“I told Pete, we should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military. National Guard, but our military.”—President Trump
The National Guard was just the beginning.
One year after President Trump deployed military troops to the nation’s capital, we find ourselves navigating a posse comitatus presidency in which the visual trappings of martial law are the norm, not the exception.
The Founders warned against standing armies on American soil, fearing that the military might someday be used not to defend the people but to control them. They understood something Americans are being encouraged to forget: soldiers and police serve fundamentally different purposes.
When the president sends troops to police domestic unrest that civilian authorities are capable of handling, he crosses a dangerous constitutional line.
When soldiers are stationed indefinitely on American streets, assisting police operations, patrolling subway stations, tourist attractions, neighborhoods and parks, that line becomes even harder to see.
When troops become so commonplace that they are used for everything from snow removal and medical emergencies to groundskeeping and beautification projects, something more insidious happens.
Military occupation begins to look normal.
And when the president uses that military presence as a demonstration of his personal power over the nation’s capital, the warning embedded in the Posse Comitatus Act becomes impossible to ignore.
The military is not supposed to be the president’s national police force.
Yet that is increasingly what Donald Trump is turning it into.
One year ago, when Trump declared a supposed “crime emergency” in Washington, D.C., called in the National Guard, unleashed federal law enforcement throughout the city and temporarily seized control of the Metropolitan Police Department, we warned that the police state had found a new playbook: martial law, one city at a time.
The emergency is long over.
The troops never left.
Now the Pentagon says the National Guard deployment can remain in Washington until January 20, 2029—the final day of Trump’s presidency—unless Trump himself decides to terminate it sooner.
That is not an emergency response.
That is a standing military presence.
The government expects American taxpayers to spend another $1.4 billion maintaining it.
What began in August 2025 as an extraordinary response to a supposedly “extraordinary” crime crisis has become part of the architecture of everyday government.
Thousands of military personnel have remained deployed in the capital. Armed Guard members patrol streets, Metro stations, parks and tourist attractions. They have supported arrest operations. They have responded to medical calls. They have shoveled snow. They have removed trash and weeds and participated in “beautification” projects.
During the nation’s 250th anniversary celebrations, their numbers swelled to roughly 5,000.
Now the Trump administration is making plans to build “apartment-style lodging units” for the troops stationed in DC at a cost of $292 million to the taxpayer.
That is in addition to the $1 billion Trump wants for White House security upgrades, including a new ballroom topped by a proposed “droneport” that he has envisioned as a rooftop staging ground for military trucks, personnel and battlefield weaponry.
The symbolism is hard to miss.
Temporary deployments do not usually require hundreds of millions of dollars in permanent-style housing, any more than constitutional government requires turning the White House into a military outpost.
This is how emergency power grabs become entrenched and permanent.
First the government identifies a crisis. Then it claims extraordinary powers to confront that crisis. Then the crisis ends. And the extraordinary powers and government overreach remain.
A year ago, the Trump administration insisted that military force was necessary to restore law and order to Washington, even though violent crime was at its lowest level in 30 years.
Today, crime continues to decline, yet there is apparently no circumstance under which the government considers the mission accomplished.
That tells you everything you need to know.
The deployment was never merely about crime. It was about establishing a precedent.
That precedent says the president can put troops on American streets, keep them there after the purported emergency has passed, assign them ever-expanding civilian functions and eventually turn their presence into such an ordinary feature of daily life that Americans stop asking why soldiers are patrolling their neighborhoods in the first place.
That is precisely the danger the Posse Comitatus Act was intended to guard against.
Enacted in 1878, the Act embodies one of the oldest principles of constitutional government: except where Congress or the Constitution specifically authorizes it, the military should not be used to execute civilian law.
There is good reason for that prohibition.
Police are supposed to protect civil order while operating within a constitutional system built around warrants, probable cause, due process, civilian accountability and limits on force. The military is trained to identify threats, take territory, defeat enemies and obey a chain of command.
Confuse those roles and eventually citizens become enemy combatants, neighborhoods become occupied territory, and political dissent becomes a security threat.
We do not have to speculate about where this leads.
We have already begun to see it.
When Trump federalized California National Guard troops and deployed Marines to Los Angeles during protests against immigration raids in 2025, a federal judge subsequently ruled that the administration had violated the Posse Comitatus Act by using military personnel to carry out civilian law-enforcement functions.
In his ruling, U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer warned that the administration appeared intent on creating something the Constitution was never meant to tolerate: a national police force with the president effectively serving as its chief.
That description increasingly fits the Trump presidency.
Trump is not merely claiming authority as commander-in-chief over America’s military. He is increasingly behaving as though being commander-in-chief makes him commander-in-chief of the American people.
It is a profound, constitutional difference.
A president governs citizens. A commander commands troops. A police chief directs law enforcement. A king commands subjects.
