About Everything,” said he was receiving calls “from politicians begging me to go to Chicago, begging me to go to New York, begging me to go to Los Angeles.”
Leaving the door open for an extended military deployment, perhaps through the mid-term elections and beyond, Trump said, “And the big question is how long do we stay? Because if we stay, we want to make sure it doesn’t come back.”
The fascist president added, “So we have to take care of these criminals and get them out of here. We have, we’ve collected hundreds of career criminals. These are career criminals. You’re not going to teach them to be nice.”
Trump added, “These are, uh, probably born that way. I don’t know. But they’re career criminals... very, very dangerous people.”
At the White House, Trump revealed the lawless and manufactured character of the alleged “crime emergency.” He said:
I keep seeing about a 30-day deadline, of which we have 22 days left, or something. But if I think we’re in great shape here, that’s one thing, but if I don’t, I’m going to just say it’s a national emergency. And if I have a national emergency, I can keep the troops here as long as I want.
Asked if there were “concrete steps” being taken towards deploying military elements to Chicago, Trump insulted Mayor Brandon Johnson, calling him “grossly incompetent,” and said he hadn’t spoken to him, but that “When we’re ready, we’ll go in and we’ll straighten out Chicago just like we did D.C. Chicago is a very dangerous, great place.” Trump then turned to San Francisco, “”We’ll clean that one up too.”
Trump grunted that D.C. “was a crime-infested rat hole.” He continued, “And they do have a lot of rats, we are getting rid of them too and we’ve made a lot of progress...
“We brought in the D.C. National Guard and we coupled them with the police and it has been amazing.” He added, “It hasn’t been clean. Now it’s going to be clean.”
Trump praised the over 2,200 National Guard troops currently embedded with local and federal police. He said:
The National Guard has been unbelievable. They are working with the police and they have some very good people in there. Some people that shouldn’t be police, actually, but they have some great people there.
Under the false pretext that Washington D.C. is in the throes of a major crime wave, for the last week National Guard soldiers from states with Republican governors have flooded the city. So far, approximately 1,400 soldiers from West Virginia, South Carolina, Ohio, Louisiana, Mississippi and Tennessee have deployed to supplement roughly 800 D.C. National Guard soldiers.
Over the past week the soldiers have not been authorized to carry weapons as they accompany police and patrol federal property. On Friday, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth granted permission for soldiers to carry the same weapons used by the US military and its allies in Baghdad, Kabul and Gaza.
In a statement to the Washington Post, the Pentagon confirmed that soldiers will “soon be on mission with their service-issued weapons.” For most infantry and military police, their “service-issued weapon” is the M-4 or M4A1 carbine. The latter is capable of fully automatic fire, while the former has semi-automatic fire or a three-round burst.
The M4 is the updated version of the M16 rifle. The civilian version of the M16 is the AR-15, the most commonly used weapon in mass shootings in the US over the past two decades.
Revealing that there are ongoing discussions and plans at the highest levels of the government to supplement the deployment of National Guard forces with active duty military elements, Trump said the National Guard “has done such an incredible job, working with the police” that “we haven’t had to bring in the regular military, which we are willing to do if we have to.”
He continued, “And after we do this we’ll go to another location and we’ll make it safe also.”
“Chicago is a mess,” Trump said. “You have an incompetent mayor. Grossly incompetent, and we’ll straighten that one out probably next. That will be our next one after this. And it won’t even be tough.”
Trump claimed he did “great with the black vote” and that “African American women” were “screaming” for Trump to flood the city with police and military. “I think Chicago will be next and then we’ll help with New York,” he added.
Chicago is about four times larger than Washington D.C., with some 2.7 million residents in the city itself, compared to about 670,000 in D.C. The first and only time Trump tried to hold a political rally in the city was on March 11, 2016. The rally was canceled due to the large presence of anti-Trump protesters.
The Chicago metro area, including parts of Illinois, Indiana and southern Wisconsin, is the third largest metro area in the country, with about 9.5 million people.
Trump’s deployment of the military in D.C. and threats to expand to other cities must be taken with deadly seriousness. Trump is arrogating to himself the powers of dictator, with no resistance from the nominal opposition party.
At the White House and at the Kennedy Center, Trump threatened D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser. He said:
I’m tired of listening to these people say how safe it was before we got here. It was unsafe, it was horrible, and Mayor Bowser better get her act straight or she won’t be mayor very long because we will take it over with the federal government, run it like it is supposed to be run.
Asked by the Washington Post to respond to Trump’s plans to arm the military elements currently in the city, Bowser “declined to comment on the authorization of weapons.”
At the Kennedy Center, Trump said Bowser “has to get on the ball because we have a situation, and she’s a nice woman, but I’ll tell you what, she’s got to get on the ball.” He added, “I don’t want to see phony numbers,” referring to a recently initiated Department of Justice criminal investigation into the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department opened by newly installed US Attorney and Fox News propagandist Jeanine Pirro.
Trump’s attacks on alleged “phony” crime stats produced by the Metro Police serve several purposes. His fascist and racist narrative that D.C. is overrun with crime is aimed at demonizing the working class and justifying military occupation of the capital—a major step in the erection of a dictatorship. At the same time, it normalizes the presence of armed agents of the state in public life and shifts attention away from the real criminality of US imperialism: the genocide and forced starvation campaign in Gaza, the mass deportation operation, the gutting of democratic rights by the Supreme Court and the ongoing transfer of wealth from the working class to the parasitic ruling class.
Asked if upon Congress’s return from the August recess he would demand that Congress give him “more control over D.C,” Trump said, “D.C. was a hell hole and now it’s safe.”