It’s not hysterical to think it could happen. It’s not conspiratorial to suggest it’s what they might actually want. And it cannot be dismissed as improbable, given the conditions on the ground and what we already know about the most powerful man in the world: the prospect of American troops, in American cities, opening fire on American citizens — and that blood on the streets could be viewed not as a tragedy but as plain good politics.
“It definitely keeps me up at night,” Janessa Goldbeck, a U.S. Marine Corps veteran and CEO of the Vet Voice Foundation, a pro-democracy nonprofit, said in an interview with Salon. “I don’t want to speculate what’s in his brain, but just taking the evidence as it is — what he said during the Black Lives Matter protests; the fact that he’s taking this maximalist approach to deploying troops—he is eager to create escalatory situations.”
In 2020, President Donald Trump wanted it to happen.
“Can’t you just shoot them?” he asked, referring to people protesting the police killing of George Floyd, according to former Defense Secretary Mark Esper, who wrote in his memoir that he “had to figure out a way to walk Trump back.” Esper was fired for “insufficient loyalty” a few months later.
Second-term Trump, who has flooded Washington, D.C., with federal agents and National Guardsmen for the ostensible purpose of combating crime that is at a 30-year low, no longer has someone such as Mark Esper to tell him “no.” The likes of Mark Milley, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (who describes Trump as “a total fascist”), and John Kelly, his former White House chief of staff (who warned that his former boss is an aspiring “dictator”), have been replaced by far-right ideologues and mediocre functionaries — White House adviser Stephen Miller and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth — who are eager to demonstrate their loyalty and inflict pain on the president’s domestic enemies.
But are U.S. troops, including members of the National Guard who may have signed up thinking they were getting free college in exchange for laying down sandbags during a natural disaster, as willing to serve a 79-year-old strongman’s political agenda? Most soldiers are presumably not eager to open fire on their fellow Americans. Indeed, a recent survey of active-duty U.S. service members found that the vast majority say they would refuse to carry out an illegal order.
But illegal orders are never as clear-cut as “shoot that unarmed grandmother exercising her First Amendment rights,” and rarely does a soldier have the time to contemplate the moral ramifications of listening to a superior officer. And in the heat of the moment, operating alongside federal agents who are behaving like the president’s Praetorian Guard — in an unfamiliar environment where they have been told they are going up against foreign criminal gangs like MS-13, or marauding bands of “Antifa” — the once-unthinkable is not outlandish.
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“I think it’s likely that you’re going to have an altercation, and it could be politically advantageous to the president to have some sort of disturbance,” Christopher Purdy, an Iraq War veteran and founder of The Chamberlain Network, which encourages former members of the military to speak out in defense of democracy, told Salon.
The probability of an incident, from a one-off shooting to an outright massacre, increases when those policing the streets are soldiers — primarily trained to kill in foreign theaters of war — and do not come from the communities they are in.
It is easy, legally speaking, for the president to deploy the D.C. National Guard; so demonstrably so that the question of why it wasn’t done on January 6, 2021, can be asked and immediately answered. But those soldiers know their city and its residents are their neighbors. The same cannot be said of the hundreds of National Guardsmen headed to the nation’s capital from West Virginia, South Carolina, Mississippi, Louisiana, Tennessee and Ohio, sent by red-state governors who see a political advantage in sending troops to patrol and restore “pride and beauty” in a city where Democrats, the president’s “enemies from within,” outnumber Republicans 9-1. And many of those soldiers, per The Wall Street Journal, are likely to be carrying weapons with live rounds.
“I would not be surprised if you have a Guard commander from an outside community be more willing to use force than the local troops,” Purdy said. “I’m not suggesting that, because these folks are coming from red states, that they’re more inclined to fire on civilians or instigate an incident,” he added. “What I am saying is that the local Guard understands the community a lot better … If you have troops that come in and don’t understand the community, don’t understand what’s going on, don’t understand the landmarks — that creates a whole lot of insecurity and unease and just unawareness. And that makes the likelihood of an incident higher.”
And that may not necessarily be so bad, from the president’s perspective. It is, again, exactly what he wanted the last time he deployed troops in the nation’s capital, when there were still officials around him who possessed some sense of honor and personal dignity. We don’t have people like that today.
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That the public would accurately attribute blame is not at all clear, either. In 1970, the Ohio National Guard opened fire on unarmed students protesting the Vietnam War on the campus of Kent State University, killing four of them and wounding nine others. As The Philadelphia Inquirer’s Will Bunch has noted, a majority of Americans, in the immediate aftermath, blamed the kids; just 11%, per a Gallup survey, blamed the killers. The students’ memorial service was even disrupted by local reactionaries who chanted, “Kent State Four! Should have studied more!”
But focusing on the immediate politics of the deployments and any ensuing incidents may be missing the real point: intimidating voters and interfering with elections in Democratic jurisdictions. House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., recently told Fox News that he’d like to see what’s unfolding in D.C., and earlier in Los Angeles, spread to urban areas across the country.
“We’re gonna support doing this in other cities if it works out in Washington, D.C.,” he said. “Our military has been in many countries around the world for the past two decades, walking the streets, trying to reduce crime in other countries. We need to focus on the big cities in America now.”
Goldbeck, the CEO of the Vet Voice Foundation, said what worries her is that such deployments could numb the American public and normalize the presence of troops in the cities where millions of Democratic voters live. With Trump already declaring war on mail-in voting, come November 2026: Why wouldn’t he seek to depress in-person turnout too? It’s not implausible that this president, with the tacit or explicit support of this Republican Party and this Supreme Court, could order troops to show up at polling stations on the grounds that local authorities are not doing enough, say, to prevent undocumented immigrants from voting.
“The use of the National Guard around elections is expressly prohibited by U.S. law,” Goldbeck noted. “However, if the president were to declare a national emergency around election fraud or something in that lane, there could be instances where he could say that the troops were necessary, and that would certainly discourage people from going to voting centers,” she said. “Election fraud has been an animating theme of his for the last several years, and so it would not surprise me if that is where we’re headed.”
