Trump Outlines Vision for Next Power Grab Over Blue State and City Officials
This is your TPM evening briefing.
President Trump doubled down on his vision to make Chicago the next city his administration’s targets as it attempts to use crime as a cover for occupying and exerting control over the Democratic elected officials of blue cities and states around the nation.
On Friday Trump hinted that the country’s third largest city was next on his agenda for a military-style occupation like the ones he’s carried out in Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., calling Chicago “a mess.” During comments to reporters in the Oval Office on Monday, Trump reiterated his baseless denigration of the city, calling it a “disaster” and “a killing field.”
“We go in, we will solve Chicago within one week, maybe less,” Trump told reporters Monday morning. “But within one week we’ll have no crime in Chicago, like no crime in D.C.”
“We may go in and do it,” he said.
As has been obvious since the moment he sent National Guard troops into D.C. to do things like patrol tourists on the National Mall, Trump is using decades-old right-wing propaganda — focused on fear mongering around the country’s supposedly lawless urban hellscapes — to justify bringing the military in to Democrat-run cities. It’s become an opportunity for Trump to flex power despite the objections of elected-Democrats and a vehicle he can use to carry out his retribution. As my colleague Josh Marshall noted today, it’s an action that allows him to “deprive those states and localities of their liberty and right to self-government. Because he wants that power for himself.”
After Trump first floated the possibility of sending guardsmen into Chicago next, Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker described the political stunt in similar terms: as “an authoritarian power grab of major cities.” Trump responded by calling Pritzker “corrupt” and “a slob.”
He then signed an executive order that will, in theory, make his vision of occupying more and more blue cities even easier. In the order, he tasks Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth with creating a quick reaction force within the National Guard “that shall be resourced, trained, and available for rapid nationwide deployment.”
Speaking of Hegseth
Speaking to reporters again in the Oval Office Monday, Trump also foreshadowed he and the Defense Secretary’s plans to macho up the Department of Defense with a name change back to what it was before World War II.
“We won World War I, World War II, it was called the Department of War. And to me, that’s really what it is,” Trump told reporters as he sat alongside South Korean President Lee Jae Myung Monday. “Everybody likes that we had an unbelievable history of victory when it was Department of War. Then we changed it to Department of Defense.”
Reverting the name might not be as simple of a process as Trump envisions, but when has that ever stopped him. Per Politico:
The president suggested the rebranding was imminent. But the Pentagon would likely need any name change approved by Congress since the department was established by a decades-old law.
Trump Threatens Newsom
California Gov. Gavin Newsom and the Democrat-controlled state legislature formally approved plans to put redrawn congressional districts on the ballot in November. The move is, of course, an attempt to offset the harms of what Republicans have done in Texas as they engage in mid-cycle gerrymandering at Trump’s request. Trump has been demanding that red state officials follow Texas’ lead and draw new maps that will favor Republicans in the midterms so that Republicans can keep the House and continue ceding their legislative authority to the executive branch.
Trump told reporters at the same press event Monday that his administration would soon take legal action to try to stop Newsom.
“I think I’m going to be filing a lawsuit pretty soon, and I think we’re going to be very successful in it,” he said. “We’re going to … filing it through the Department of Justice, that’s going to happen.”
SCOOP
New story out just this evening from TPM reporters Kate Riga and Josh Kovensky:
The Trump administration has strong-armed the University of Michigan’s statewide hospital system over its provision of transgender health care services for minors, sending a subpoena in recent weeks to University of Michigan Health and several doctors who perform gender-affirming care, TPM has learned.
Read the full story here.
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