President Donald Trump is shifting systematically to tighten his grip on Democratic-leaning large cities — the geographic middle of resistance to his agenda — by undermining their autonomy and eroding their political energy.
These militant objectives are the frequent thread that hyperlinks the high-profile initiatives Trump has launched in current days to seize control of legislation enforcement in Washington, DC; stress crimson states to attract new congressional district lines; and probably pursue an unprecedented “redo” of the 2020 census.
These new efforts compound the stress Trump is already inserting on main cities with an agenda that features aggressive immigration enforcement; cuts in federal research funding to universities central to the financial system of many giant metros; and threats to rescind federal funding for jurisdictions that resist his calls for to impose conservative insurance policies on immigration, education, homelessness and policing.
Trump is pursuing this confrontational method at a time when main metropolitan areas have turn out to be the undisputed engines of the nation’s financial progress — and the nexus of analysis breakthroughs in applied sciences corresponding to synthetic intelligence, which Trump has identified as key to the nation’s competitiveness. The 100 largest metropolitan areas now account for about three-fourths of the nation’s financial output, based on analysis by Brookings Metro, a center-left suppose tank. But Trump is treating the most important cities much less as an financial asset to be nourished than as a political risk to be subdued.
Mark Muro, a senior fellow at Brookings Metro, mentioned Trump’s method to the nation’s largest cities is “colonial” in that he needs to profit from their prodigious financial output whereas suppressing their independence and political clout. This administration is “treating America’s nice financial engines as weak and problematic colonial outposts,” Muro mentioned. “They view them as the issue, when (in actuality) they’re absolutely the base of American competitiveness within the battle towards China or whoever (else).”
Antagonism towards main cities has lengthy been central to Trump’s message. A number of occasions he has described American cities with mayors who’re Democrats, members of racial minorities, or each, as dystopian “rodent-infested” “hellholes.” Trump in 2024 nonetheless ran better in most giant cities than in his earlier races, amid widespread disenchantment about then-President Joe Biden’s file on inflation, immigration and crime.
Nonetheless, as Trump himself has famous, giant cities, and infrequently their interior suburbs, stay the muse of Democratic political energy and the cornerstone of opposition to his agenda. A collection of dramatic actions simply prior to now few days exhibits how systematically Trump is shifting to debilitate these cities’ means to oppose him.
Essentially the most seen means Trump is pressuring large cities is by deploying federal legislation enforcement and navy personnel into them over the objections of native officers. In his first time period, Trump despatched federal legislation enforcement personnel into Portland, Oregon, and Washington, DC, within the aftermath of George Floyd’s 2020 homicide.
However after he left workplace, Trump, who doesn’t typically publicly second-guess himself, ceaselessly mentioned that one in all his best regrets was that he didn’t dispatch extra federal forces into cities. In his 2024 marketing campaign, he explicitly pledged to deploy the Nationwide Guard, and probably active-duty navy, into main cities for a number of functions: combating crime, clearing homeless encampments and supporting his mass deportation program.
In workplace, Trump has steadily fulfilled these guarantees. When protests erupted in Los Angeles in June over an intense Immigration and Customized Enforcement deportation push, Trump deployed not only the National Guard (which he federalized over the objection of California Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom), but in addition active-duty Marines. Then, the administration used these forces not solely to protect federal buildings, but in addition to accompany ICE (and different businesses) on enforcement missions — together with a putting deployment of armored automobiles and soldiers in tactical gear to a public park in a closely Hispanic neighborhood.
The underlying immigration enforcement that precipitated the LA protests constituted a special present of pressure. As a recent CNN investigation showed, ICE is relying rather more on avenue apprehensions in cities in blue states than in crimson states, the place it’s eradicating extra folks from jails and prisons. The administration says that imbalance is a results of “sanctuary” insurance policies in blue states and cities limiting cooperation with federal immigration enforcement. However civil rights teams see the administration’s confrontational blue-state method as an try and intimidate each native officers and immigrant communities. (The actual fact that ICE last week carried out an immigration sweep instantly outdoors a Newsom press convention bolstered the latter interpretation.)
