🎉 It’s PN’s fourth anniversary and we’re commemorating it this week by offering paid subscriptions at a special discounted price. Click the button below to take advantage and support our work ⬇️
The Trump administration’s war on cities just entered a new, more terrifying phase. What stage of fascism is it when the president defies a court order and sends troops into a city anyway? Because as of Sunday, that’s where we’re at.
On Saturday, a Trump-appointed judge, Karin Immergut, wrote a detailed order telling the administration in no uncertain terms that Trump could not deploy the Oregon National Guard to Portland. (Stephen Miller referred to the Immergut’s order as “legal insurrection.”) On Sunday, Trump sent in troops anyway with what he surely thought was a clever little twist that wasn’t actually defiance of the court order: the troops are California National Guard members.
Cue the Good Place meme: “Okay. But that’s worse. You do get how that’s worse, right?”
Meanwhile, literally in the time it took to write this article about the illegal deployment of California Guard members to Oregon, Trump also federalized the Illinois National Guard so that he could better attack Chicago, which has been under siege from Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and her federal goons for almost a month now.
We’ll come back to Chicago. But first let’s talk Portland.
By sending the California Guard to Oregon, Trump ordered troops from one state to go into another against the wishes of both. Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek said, “There is no need for military intervention in Oregon. There is no insurrection in Portland. No threat to national security.” Nonetheless, Trump ordered 300 California Guard members to go to Portland to help quell the raging antifa mobs terrorizing the city.
Yeah, not so much.
Until the administration deliberately turned up the temperature in Portland to force a crisis, protests against ICE had fallen to a few dozen people at most, and the Portland police watching the protesters made observations of their terrifying behavior, such as “mostly sitting in lawn chairs and walking around.”
The horror.
But doesn’t matter what objective reality is. It doesn’t even matter if local law enforcement — not exactly a hotbed of wild-eyed leftists — say there is nothing that warrants deploying the military. Indeed, saying that just leads to the administration declaring it will now investigate the police force over how it responds to ICE protests.
The Arsonist in Chief
It’s hard to believe that Trump didn’t already have this gambit in his back pocket if the court blocked him from federalizing Oregon’s Guard.
The court order came down around 5:00pm pacific time on Saturday. By 6:30am Sunday, one transport with around 100 California Guard members was already in the air on the way to Portland, with another scheduled for later that day. The administration also said it would be extending the federalization of those 300 California Guard members until January 31.
While this is an attack on Oregon’s sovereignty, it’s just as much an attack on California’s. California Gov. Gavin Newsom has blasted the move, calling it a “breathtaking abuse of the law and power.” He also said he’d be suing the administration over it.
It will come as no surprise that this is completely unlawful. States are sovereign entities, meaning that, although subordinate to the federal government, each otherwise has complete control over its own borders. Simply put, one state cannot invade another. This is something so central to American democracy that you don’t even need some sort of legal explanation as to the underpinnings. The whole notion of the United States falls apart if one state can just roll over another.
Worse still, Trump sent the California National Guard, which was deployed against the wishes of the state, rather than choosing from the multiple red states, like Louisiana and West Virginia, where governors voluntarily chose to send their own troops to Washington DC. To be clear, it would still be wildly illegal to deploy one state’s Guard in another state, but at least in that instance the members involved would be from a state that willingly deployed them.
There’s no doubt that Trump thought this was a fun little two-for. He’s telling the lower court to pound sand by treating the order as only applying to the deployment of the Oregon National Guard. He’s also telling Newsom to pound sand by taking California’s National Guard to another state, even though there are still court cases fighting the California deployment.
But it’s painfully clear now that the administration doesn’t believe it has to follow any court orders it doesn’t like. It’s also painfully clear that if court orders don’t hold Trump back, not much will. What are blue states going to do? Try to get their own National Guards to fight the Guard members from another state? Try to have state and local law enforcement try to resist a military incursion?
