Donald Trump isn’t done.
While announcing a federal takeover of the police department of Washington, D.C., on Monday, the president threatened several cities with similar measures. Shortly after sharing his plan to deploy hundreds of National Guard troops in the capital, Trump hinted at the idea of deploying the National Guard in other major metropolises.
“I’m going to look at New York in a little while,” Trump said. “If we need to, we’re gonna do the same thing in Chicago, which is a disaster.”
The president called Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson “totally incompetent” and leveled similar accusations at Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker while warning of the possibility of boots in the Loop. Pritzker fired back on Monday, saying that Trump had “absolutely no right” to take control of the Illinois National Guard.
“There is a law on the books, confirmed by the Constitution, called ‘posse comitatus,’” Pritzker said. “It means that the federal government does not have the right to send soldiers into American cities…for any purpose.”
As president, Trump does have the right to take over the capital’s police force and call in the city’s National Guard troops. The National Guard in other states — Illinois, for example — is controlled by the state’s governor. Trump has been testing the limits of that control in his second term. He wrested control of the California National Guard away from Gov. Gavin Newsom by declaring protests against Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids to be a rebellion. That order was quickly tangled up in a series of judicial orders and stays. The state’s lawsuit against the Trump administration over the deployment began hearings on Monday.
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Trump has also threatened federal intervention in his hometown of New York City, particularly if Democratic Party candidate Zohran Mamdani is successful in his bid for the mayoralty.
“Whoever’s mayor of New York is going to have to behave themselves or the federal government is coming down very tough on them,” Trump said in July.
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