Regardless of the rationale, analysis by the College of California at Merced suggests the administration’s enforcement method is hurting blue cities. Utilizing census knowledge, the varsity’s Group and Labor Heart not too long ago found that from May to July the variety of California staff holding a private-sector job fell by about 750,000 — proportionally a fair higher decline than throughout the 2008 Nice Recession. Hispanic folks and Asian People accounted for nearly all of the falloff.
Sociology professor Ed Flores, the middle’s school director, mentioned he believes the decline is “completely” tied to financial disruption flowing from “the presence of ICE and the way in which that (folks) are being apprehended” on the road.
New York Metropolis, too, has seen a notable drop in the labor force participation rate amongst Hispanic males.
Now, with the navy (if not ICE) presence in LA winding down, Trump has despatched a whole bunch of Nationwide Guard troops into Washington, DC, whereas additionally using a bit of federal legislation that permits him to briefly seize management of town’s police division.
In his news conference last week asserting the DC strikes, Trump repeatedly mentioned he would complement the Nationwide Guard forces, as he did in LA, with active-duty troops if he deems it obligatory. And he repeatedly signaled that he’s contemplating deploying navy forces into different cities that he described as overrun by crime, together with Chicago, New York, Baltimore and Oakland, California — all jurisdictions with Black mayors. “We’re not going to lose our cities over this, and this can go additional,” Trump declared.
Most consultants agree that Trump will confront substantial authorized hurdles if he tries to copy the DC deployment elsewhere. “What they’re doing in DC will not be repeatable elsewhere for various causes,” mentioned Joseph Nunn, a counsel within the nationwide safety program on the Brennan Heart for Justice.
Nunn mentioned Trump can order this mission due to the DC Nationwide Guard’s distinctive authorized standing. On the one hand, Nunn famous, the DC Guard is underneath the president’s direct management, quite than the jurisdiction of a state governor. On the opposite, he mentioned, the Justice Division has dominated that even when the president makes use of the DC Guard, its actions qualify as a state, not federal, deployment. That’s essential as a result of state guard deployments aren’t topic to the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act’s ban on federal navy forces partaking in home legislation enforcement.
If Trump tries to deploy the Nationwide Guard to handle crime within the large cities of blue states, corresponding to Chicago or New York, Nunn argued, he would face a catch-22. Since there’s nearly no likelihood Democratic governors would conform to take part, Trump might solely put troops on these streets by federalizing their states’ Nationwide Guard or utilizing active-duty navy, Nunn mentioned. However, he added, “as soon as they’re working with federalized Nationwide Guard or active-duty navy forces, the Posse Comitatus Act applies” — barring using these forces for home legislation enforcement.
Trump might search to override the Posse Comitatus Act’s ban on navy involvement by invoking the Revolt Act. The Revolt Act has not been used to fight avenue crime, however the statute allows the president to domestically deploy the navy towards “any riot, home violence, illegal mixture, or conspiracy.”
Richard Briffault, a Columbia Regulation College professor who specializes within the relationships amongst completely different ranges of presidency, agreed that invoking the Revolt Act to justify sending the Nationwide Guard into cities over mayors’ objections would shatter the commonly understood limits on the legislation’s utility.
However he additionally believes that precedent gives no agency assurance that this Supreme Courtroom, which has proved extremely receptive to Trump’s expansive claims of presidential authority, would cease him. Trump “might attempt” to win courtroom approval of navy deployments to struggle crime by citing the Revolt Act’s language about “‘home violence’ and ‘illegal combos’” after which claiming that’s “depriving the folks of their proper to safety,” Briffault mentioned.
Regardless of the authorized hurdles, extra broadly deploying the navy on home missions would carry substantial penalties. Mayor Jerry Dyer of Fresno, California, who spent 18 years as town’s police commissioner, says that placing navy forces onto the streets of extra cities would create issues of coordination with native officers and belief with native communities. “Everytime you begin sending federal assets into native jurisdictions and really take over the policing of that jurisdiction, it might probably turn out to be very disturbing to that neighborhood and fairly frankly can create some neighborhood points and finally a scarcity of belief,” mentioned Dyer, who co-chairs the Mayors and Police Chiefs Job Power for the US Convention of Mayors.
