US President Donald Trump signed an executive order Monday morning instructing the Pentagon to prepare for nationwide military operations by National Guard troops modeled on the military-police occupation of Washington D.C., now two weeks old. The flagrantly unconstitutional and illegal order is a further step in the establishment of authoritarian rule in the United States.
In comments following the signing of the orders, Trump mused that his critics were accusing him of being a dictator, adding, “A lot of people are saying maybe we like a dictator.”
In this campaign, Trump relies on the complicity of both the Democratic Party and the corporate media to conceal from the American people the reality of a systematic conspiracy to establish a presidential dictatorship, unfolding in real time.
Trump signed a total of four executive orders before television cameras, with much of his cabinet and Vice President JD Vance crowding around him and taking turns being called on to flatter their boss and receive praise from him. The degrading spectacle could be compared to that in the court of an absolute monarch, but only if the ruler was a semi-imbecile given to spewing nonstop lies and self-congratulation.
The most ominous of the orders carries the anodyne title, “Additional Measures to Address the Crime Emergency in the District of Columbia.” It builds on the executive order Trump issued August 11, declaring the crime emergency “to address the rampant violence and disorder that have undermined the proper and safe functioning of the Federal Government.”
None of those conditions actually exist as characterized by Trump. Whatever the level of street crime, it has in no way disrupted the functioning of the federal government—certainly not compared to the disruption caused by Trump’s own actions in firing hundreds of thousands of federal workers and closing down entire agencies, without congressional authorization and in defiance of numerous court orders.
Section 2 of the order authorizes the hiring of more police and prosecutors in the District of Columbia. It goes on to instruct the task force set up by Trump on March 27, 2025 “to establish an online portal for Americans with law enforcement or other relevant backgrounds and experience to apply to join Federal law enforcement entities to support the policy goals” of the administration.
All police agencies participating in this task force shall “immediately create and begin training, manning, hiring, and equipping a specialized unit that is dedicated to ensuring public safety and order in the Nation’s capital that can be deployed whenever the circumstances necessitate, and that could be deployed, subject to applicable law, in other cities where public safety and order has been lost.”
The procedure outlined here is absolutely unprecedented in American constitutional history. Trump has ordered the creation of a vigilante unit, comprised of former police, soldiers and others with security backgrounds, to join in the repressive operation in the District of Columbia and to become part of a “specialized unit … that could be deployed … in other cities where public safety and order has been lost.”
This amounts to the creation of an American version of the Freikorps, the paramilitary units of ex-soldiers and police that were organized in Germany after World War I to defeat the German Revolution, murder its most prominent leaders, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, and crush the German working class. The Freikorps was the initial form of what was to become Hitler’s Nazi stormtroopers.
Section 2 of the executive order goes on to instruct Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth to “immediately create and begin training, manning, hiring, and equipping a specialized unit within the District of Columbia National Guard … that is dedicated to ensuring public safety and order in the Nation’s capital.”
Hegseth is also authorized to ensure the creation of similar police-type units within the Army National Guard and Air National Guard units in every state. These forces will be “available to assist Federal, State, and local law enforcement in quelling civil disturbances and ensuring the public safety and order whenever the circumstances necessitate…”
The Pentagon boss is charged with designating “an appropriate number of each State’s trained National Guard members to be reasonably available for rapid mobilization for such purposes. In addition, the Secretary of Defense shall ensure the availability of a standing National Guard quick reaction force that shall be resourced, trained, and available for rapid nationwide deployment.”
The executive order thus outlines a two-track process for the creation of a nationwide force directed by the president, through the secretary of defense, to send armed federal personnel to carry out policing anywhere in the United States: through volunteers recruited directly to come to the District of Columbia and through National Guard units in all 50 states.
The text of this order, while signed by Trump, was drafted by White House lawyers working under the direction of Trump’s top fascist aide, Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, who was standing by Trump as he signed. He praised Trump extravagantly, repeating the lie that in Washington D.C., “No one can even find a record of being murder free for as long as we’ve been murder free under President Trump’s leadership.”
This is one of the easily refuted barrage of lies that have accompanied the police-military occupation of Washington, since last week was the fifth week of the year without a homicide, including a two-week period in February and March, when no National Guard troops were patrolling the US capital.
Trump’s latest executive order establishes the framework for military operations throughout the United States, in violation of the Posse Comitatus Act, which forbids the military from assuming police functions except in circumstances of a complete breakdown of a local or state government.
Those who wrote this order know full well that the Democratic Party will do nothing but file a few lawsuits, which will wend their way through the court system for months if not years, while Trump’s “volunteers” and “specialized units” rampage through American cities.
In his comments, alongside declaring that people “like a dictator,” Trump reiterated his threat that the next target of federal military-police takeover could be the city of Chicago. He claimed, “Chicago is a killing field right now,” a designation he has never applied to Gaza, where the killing is being perpetrated on a massive scale by Israeli forces armed, financed and egged on by Washington.
Asked whether he was prepared to order National Guard troops into cities where state governors do not request the federal deployment, he replied, “I am,” before launching into a long digression on the subject of Chinese carp infesting the Great Lakes, in the course of which he confused the Democratic governor of Michigan with a Republican governor of New Jersey from three decades ago. There were no press reports afterwards on this symptom of mental decay in the 79-year-old president.
In Chicago, state and local officials, all Democrats, held a press conference Monday afternoon in which they replied to Trump’s threats of military occupation with a mix of hand-wringing, rhetorical opposition, and calls for Trump to use the National Guard to fight the “real enemies” of the American people, rather than the American people themselves.
While Illinois Governor JB Pritzker, the billionaire who is planning a presidential bid in 2028, attempted to strike a populist and democratic note, Senator Tammy Duckworth, a former military helicopter pilot and double amputee from the Afghanistan war, revealed the real concerns of the Democratic Party.
After denouncing Trump as a “tinpot despot,” she accused him of misusing the National Guard. “We want the National Guard to fight our enemies, not our neighbors,” she said, calling on Trump to reverse his policy on the war against Russia in Ukraine and provide massive military aid for the US-NATO war there, along the lines of the policy pursued by the previous Biden administration.
The entire thrust of her speech—which was enthusiastically applauded by the assembled Democratic Party officials—was that Duckworth wanted Trump to send US troops into Kiev or even Moscow rather than Chicago.