Yet he and his party keep pretending they have a mandate.
By Will Saletan
DONALD TRUMP LIKES TO PRETEND that his victims secretly love the way he treats them. He does this in foreign policy (claiming that Greenland and Canada want him to annex them), in elections (imagining that voters in blue states prefer him), and in his serial abuse of women.
Now he’s doing the same thing as he sends troops into American cities. Mayors and governors are saying no to these invasions. But Trump insists that residents are saying yes.
Once again, Trump is faking consent. People in these cities don’t support his deployments. Nor do Americans generally. And in honest moments, he has admitted that he never got our approval.
Trump routinely claims to have a mandate for whatever he does. In May and June, as he rebuked courts for blocking some of his deportations, he said he had been “elected on a historic mandate” to “get people out of our country.” In August, after deploying the National Guard to Washington, D.C., he told the press, “We want to stay there for longer than thirty days. . . . We have an absolute mandate, and I can extend it.”
His lieutenants in the domestic crackdown tell the same story. On August 31, after being pressed on Face the Nation about Trump’s deployment of the Guard to Los Angeles, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem wrote on Facebook, “President Trump has been clear: we are going to make our streets and cities safe again. Thank you to our brave law enforcement who are delivering on the American people’s mandate.”
On October 6, when reporters at the White House asked about Trump’s use of the Guard and the active-duty military on American streets, Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller replied: “The central issue that was litigated in 2024 was whether or not to turn back the border invasion. Americans voted to send the illegals home.” On this basis, Miller argued that the Guard was “dispatched to protect ICE officers” as they “execute on the mandate of the last election.”
But Trump never had a mandate to federalize, much less militarize, urban law enforcement. And twice in the last week, he essentially admitted it.
“I campaigned on crime, but I never thought we’d go into every city . . . and make them safe,” Trump confessed during an Oval Office exchange with reporters last Wednesday. “I did get elected for crime, but I didn’t get elected for what we’re doing. This is many, many steps above.”
The next day, in an interview with Maria Bartiromo, the president bragged, “I’m going to save the cities.” But in his next breath, he conceded, “I didn’t run on that. I ran on crime, but I didn’t run on straightening out the city.”
For once, Trump was speaking the truth. He never told voters he would send troops into cities. And if he had, they wouldn’t have supported it. The question wasn’t tested in the 2024 exit polls or the AP VoteCast survey—presumably because Trump wasn’t running on it—but CBS News asked a similar question two weeks after the election. In that poll of U.S. adults, 57 percent of respondents supported Trump’s plan to deport illegal immigrants, but 60 percent said he shouldn’t use the military to carry it out.
TO COMPENSATE for the absence of a mandate, Trump, Miller, and Noem pretend that people in the targeted cities now endorse the president’s deployments. Three weeks ago, Trump ridiculed Tina Kotek, the governor of Oregon, for opposing him:
You had to see this governor. She didn’t know what she was doing. She called me. She said, “We don’t want troops in Portland.” You know who wants ’em? The people. They go around, interview people. Even CNN, they interview people. “Send as many troops as you can.” The people want ’em. The people in Washington, D.C., want ’em. Everybody. They want to have safety.
A few days later, Trump floated the same story about Chicago and other cities:
You have black women with MAGA hats on in Chicago, all over the place. They want the Guard to come in. Or they don’t care who comes in; they just want to be safe, and they really don’t care. You know, there was one woman, and she was great today, she said, “You know what? I don’t care if it’s the National Guard, the Army, the Marines, the Air Force, I don’t care who comes in as long as we’re safe.” And that’s the way most of the public feels.
These claims of popular support are bogus, just like Trump’s delusions about having won the 2020 election. In August, a Washington Post survey asked D.C. residents, “Do you support or oppose Trump ordering the federal government to take control of Washington, D.C.’s police department and ordering the National Guard and FBI to patrol D.C.?” Seventy-nine percent of residents opposed it. In a September NORC poll, 56 percent of Chicago residents said it was unacceptable to “use the U.S. military and National Guard to assist local police” in cities, and 66 percent said it was unacceptable to use the military and Guard “to help find and deport people who are in the country illegally.”
The pattern has persisted in national polls taken this month. In a CBS News survey, 58 percent of Americans opposed “Donald Trump’s decision to deploy the National Guard to U.S. cities,” and 61 percent said he “should not deploy active-duty U.S. military troops to U.S. cities.” In a Reuters-Ipsos poll, 37 percent of American adults said “the president should be able to send troops into a state even if its governor objects,” but 48 percent said he shouldn’t. Fifty-eight percent agreed that “the president should only deploy troops to areas with external threats.”
NOW TRUMP IS CHANGING HIS STORY AGAIN. He’s claiming a mandate for his deployments. On Monday, an appeals court ruled that he could deploy the Guard to Portland. On Tuesday, citing that decision, a reporter asked him, “Do you feel unfettered to send the National Guard into whatever city you want now?”
The answer was yes. “We have the right to use the National Guard to put out trouble,” said Trump. “That’s, you know, how I got elected—one of the reasons I got elected.”
No, it wasn’t. Trump admitted just days ago, twice, that voters didn’t elect him to do what he’s doing to our cities. Now he’s pretending they did. It’s an egregious about-face, even for Trump. He has no mandate, and he has no shame.
