Building a Police State
By Richard C. Gross
"We must scrupulously guard the civil rights and civil liberties of all our citizens, whatever their background. We must remember that any oppression, any injustice, any hatred, is a wedge designed to attack our civilization."
—Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1882–1945), 32nd President of the United States
Americans’ freedoms are trickling away as President Trump menaces the public with armed troops patrolling the capital’s streets and seizes control of the government by firing experienced officials and replacing them with loyalists who know little about their jobs.
The troops, brandishing black machine guns pointing down or pistols at their hips, are even more alarming because they are visible—like the sand-painted Humvees and armored vehicles we’ve seen rumbling through Afghanistan and Iraq on television.
With little to do, soldiers are gardening and spreading mulch in parks. What a disservice to our men and women in uniform.
The dismissals of experienced officials and mass layoffs in the civil workforce are just as real as the troops. To keep Trump’s followers happy that immigrants are being caught, daily videos are broadcast and posted of people being detained on the streets, in courthouses and farm fields.
The United States is caught in a creeping dictatorship unlike anything in its 249-year history. It is led by an elected politician seemingly compelled to dismantle the country.
He plays the king, but he resembles more a godfather of organized crime, ruling without compassion, using threats and extortion, and employing executive orders to bypass Congress in the freezing or denial of hundreds of billions of dollars intended for everything from helping poor Americans to foreign aid.
This is far from a normal American presidency. Normal presidents worry about fundraising, passing legislation and governing in partnership with Congress and allies.
Worse, in this administration, dissent is met with swift retribution, instilling fear among top officials, corporate leaders, and members of Congress. In fact, we are under authoritarian, tyrannical rule. Bottom line: it’s becoming harder to designate the United States a free country.
The decade-long bluster, bellyaching, and complaints about immigration have served as cover for the real agenda: consolidating power. Far-right Project 2025 shows how Trump aims to refine his first-term strategies for a second term.
This narcissistic president goes so far as to hang banners of his scowling face from buildings—eerily reminiscent of the Nazis’ red, black, and white swastika shrouds. This is a hallmark of cult dictatorships, not democracies.
The banners could be subtitled: “Big Brother Is Watching You.”
Overawed by the military and tracking his deployment of troops to Los Angeles in June, Trump ordered 2,200 National Guard troops to Washington, D.C., as crime fighters, supported by masked federal agents from multiple agencies. It is a ruse—a pretext to assert control over a city led by Democrats and a Black woman mayor.
Crime in Washington is at a 30-year low. Crime-fighting long has been a Republican rallying cry; President Ronald Reagan campaigned in the 1980s on being “tough on crime” and advocated for federal intervention. Now the excuse is being exploited for control.
More cities are likely targets: Chicago, Baltimore and New York. Chicago’s mayor and Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker pushed back loudly, forcing Trump to back down—for now.
Reports suggest that Trump is considering sending only 200 Homeland Security officials to Chicago, using a naval base outside the city as a staging area. These officials may be a feint, with troops to follow.
“This plan seems to be a rerun of their tactics in Los Angeles, where ICE agents were used as a pretext to justify further escalation by federal agents and National Guard troops,” Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson said.
“We reject any attempts that put Chicagoans in danger as a means of furthering the president’s political ends,” he said.
“This is exactly the type of overreach our country’s founders warned against,” Pritzker added, “and it’s why they established a federal system with separation of powers, built on checks and balances.”
Unlike Washington, Chicago is not under federal control. A governor’s permission is required before troops can enter a city. California Gov. Gavin Newsom, for example, never authorized 4,000 National Guard and 700 active-duty Marines to deploy to Los Angeles. Federalizing the California Guard to control minor protests against harsh and unconstitutional immigration policies is being challenged in court.
Trump responded, “I made the statement that next should be Chicago, because, as you all know, Chicago is a killing field right now… a lot of people are saying, ‘Maybe we’d like a dictator.’ I don’t like a dictator. I’m not a dictator.”
It’s a spectacle of manipulation, trying to elicit sympathy for what he may consider a righteous cause. He repeatedly promised during his campaign to be a “dictator on Day One”—and, disturbingly, he lied because that has lasted more than a day.
Deploying soldiers trained for battlefield combat, not civilian policing, evokes memories of the Ohio National Guard firing on protesters at Kent State, killing four and wounding nine.
“The specter of city streets patrolled by soldiers trained to fight enemy combatants, not U.S. citizens, may well serve not to quell violence but to invite it,” wrote Lawrence Douglas, a law professor at Amherst College, in The Guardian.
“The prospect of protests turning ugly and violent is all too real. The deployment of troops, under the pretext of responding to an emergency, works to create the very emergency that justifies an ever-greater deployment. The danger is this is precisely what the president wants.”
Then martial law could be declared, and the 2026 midterms postponed.
All it could take is a rock thrown at a soldier or a car backfiring, as the Times’ Ezra Klein recently noted. He interviewed Radley Balko, an author and journalist, who said:
“What we’re seeing is a response to a manufactured crisis… a massive increase in aggressiveness and brutality toward immigrants—in response to a crisis entirely of Trump’s own making. This is not a good-faith effort to go after the worst of the worst.
“Stephen Miller [White House deputy chief of staff] is a menace. He’s been very clear about what his intentions are. He has been very clear that he does not believe the United States should be a place that takes in refugees from other countries…. We’ve read … about his being influenced by white supremacists.”
The courts may be the last line of defense. More than 330 legal challenges have been filed against Trump’s decrees, including 100–120 targeting executive orders. The Washington Post has documented 57 instances in which Trump officials ignored, delayed, or undermined compliance in 165 losing court cases.
These are not the best of times. Worse still may lie ahead.
Richard C. Gross, who covered war and peace in Israel and reported from the Pentagon, was the foreign editor of United Press International and served on the editorial board and as opinion page editor of The Baltimore Sun.