Much more profound could be the implications of numbing People to the sight of closely armored navy forces routinely patrolling the streets of home cities — a picture that traditionally has been frequent solely in authoritarian international locations. New York College historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a number one scholar of authoritarian regimes, wrote last week that the last word goal of Trump’s home deployments “is to habituate People to see militarized cities and crackdowns towards public dissent in cities as regular and justified.” Step-by-step, she argued, Trump is looking for “to disempower and delegitimize all Democratic municipal and state authorities.”
In much less apparent methods, the battle that has erupted over redistricting — and the possible struggle approaching over the census — constitutes one other Trump-backed effort to “disempower” giant metropolitan areas.
The weird mid-decade congressional redistricting that Texas Republicans are pursuing at Trump’s behest would improve the variety of Republican-leaning US Home seats largely by lowering the variety of districts representing the state’s largest metropolitan areas, together with Dallas, Houston and Austin, which all lean Democratic.
The brand new map would additional dilute the political affect of Texas’ main metro areas, at the same time as they’ve accounted for about four-fifths of the state’s inhabitants and financial progress over current years, mentioned Steven Pedigo, director of the LBJ Urban Lab on the College of Texas’ Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs.
“The expansion in Texas has been pushed by city communities, however these communities aren’t going to be represented in these extra maps,” Pedigo mentioned.
In that means, the brand new Texas map extends the technique that Republicans there, and in different rising Solar Belt states, used within the maps they drew after the 2020 census, mentioned John Bisognano, president of the Nationwide Democratic Redistricting Committee.
States corresponding to Texas and Florida that added essentially the most Home seats and electoral votes after the 2020 census — and are poised to realize essentially the most once more after 2030 — are including inhabitants primarily amongst non-White folks and in Democratic-leaning metro areas, Bisognano noted in a recent memo. But each of these teams might be denied the extra Home illustration generated by that inhabitants progress if the Republicans controlling Solar Belt state governments proceed to attract district strains that splinter metro populations and favor rural ones. “They’re subjugating (metro voters) to supply a partisan consequence that’s not reflective of the folks of these cities,” Bisognano mentioned.
The calls from Trump and Vice President JD Vance to “redo” the 2020 census, partly to exclude undocumented immigrants, might marginalize cities much more.
Even when Trump might surmount the numerous authorized and logistical obstacles to conducting a mid-decade census, a reapportionment of Home seats and electoral votes that excluded undocumented immigrants wouldn’t end result within the shift of affect from blue to crimson states that many conservatives envision. John Robert Warren, a College of Minnesota sociologist, concluded in a 2025 paper that if unauthorized immigrants have been excluded from the 2020 census, California and Texas would every lose a Home seat and New York and Ohio would every achieve one. “It might make actually zero distinction,” Warren mentioned. “Should you assume Texas and Ohio go crimson and California and New York go blue, then it’s only a wash.”
Excluding undocumented immigrants from the rely, although, might supply Trump one other option to squeeze city facilities. Many agricultural communities have substantial undocumented immigrant populations, however half of all undocumented immigrants dwell in simply 37 giant counties, based on estimates by the Migration Policy Institute. “Inside a state that Republicans management, by not together with (undocumented folks), it could be a lot simpler to attract Republican districts since you would have a smaller minority inhabitants base to work with,” mentioned Jeffrey Wice, a redistricting knowledgeable at New York College’s legislation college. Not solely congressional illustration but in addition the numerous federal funding sources tied to inhabitants would shift towards rural areas if the census undercounts the city inhabitants, he famous.
Wice, who previously consulted for Democrats on redistricting, says blue states and cities can’t assume Trump received’t pursue any of those prospects, irrespective of how far-fetched they now appear. The identical is unquestionably true on the deployment of federal pressure into blue locations. The New Republic’s Greg Sargent recently published an inside Division of Homeland Safety memo that described the joint ICE-Nationwide Guard mission in Los Angeles as “the kind of operations (and resistance) we’re going to be working by way of for years to return.” (Emphasis added.)
Throughout World Warfare II, the German siege of Leningrad famously lasted nearly 900 days. Huge blue American cities could also be counting down the hours as anxiously for the 1252 days remaining in Trump’s second time period.
