Copyright Newsweek
President Donald Trump announced this week that he plans to deploy the National Guard to San Francisco, following controversial deployments to Chicago and Portland. Are these deployments really about fighting crime, or squashing dissent? And are they even legal? Newsweek contributors Mark Davis and David Faris debate: Mark Davis: As with anything President Trump does, opinions about the National Guard deployments to various crime hotspots largely reflect opinions of the president. So it’s helpful to examine whether the deployments are proper, and whether they are working. Presidents have wide latitude to deploy the Guard, and protection of federal property is an obvious justification in this season of violent hostility to ICE. And from Washington to Los Angeles, from Chicago to Memphis, homicides and property crimes are down. One could say the arrival of more law enforcement actually reduces criminal behavior. David Faris: President Trump’s justifications for deploying the National Guard to cities whose leaders annoy him are so laughably absurd that federal judges have barely been able to contain their contempt. Crime has been dropping sharply across the country for two years, and there is no insurrection happening in Chicago, where I live. There are some people, mostly in inflatable animal costumes, peacefully exercising their right to protest the abduction of their neighbors by masked, poorly trained agents of a hostile regime. These deployments are nothing more than partisan spite from an increasingly unhinged aspiring dictator, and the Supreme Court must halt them. Davis: Federal judges and other Trump critics are free to disagree with Trump’s logic, but such actions are properly left to presidential purview. There were cries of overreach when the Guard was deployed to stem segregationist tension in Arkansas and Alabama in the 1950s and '60s. Should political pushback have stemmed Eisenhower and JFK? Faris: The governments of Arkansas and Alabama were defying court orders to preserve white supremacy. Here the president is running roughshod over state and local governments that are not interfering in the federal government’s work. Trump isn’t JFK; he’s a petty tyrant taking his anger out on entire states and cities. Davis: Local governments are absolutely interfering, as Governors Pritzker and Newsom declare open warfare on ICE, energizing unhinged citizens toward fits of dangerous lawlessness. Those recoiling at Trump’s response should step away from judicial tyranny and work to elect a successor who will return us to the softness on crime and borders that they crave. Faris: Pritzker is calling it like it is. The president could always pursue a consensus solution to America’s immigration problem through Congress rather than antagonizing our communities with blunt force and unconstitutional military deployments. Trump is losing the battle for public opinion. Election losses are sure to follow. Davis: Pritzker smearing Trump as a "dictator" is the stuff of cable news segments, not thoughtful analysis and surely not a legal argument. It will strike partisan allies as “telling it like it is,” but it proves that this whole National Guard debate is a political battle for the ballot box, not the courts. Faris: This is, after all, the cable news presidency, more of a content mill for far-right social media than a government. The president prefers posting AI slop videos of himself dumping excrement on city-dwellers than working for them. But his destruction of civil-military guardrails is very real and very dangerous. Davis: Many blue-city residents who have noticed a decrease in crime surely appreciate the safer streets, an environment that tired old No Kings boomers will never have to navigate. The guardrails are safe. The National Guard deployments are within legal boundaries. The only objections are from those factions whose failed policies on crime and borders are now on full display. I look forward to the elections of 2026 and 2028, where candidates who actually supported public safety will enjoy wide support, some of it from city residents who finally see who really cares about their quality of life. Faris: Take it from someone who actually lives in one of these cities: there is very little support here for this sustained assault on our communities, which poses the most serious threat to American unity since the Civil War. This was always the nightmarish place where the hallucination of deporting 10 million people was going to lead. Calling President Trump a dictator isn’t a smear, but an accurate reflection of his incendiary actions. And loudly opposing our slide into autocracy isn’t “hating America,” but a sincere effort to save the country we love from turning into a dysfunctional, vengeful kleptocracy. Mark Davis is a syndicated talk show host for the Salem Media Group on 660AM The Answer in Dallas-Ft. Worth, and a columnist for the Dallas Morning News and Townhall. David Faris is a professor of political science at Roosevelt University and the author of It's Time to Fight Dirty: How Democrats Can Build a Lasting Majority in American Politics. His writing has appeared in Slate, The Week, The Washington Post, The New Republic, Washington Monthly, and more. You can find him on Twitter @davidmfaris and Bluesky @davidfaris.bsky.social. The views expressed in this article are the writers' own.
