National Guard Standoff Is a Recipe for More Political Conflict

By Noah Rothman

Tuesday, October 07, 2025

 

In a May memo titled “Helping people make their voices heard,” Portland, Ore., police officer Jessica Ruch — a “dialogue liaison officer” tasked with coordinating police actions with the professional protesters — made it clear that her sympathies are more with the protesters than her city.

 

“You don’t sound like a riot cop,” the imaginary interlocutor in her memo reacted after hearing Ruch heap praise on the protest movements of which she was once a part. “Right,” she replied to herself. “We don’t have a riot squad any more. That’s an antiquated model.” The Portland PD’s focus isn’t on proactively policing menacing elements in the streets. It’s on “safety,” including that of demonstrators, who may be as threatened by lawless elements as they are by law enforcement. “We don’t want to be the bad guys,” Ruch concluded.

 

To whom are cops the “bad guys?” Those who would eagerly conflate riotous violence with peaceable political dissent, as Portland’s mayor and Oregon’s governor have? Then, we’re not talking about the average Portlanders in proximity to the threat who express their sense of precarity to anyone with an ear out for such complaints. These political figures are responding to the gentry classes in their city and state — well-heeled constituencies removed from the riotous lawlessness they might even regard as a peculiarity of urban life more worthy of preservation than policing.

 

Portland and, to a lesser extent, much of urban America, suffers from that cultural problem. To the extent that Donald Trump’s administration is intervening in the effort to address it, the politics of its initiatives should make anyone who genuinely worries for the future of America’s great cities shudder. So far, Washington’s efforts seem set to make the problem worse.

 

A CBS News/YouGov survey published last month found that just 42 percent of respondents support the deployment of National Guard forces to “other cities” outside Washington, D.C., to aid local law enforcement. Only 39 percent of respondents said they would support a Guard deployment in their local area. Sixty-one percent would oppose one. September’s New York Times/Siena University survey produced similar results. Only one-third of respondents said Trump had calibrated his deployment of the National Guard’s “about right.” A majority said he had “gone too far,” including nearly 60 percent of self-described independents. When asked what concerns them more, crime spiraling out of control or Trump using the National Guard to “intimidate his political opponents,” 51 percent opted for the latter.

 

What happened? Did Democrats suddenly become the party that most voters trust on crime? Has the national political press undergone such a transformative reputational makeover that its narratives are suddenly viewed as gospel? Don’t kid yourself.

 

Voters in the aggregate are savvier than the unearned condescension that regular news consumers reserve for them often allows. They see presidential memes recklessly broadcast by the White House threatening the city of Chicago and its American citizens with the full brunt of the “Department of War.” They hear the president muse impishly about using “dangerous cities as training grounds for our military,” to root out the “invasion from within.” They read reports of the president’s willingness to invoke the Insurrection Act of 1807 to overrule elected officials and circumvent the courts and put uniformed soldiers on as many streets as possible.

 

Reasonable observers might conclude that the public’s apprehension toward the president and his intentions has less to do with his record when it comes to National Guard deployments than with his rhetoric. After all, the deployment in Washington, D.C., is primarily cosmetic, and the detachment sent to Los Angeles in support of law enforcement’s efforts to quell some local rioting was far less eventful than Democrats forecast.

 

If the public is merely defaulting to their negative assumptions about our (unpopular) president based on his provocations alone, that is an unnecessary own goal. Trump should be putting the representatives of America’s dark-blue cities on the defensive, forcing them to explain to their beleaguered citizens why they must put up with a certain level of anarchy. Instead, he’s given Democrats every reason to believe that opposing Trump’s deployments is a winning issue for them.

 

So, the problem of not just crime but civil unrest in America’s worst-governed cities will continue. The constituents of those localities demand it, and voters tend to get what they want. Moreover, it’s not at all clear that the continuation of America’s urban cultural problem wouldn’t suit this White House. Trump clearly likes cultivating Democratic foils, and there is no shortage of ambitious Democratic administrators who would leap at the opportunity to be attacked by, and, thus, elevated to the stature of, the president.

 

The incentive structure here is all wrong. It will not produce a more just civic compact in America’s cities. It is likely to yield even more political conflict, and to possibly draft local National Guard forces into polarizing cultural combat. Perhaps that outcome would be one that both parties might welcome. But such an approach makes a casualty of American civic comity while also failing to address the problems that plague American city streets. That seems like it’s too high a price to pay just to win a news cycle.