US President Donald Trump has threatened to send troops to Chicago to “straighten that one out.” New York City, he says, might be next.

Already, armed National Guard regiments are patrolling the streets of Washington, DC. All this on top of the deployment of troops to Los Angeles earlier in the summer.

The deployment of out-of-state troops to occupy cities cannot plausibly promote public order. It’s blunt force, a brutal power grab. It runs afoul of the Constitution and the proper role for states.

I write history books and consider myself an expert on the presidency. I can think of few analogies—not in this country, anyway—for such a move by a chief executive.

Why is this particular turn so alarming? After all, public safety is important, and fighting crime is a worthy goal. My colleague Liza Goitein explains the legal and constitutional issues:

Trump is on even thinner legal ice with this plan than he is in Los Angeles and DC. Unlike in the capital, the president doesn’t command the Illinois National Guard unless he calls them into federal service (i.e., “federalizes” them). There are various laws that authorize him to federalize the guard, but none of them would apply here.In Los Angeles, Trump is relying on a law (Section 12406 of Title 10 of the US Code) that authorizes federalization when “the President is unable with the regular forces to execute the laws of the United States,” meaning federal law. Immigration law is federal law. Trump claimed that the protests rendered him “unable... to execute” ICE raids. Although dozens of raids happened during the protests and the administration did not cite a single raid that was thwarted, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals deferred to Trump’s assessment.
But that law simply wouldn’t apply to the type of crime Trump has cited in Chicago—essentially, violent street crime. The laws that are implicated are largely those of Illinois and Chicago, not the “laws of the United States.”
Even under the Insurrection Act—which is the main exception to the law barring deployment of the military for domestic law enforcement—the president may deploy troops to execute the law only in situations involving either federal laws or those state laws designed to protect the constitutional rights of classes of people (basically, civil rights laws).
Nor can Trump ask other states’ governors to send their guard forces into Chicago, as he did in DC under a law known as Section 502(f), which authorizes governors to voluntarily use their guard forces for missions requested by the president or secretary of defense. Under this law, presidents have asked governors to deploy guard forces within their own states, in other states that consent, or (as only Trump has done) in DC without local consent. No governor has sent guard troops into another state that did not consent, as would be the case here. That’s because guard forces deployed under this law remain state officers as a legal matter. And under the Constitution, states are sovereign entities vis-à-vis one another. That means one state cannot invade another, even at the president’s request.
If the president wants to send one state’s National Guard forces into an unwilling state, he must federalize them first. But to federalize them, he needs statutory authority. And there is no statutory authority to federalize the guard to police local crime.
The Pentagon reportedly sees its planned military deployment in Chicago as a model for other cities. And of course, the other cities Trump has name-checked in this context are governed by Democrats: Baltimore, Los Angeles, New York, and Oakland.
Flooding “blue” cities with soldiers on the pretext of fighting crime would be an unprecedented abuse of power that would violate states’ rights and threaten our most fundamental liberties. The plan is profoundly un-American. And it is illegal.

Public safety matters greatly. But facts belie the (ever shifting) rationale. New York, for example, remains one of the nation’s safest large cities. As Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch told Attorney General Pam Bondi yesterday, crime has dropped dramatically, even this year. Fighting crime is not a rationale—it’s a pretext.

The cities targeted so far have two things in common: a Black mayor and a fusillade of presidential rhetoric denouncing them as “hellholes.”

Bill Kristol, founder of The Bulwark and a longtime prominent Republican, surveyed events and put it this way: “What we are seeing is not merely a ‘slide toward authoritarianism.’ It’s a march toward despotism. And it’s a march whose pace is accelerating.”

What can be done to push back? Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker warned federal forces: “Do not come to Chicago. You are neither wanted here nor needed here.” Trump, in turn, mused: “They say... ‘He’s a dictator. He’s a dictator.’ A lot of people are saying, ‘Maybe we’d like a dictator.’” He added, “I don’t like a dictator. I’m not a dictator.” (As presidential quotations go, it’s about as reassuring as Richard Nixon’s “I am not a crook.”)

Pritzker and New York Gov. Kathy Hochul can play pivotal roles. States and cities can go to court—an epic legal battle. They can rally the public in their states and around the country. They can monitor and document the conduct of deployed forces.