As much as this feels like an unhinged, chaotic project, it also feels a lot like there’s a conscious plan to keep escalating the incursion of troops and federal agents into (blue) American cities on increasingly flimsy pretenses.
Four months ago, it was Los Angeles. There, Trump federalized the California Guard over Newsom’s objections based on Trump’s vague assertion that there was an unspecified “rebellion.” When Trump announced this with a typically bellicose memo, he didn’t actually limit it to California. Instead, it was sort of a catch-all designed to expand his authority in two ways.
First, it stretches the definition of “rebellion,” saying that “protests or acts of violence directly inhibit the execution of the laws” are now a rebellion against the government. That’s an absurd expansion that allows Trump to pretty much claim that any protest against the actions of federal agents is a rebellion.
Next, the memo said that Trump could federalize the National Guard “at locations where protests against these functions are occurring or are likely to occur based on current threat assessments and planned operations.”
So, anywhere Trump wants, any time Trump wants.
After the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals blocked a lower court order that found the deployment of troops to Los Angeles illegal and ruled that it was totally fine if the troops just stuck around, the administration had to feel emboldened. If a federal appellate court will protect Trump from the consequences of his actions, why not push a bit further?
Then it was the turn of Washington DC, where the District’s unique status of Home Rule gives the president powers that he doesn’t have elsewhere. First, he’s allowed to order DC’s mayor to provide local police for a federal purpose if there is an emergency. Next, unlike the states, where the National Guard is under the control of the governor, DC’s National Guard is under the control of the president.
The assault on Washington DC also allowed Trump to push the envelope in a new way: getting red state governors to agree to send their National Guard members to DC to assist with the crackdown. In that situation, those National Guard members aren’t federalized. They theoretically remain under the authority of their state, but they assist with federal work.
Now, every time anyone wrote about this as it unfolded, we added some sort of caveat explaining that this situation was particular to DC and that any deployment elsewhere would violate state sovereignty if Trump did it over the objection of a governor. And to be honest, back in late August, it seemed somewhat farfetched to think Trump might make moves that aggressive.
But six weeks later, that’s precisely what he did. And he did it without any explanation. When the Sacramento Bee asked the White House for a comment, they got an automated message explaining that it is the Democrats’ fault that they aren’t answering the phone: “As you await a response, please remember this could have been avoided if the Democrats voted for the clean Continuing Resolution to keep the government open.”
Of course, Trump’s press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, has managed to hold press conferences regularly since the shutdown began. Over the weekend, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem found time to do a media hit whining about the NFL choosing Bad Bunny for the Super Bowl halftime show. She also made sure to post a video on X from her embedded film crew, this time whining that Broadview City Hall in Chicago would not let her and her ICE thugs in to use the bathroom.
Apparently that’s a huge scandal, but explaining why you’re defying a court order, a state’s sovereignty, and the Posse Comitatus Act doesn’t even warrant picking up the phone.
The terrorism is coming from inside the government
And then there’s Chicago.
Noem’s federal agents have been particularly violent there, including mounting a military-style assault on an entire apartment building during which they dragged children outside naked and zip-tied them together. They’ve arrested an elected official for the crime of asking if they had a warrant to arrest someone at a medical center. They’ve thrown tear gas at people for the crime of chilling on the sidewalk. They’ve assaulted a congressional candidate, Kat Abughazaleh, on camera.
It seems that’s not enough violence for the administration. So, Trump has now “authorized” 300 Illinois National Guard members to help keep the boot on the neck of Chicago residents. It’s not really clear what “authorize” means. Unlike when he federalized the California Guard, there appears to be no official statement about Illinois. As with Portland, the justification for this rests on an unhinged belief that Chicago is a war zone. Indeed, Trump thinks that somehow, Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker opposes the deployment because he is being threatened by dark, shadowy forces.
“I think he’s afraid for his life somehow,” Trump said. “When you can have 40 or 50 people killed over the last couple of months, hundreds of people wounded, there’s no place like that in the world.”
