If Trump does, it might actually help a new mayor.
Photo: Shuran Huang/The New York Times/Redux
As disturbing as it is to write this sentence, it seems inevitable that at some point in the next three years, President Donald Trump will dispatch the National Guard to New York City. After menacing Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., Trump has come to revel in the spectacle. For the increasingly unpopular president, sending in the troops amounts to — in his mind, at least — a win-win. Democrats, especially big-city Democrats, are outraged. The Republican base is thrilled. Representative James Comer, a Kentucky Republican, has already urged Trump to keep the National Guard road show going. “We’re gonna support doing this in other cities if it works out in Washington, D.C.,” Comer said recently. “Our military has been in many countries around the world for the past two decades walking the streets trying to reduce crime. We need to focus on the big cities in America now, and that’s what the president is doing.”
New York is a ripe target because it looms so large in the right-wing imagination, and Trump, as a native, is naturally obsessed with the local political class. He regularly reads the New York Post and believes Zohran Mamdani, as the probable next mayor, will plunge the city into a socialist abyss. Mamdani, for Trump, is the ideal foil, an African-born Muslim socialist. There’s no common ground between them. And Trump has enthusiastically dispatched the National Guard to Washington because, temporarily, at least, it offers the distraction he craves. As long as he’s intimidating Democratic cities, the MAGA base isn’t blasting away at him for failing to deliver the supposed truth about Jeffrey Epstein. Among Republicans, Epstein and various other political problems won’t be a drag on Trump’s popularity as long the president keeps manufacturing crises for the National Guard to supposedly solve.
Still, as terrifying as this all might be, sending troops into city streets has not been the pure political win Trump may have believed it to be. Karen Bass, the mayor of Los Angeles, was deeply imperiled for much of the year after she was faulted for her response to the deadly wildfires that tore through the city. In January, the recall of Bass seemed almost inevitable. Other California progressives had been driven out of office that way, and there was little reason to believe Bass, who was infamously in Ghana when the fires broke out, could survive and win another term.
Then Trump, responding to anti-ICE protests in Los Angeles, unleashed his troops. They descended on MacArthur Park, a popular spot in one of the densest immigrant neighborhoods of the city. Bass went straight to the park to confront the federal agents. She held a steely press conference and vowed to defend her city. Once accused of being a feckless liberal executive, Bass has seen her standing among voters improve dramatically. A recall effort fizzled. She is a face of the anti-Trump resistance in California, and another term seems likely. The state, meanwhile, sued to end the mobilization, which a federal judge ruled to be illegal. But an appeals court blocked that ruling, allowing the deployment to continue. Even as the protests died down, troops were accompanying federal agents conducting immigration enforcement. The state has argued those assignments amount to an illegal use of federal troops to conduct domestic law enforcement — but, for now anyway, the courts aren’t preventing Trump from doing it.
For Mamdani, as mayor, a National Guard incursion could be nightmarish. In 2020, Bill de Blasio successfully beat back efforts from Trump, then in his first term, to dispatch troops to respond to the George Floyd protests. Crime has fallen in the five boroughs since then, and Trump would have to, in almost any instance, invent a crisis to flood the city with military personnel. In such a scenario, Mamdani could find himself, like Bass, the leader of the local anti-Trump movement. Other theoretical challenges could evaporate as city Democrats rally around Mamdani’s flag. (Disclosure: In 2018, when I ran for office, Mamdani was my campaign manager.)
Mamdani would, like Bass, need a signature moment, and he would be savvy enough to find one. He could meet the troops face-to-face. The good news, so far, is that in the case of Los Angeles, at least, almost all the troops are gone. Washington is a different story because Congress, by law, effectively controls the city. Trump has taken over the police department there. He can’t do that in Los Angeles or New York. If Mamdani is able to forge a close relationship with his NYPD leadership, he could also use that to his advantage in a fight with Trump. A National Guard incursion is, above all else, a direct argument against the NYPD. Trump would be saying that New York cops cannot handle crime in their own city. A police commissioner, as well as the rank-and-file officers, would greatly resent that idea, especially as New York appears on track to post one of its lowest ever murder rates. The business elites who regularly talk to Trump may not want troops jostling with cops, either.
Trump, then, would have to tread more carefully than he’d like. If he has any self-awareness, he may also have to realize that he’s emboldening the very politicians he rails against most. He has almost single-handedly saved Bass’s career. And if Mamdani, as mayor, is struggling, a shot in the arm may just be a direct confrontation with the president. Trump hasn’t made America great again, but he has made great again some of the Democrats he hopes to destroy.
