Troops in the streets: The police-state dark side of democracy

Troops in the streets: The police-state dark side of democracy
Trump isn't the first president to send troops into American cities as political theater: But there's a difference

By Andrew O'Hehir
Executive Editor
Published August 31, 2025 6:30AM (EDT)


(Salon) Donald Trump’s deployment of the National Guard, along with other military or paramilitary forces, to “police” the streets of Washington, D.C., Los Angeles and very likely other American cities can be called many things. It’s ominous, and clearly meant to be. It’s dangerous to the future of democracy — assuming, for the moment, that’s still what we have in this country. It’s also clumsy, farcical and potentially self-destructive; I would argue that those qualities complement the menace, rather than undercutting or contradicting it.

But here’s what it’s not: It’s not unprecedented, or even all that unusual. According to the pseudo-moral discourse of “norms” and “guardrails” in which so much of American journalism remains imprisoned, we don’t do troops in the streets in the world’s leading democracy, because then we wouldn’t be the world’s leading democracy, would we? Except, of course, in rare and exceptional circumstances governed by strict rules — which sounds convincing unless you bother to look closely, which is when you discover that the exceptional circumstances have happened pretty often for all kinds of reasons, and the rules are so hazy and indistinct as not to be rules at all.

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None of which is to say that there aren’t distinctive and troubling qualities to Trump’s ramped-up use of military force in American cities. It’s just that those troubling qualities are inherently subjective. As is so often the case, Trump, molded by the sharper minds in his inner circle, has perceived the flaws and weak spots in our crumbling 18th-century constitutional order and exploited them ruthlessly. What troubles so many non-MAGA citizens (an actual majority, if we believe recent polls) is not the fact that the president is sending in the troops, but exactly who that president is and why he’s doing it.

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What’s distinctive about Trump’s domestic use of the military, of course, is that the excuse for it is transparently absurd: The alleged disorder the Guard has been dispatched to suppress is either invented or imaginary. In L.A., the crisis was entirely the result of the federal government’s overtly racist and willfully indiscriminate police-state actions, in seeking to detain and deport undocumented immigrants by the thousands (along with whoever else got swept up). There is no crime wave in D.C., as has been extensively documented, but the existence of any crime whatsoever — especially if committed by a Black person — was all that was necessary. ..................(more)

https://www.salon.com/2025/08/31/troops-in-the-streets-the-police-state-dark-side-of-democracy/