But just because Republicans live in terror of cities does not mean the rest of us do.
Trump’s campaign of terror is escalating quickly nonetheless. Sunday evening, Pritzker posted on X that Trump was sending 400 members of the Texas National Guard to Illinois, Oregon, and “other locations.” No one from the administration has actually talked with Pritzker, of course, which left Pritzker trying to appeal to whatever tiny amount of good nature Texas Gov. Greg Abbott may possess and ask him to refuse to coordinate this.
There’s no evidence that Abbott is planning on stopping it. On Saturday, Trump issued a memorandum to the head of the Texas National Guard, stating that he was to immediately coordinate the mobilization of up to 400 members of the Texas National Guard under Section 12406 of Title 10 of the US Code to go to Illinois, Oregon, and apparently anywhere else the president wants.
This is the same justification Trump used to send troops to California, and it appears that he is now stretching that well past the breaking point by saying that his declaration about “rebellion” back at the start of his invasion of California covers this action as well. Except there is no mechanism whatsoever, no memo Trump can write, no law he can twist, that makes it legal for the National Guard of one state to invade another.
On Sunday, California joined Oregon’s lawsuit against the administration, asking the court for an emergency temporary restraining order blocking the use of California troops. Thankfully, Judge Immergut concluded after an emergency hearing on Sunday night that no, Trump cannot get around her order barring the deployment of the Oregon National Guard by sending other National Guards to the state instead. She ruled from the bench, granting the temporary restraining order requested by California and Oregon. She said the administration’s actions were in “direct contravention” of her Saturday order and that there was no new information about the situation in Portland that warranted a change.
The new temporary restraining order bars the administration from the relocation or federalization of any National Guard troops from any other states or Washington DC. However, this case only deals with deployments to Oregon. Illinois — and wherever else the administration chooses to torment next — will need to bring their own lawsuits to stop this. Not that the administration seems all that interested in obeying court orders, and of course there’s the whole thing where the Supreme Court is consistently giving Trump whatever he wants.
It honestly isn’t clear where we go from here. There are no mechanisms in the structure of American democracy for one state to defend itself against another, or to defend itself against the federal government. There’s no precedent for this sort of thing because it was, until Trump, inconceivable.
It also would’ve been inconceivable not so long ago that both the Supreme Court and Congress would stand aside and let a lawless president try to tear America apart with impunity. But if no one will check Trump’s behavior, why should he stop?
Pritzker gave voice to what we are all thinking: “We must now start calling this what it is: Trump’s Invasion.” Now, we have to figure out how to fight back.
That’s it for today
We’ll be back with more tomorrow. If you appreciate today’s PN, please do your part to keep us free by taking advantage of our special offer and signing up for a paid subscription.
Thanks for reading, and for your support.
Conspiracy is the game, cruelty is the system.
Trump’s invasion of Portland isn’t “law and order.” It’s prerogative power in its rawest form: a president defying a federal court and deploying troops across state lines against the will of both governors. That’s not federalism, it’s the logic of occupation.
As I’ve written in past pieces on institutional drift and cruelty‑as‑operating‑system, this is how authoritarian systems normalize themselves. Procedure becomes theater, legality becomes camouflage, and precedent is discarded whenever it obstructs raw executive will.
In foreign policy, I saw this pattern abroad: Russia, Turkey, China; where the extraordinary is routinized until citizens forget it was ever extraordinary. Now we are watching it play out at home.
The question isn’t “what stage of fascism” this is. The question is whether any institution will resist before the performance of power becomes the only law left standing.
I’ve written before about cruelty as an operating system and propaganda as exhaustion. This narrative is part of that same architecture, diverting anger away from real mechanisms of power.
My focus is behavioral and how law, power, and human behavior converge.
—Johan
Former Foreign Service Officer
The issue here is that the military is preparing for a civil war and this administration is looking for an excuse for it, they are actually trying to provoke it .