We must all speak out when our Constitution is under threat.

It’s going to be a busy fall.

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After his Friday meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin, U.S. President Donald Trump bragged that the dictator had backed one of his conspiracy theories. According to Trump, Putin said, “You can’t have an honest election with mail-in voting.” (You don’t need to be a former KGB agent to know how to woo our chief executive.)

Then on Monday, perhaps emboldened by his encounter with a real-life autocrat, Trump announced a major effort to seize control of American elections.

In a Truth Social post, he declared that he would sign “an EXECUTIVE ORDER to help bring HONESTY to the 2026 Midterm Elections” and “lead a movement to get rid of MAIL-IN BALLOTS.”

We’ve all grown used to the president’s wild claims about elections. We might be tempted to roll our eyes now, but we shouldn’t. It’s appalling.

If we do not act against these threats, free and fair elections in 2026 could be at stake. So, what can be done?

The order would likely purport to ban or seriously limit mail voting, a focus of Trump’s since 2020. To be clear, mail voting is a widely popular and long-standing practice used by about a third of citizens. Every state has well-tested security measures in place to ensure that the process is safe and secure.

Trump claimed in his post that we are the only country in the world that uses mail voting. Putin, whom he called a “smart guy,” allegedly told him that, but it is blatantly false. Dozens of countries use mail voting, including Canada, Germany, and the United Kingdom. (And of course, Trump himself regularly votes by mail in Florida.)

The order could also target voting machines. “While we’re at it,” he said in the post, we should get rid of “Very Expensive, and Seriously Controversial VOTING MACHINES.” That’s nutty. Machines with a paper record (used by 98% of voters) are far more accurate and secure than, say, counting ballots by hand. Ironically, Trump’s blast came the same day that Newsmax paid $67 million to a voting machine company in a defamation suit arising from the last round of false claims about the 2020 election.

Attempting to implement any of these policies via executive order would be flagrantly illegal and flatly unconstitutional—a power grab. Already, earlier this year, Trump tried to seize control of elections with an executive order requiring Americans to produce a passport or another citizenship document to register to vote using the federal form. The Brennan Center and others sued, and judges blocked the worst part of that move. The new threatened executive order, too, could turn out to be vapor, essentially a malevolent press release.

But Trump’s post contained a chilling claim: “Remember, the States are merely an ‘agent’ for the Federal Government in counting and tabulating the votes. They must do what the Federal Government, as represented by the President of the United States, tells them, FOR THE GOOD OF OUR COUNTRY, to do.”

This statement plainly repudiates the Constitution—the Elections Clause gives states and Congress the power to run elections. Presidents have no authority to rewrite election rules. In a democracy, the states are not personal agents of the president.

If successful, this executive order would be nothing short of an authoritarian takeover of our election system. Imagine the man who demanded that a state election official “find” him 11,780 votes in charge of “counting and tabulating the votes.”

This threat comes as federalized troops and masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents patrol the streets of Washington, DC. Last week, ICE agents massed outside a Democratic event on redistricting in California.

Again, Trump’s threatened executive order would be blatantly illegal and blocked by a court. But it’s still important to listen to what he’s saying. He’s making his goal—a federal takeover of elections—explicit. And while this particular tactic won’t work, it’s just one piece of the administration’s emerging, unmistakable campaign to undermine our elections, a drive that ranges from defunding election security programs to trying to gain access to state voter rolls.

Voters must have the final say in a democracy. If we do not act against these threats, free and fair elections in 2026 could be at stake. So, what can be done?

The courts must uphold the Constitution when it comes to elections, as they did with Trump’s earlier executive order.

State leaders and election officials must also fight back. They must stand firm in their right to oversee elections, continue to provide voters with options such as mail and early voting, resist illegal orders, and keep control over voting machines. The Brennan Center has published information about how to respond to requests to access sensitive data and machinery.

Ultimately, the integrity of the next election will be up to voters. We must all speak out against these moves to meddle with the vote. It’s harder to take over an election when everyone is watching.

Think again about Trump’s claim that states are his “agents” in tabulating the votes. Vladimir Putin’s great hero had something to say about that: “I consider it completely unimportant who in the party will vote, or how,” Joseph Stalin said, “but what is extraordinarily important is this—who will count the votes, and how.”

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