It always starts with “law and order.” What Donald Trump has unleashed in Washington this week is not policing. This is occupation. Three Republican governors, eager to prove their loyalty to the orange emperor in Mar-a-Lago, have dispatched hundreds of National Guard troops into a city that neither invited them nor requires them. Armed detachments from West Virginia, South Carolina and Ohio now patrol the streets of the nation’s capital, a heavily Democratic city placed under military rule by executive decree.
The justifications are threadbare. Crime is lower than during Trump’s first term. Homelessness is not a national security threat. Yet under the rubric of “restoring pride and beauty,” federalised police and out-of-state troops now roam the National Mall, Union Station, and the surrounding neighbourhoods. The excuse is public order; the reality is power.
“The excuse is public order; the reality is power.”
This is not a crime policy. It is a strategy of occupation and polarisation, a calculated escalation that weaponises the National Guard as a partisan army. Jeff Sharlet is right: when red-state troops descend on a blue city at the president’s command, we are already inches away from civil war. Perhaps only one bullet (one exchange of fire in Dupont Circle or on the steps of the Capitol) separates this moment from open conflict.
The photographs already look like a foreign occupation: unmarked officers, soldiers at landmarks, federal law displacing local authority. The guns may be in the Humvees for now, but they are there, and everyone knows it. This is how civil wars are seeded: not with a declaration, but with the creeping normalisation of military rule.
Trump has always understood politics as theatre, but this is more than spectacle. He is cultivating a war footing between “his” states and the territories of the opposition, turning the institutions of the republic into extensions of the MAGA base. These deployments test the loyalty of governors, militarise partisan boundaries, and train both troops and civilians to think in terms of occupation and resistance. Secession begins not with laws, but with boots on unfamiliar streets.
“Secession begins not with laws, but with boots on unfamiliar streets.”
Democrats call it overreach. But overreach is the point. To create conditions of civil strife, Trump must provoke confrontation, must force Washington residents to witness armed men from West Virginia patrolling their streets, must dare someone to resist. The photographs already look like a foreign occupation: unmarked officers, soldiers at landmarks, federal law displacing local authority. This is how civil wars are seeded. Not with a declaration, but with creeping normalisation of military rule.
Muriel Bowser is right to call it a test of democracy. But the truth is starker: this is democracy’s suspension. Trump is building an alternate sovereignty, one in which Republican states export armed force into Democratic ones, bypassing elected local officials. The old constitutional guardrails have become suggestions; the balance of powers, a fiction.
The liberal press will insist that cooler heads will prevail, that institutions will hold. They said the same in 2020 as Trump sent federal paramilitaries to Portland. They said the same in the 1870s, as Reconstruction governments begged Washington to defend Black suffrage against white militias. They said the same in Weimar Germany, as brownshirts marched and the courts looked away. What they missed (then as now) is that institutions are precisely what is being re-forged: bent, stretched, militarised into partisan instruments. The deployment of red-state troops into the capital is not an aberration. What looks like overreach today is meant as precedent tomorrow.
“Civil war does not require secessionist flags or battle lines. It requires the slow construction of parallel sovereignties, where law becomes faction.”
Washington is no longer policed; it is occupied. The Guard wears the insignia of the United States, but their loyalty is pledged to one man, and the states sending them know it. It doesn’t matter that the president can legally do this, that Washington, as a federal city, falls under executive authority. What matters is the precedent being shattered. Federal power is being bent into partisan rule, and the fig leaf of legality only makes the abuse more brazen. The Republican Party has always lied about being the party of “states’ rights.” Trump proves it. When power is on the table, rights vanish, and federal muscle is dispatched at will. This is not local self-government. This is a power grab.
Trump is not just waiting for civil war. He is cultivating it. The ground is seeded.