The danger begins when one man starts behaving as though all four offices belong to him.
That mindset is increasingly visible not only in the administration’s policies but in Trump’s carefully cultivated image of presidential power.
Throughout history, authoritarian rulers have understood the propaganda value of martial imagery. Mussolini surrounded himself with Blackshirts and military pageantry. Hitler’s meticulously staged uniforms, rallies and parades projected total command over the German state. Stalin and Mao enveloped themselves in the imagery of military power and revolutionary force.
The message was unmistakable: I am not merely your political leader. I am your protector, your commander and your law.
Trump has increasingly embraced his own digital version of that authoritarian theater.
Just days ago, he circulated an AI-generated image depicting himself in an elaborate military uniform alongside Generals George S. Patton and Douglas MacArthur, laden with decorations and medals he never earned for military service he never performed.
It would be tempting to dismiss such images as narcissistic internet trolling.
That would be a mistake.
Propaganda matters because it tells people how power wishes to be seen. Trump’s increasingly martial self-portraits complement a presidency that repeatedly treats domestic political problems as military problems, political opponents as enemies, immigrants as invaders, protesters as insurgents, cities as territory to be liberated, and federal force as the preferred instrument for imposing order.
The message is not subtle.
This is how Trump sees presidential power: Not merely as persuasion. Not merely as leadership. Not merely as authority derived from the consent of the governed. But as authoritarian power backed by military force.
The National Guard deployment in Washington is the physical embodiment of that worldview.
Armed soldiers are stationed around the monuments. They guard the perimeter of the Reflecting Pool. They patrol the National Mall. They appear at Metro stations, tourist sites and public parks.
Their presence is no longer presented as extraordinary. That is precisely the problem.
A free people should never become accustomed to soldiers policing their streets. Once that sight becomes ordinary, the constitutional barrier separating military power from civilian government has already begun to collapse.
And Washington is the ideal laboratory for normalizing it.
Because the District of Columbia is not a state, its residents lack many of the political and constitutional defenses available elsewhere. The president exercises direct control over the D.C. National Guard, while Congress retains enormous power over the city’s local government.
That makes Washington uniquely vulnerable. It also makes it uniquely useful as a testing ground.
What can be normalized in the capital today can be demanded elsewhere tomorrow.
Indeed, we have already seen repeated attempts to expand the model beyond Washington: federalized National Guard troops in Los Angeles, attempted Guard deployments elsewhere, federal agents sent into cities, immigration enforcement increasingly carried out with military equipment and rhetoric, and presidential threats to “liberate” jurisdictions whose elected leaders resist federal policy.
Not every deployment has survived judicial scrutiny.
That is encouraging, but it is not reassuring enough.
The real danger is larger than whether any particular deployment is eventually blocked by a court. The danger is that the country is being conditioned to accept the premise behind all of them: that whenever the president declares a city dangerous, disorderly, disobedient or insufficiently cooperative, military force is an appropriate instrument of domestic government.
That premise should frighten conservatives and liberals alike.
This is not fundamentally a question of whether you trust Donald Trump. It is whether you trust any president with a standing military force at his disposal for domestic political purposes.
The Constitution was not written on the assumption that good people would always hold power. It was written because power attracts abuse.
Every authority surrendered to Trump becomes an authority available to his successors. Every emergency power normalized now becomes part of the presidential toolbox later. Every constitutional boundary ignored because the “right” president is violating it becomes one less boundary available when the “wrong” president takes office.
This is how republics lose their safeguards: Not always through dramatic coups. Not always through tanks surrounding the legislature.
Sometimes it happens more quietly: One deployment. One emergency. One executive order. One city. One exception at a time.
Last year, we warned that the police state had developed a new playbook: martial law, one city at a time.
A year later, the greater danger is that Americans are getting used to it.
The troops are still there. The emergency is gone.
The president has extended their presence through the end of his term.
And the sight of soldiers performing civilian functions in the nation’s capital is slowly being transformed from an extraordinary exercise of government power into just another part of the scenery.
As we have warned repeatedly in Battlefield America: The War on the American People and its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, that is how constitutional lines disappear—not because someone formally erases them, but because enough people stop noticing when they are crossed.
The Founders feared standing armies because they understood that military power and political liberty exist in constant tension.
The Posse Comitatus Act reflects that same hard-earned wisdom.
Soldiers defend the country. Police enforce the law. Presidents execute the laws within constitutional limits.
Citizens are not troops. Cities are not battlefields. Political opponents are not enemy combatants. And the president is not the American people’s commander-in-chief. He is commander-in-chief of the armed forces.
That distinction may be one of the few things standing between a constitutional republic and a police state presidency.
We had better remember it before the exception becomes the rule—and the troops never go home.
Article posted with permission from John Whitehead
