Analysis: The common thread in Trump's latest moves: squeezing big blue cities

CNN

8 hours ago

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President Donald Trump is moving systematically to tighten his grip on Democratic-leaning big cities — the geographic center of resistance to his agenda — by undermining their autonomy and eroding their political strength.
Those militant goals are the common thread that links the high-profile initiatives Trump has launched in recent days to seize control of law enforcement in Washington, DC; pressure red states to draw new congressional district lines; and potentially pursue an unprecedented 'redo' of the 2020 census.
These new efforts compound the pressure Trump is already placing on major cities with an agenda that includes aggressive immigration enforcement; cuts in federal research funding to universities central to the economy of many large metros; and threats to rescind federal funding for jurisdictions that resist his demands to impose conservative policies on immigration, education, homelessness and policing.
Trump is pursuing this confrontational approach at a time when major metropolitan areas have become the undisputed engines of the nation's economic growth — and the nexus of research breakthroughs in technologies such as artificial intelligence, which Trump has identified as key to the nation's competitiveness. The 100 largest metropolitan areas now account for about three-fourths of the nation's economic output, according to research by Brookings Metro, a center-left think tank. Yet Trump is treating the largest cities less as an economic asset to be nourished than as a political threat to be subdued.
Mark Muro, a senior fellow at Brookings Metro, said Trump's approach to the nation's largest cities is 'colonial' in that he wants to benefit from their prodigious economic output while suppressing their independence and political clout. This administration is 'treating America's great economic engines as weak and problematic colonial outposts,' Muro said. 'They view them as the problem, when (in reality) they are the absolute base of American competitiveness in the battle against China or whoever (else).'
Antagonism toward major cities has long been central to Trump's message. Several times he has described American cities with mayors who are Democrats, members of racial minorities, or both, as dystopian 'rodent-infested' 'hellholes.' Trump in 2024 nonetheless ran better in most large cities than in his earlier races, amid widespread disenchantment about then-President Joe Biden's record on inflation, immigration and crime.
Still, as Trump himself has noted, large cities, and often their inner suburbs, remain the foundation of Democratic political strength and the cornerstone of opposition to his agenda. A series of dramatic actions just in the past few days shows how systematically Trump is moving to debilitate those cities' ability to oppose him.
The most visible way Trump is pressuring big cities is by deploying federal law enforcement and military personnel into them over the objections of local officials. In his first term, Trump sent federal law enforcement personnel into Portland, Oregon, and Washington, DC, in the aftermath of George Floyd's 2020 murder.
But after he left office, Trump, who does not often publicly second-guess himself, frequently said that one of his greatest regrets was that he did not dispatch more federal forces into cities. In his 2024 campaign, he explicitly pledged to deploy the National Guard, and potentially active-duty military, into major cities for multiple purposes: combating crime, clearing homeless encampments and supporting his mass deportation program.
In office, Trump has steadily fulfilled those promises. When protests erupted in Los Angeles in June over an intense Immigration and Custom Enforcement deportation push, Trump deployed not only the National Guard (which he federalized over the objection of California Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom), but also active-duty Marines. Then, the administration used those forces not only to guard federal buildings, but also to accompany ICE (and other agencies) on enforcement missions — including a striking deployment of armored vehicles and soldiers in tactical gear to a public park in a heavily Hispanic neighborhood.
The underlying immigration enforcement that precipitated the LA protests constituted a different show of force. As a recent CNN investigation showed, ICE is relying much more on street apprehensions in cities in blue states than in red states, where it is removing more people from jails and prisons. The administration says that imbalance is a result of 'sanctuary' policies in blue states and cities limiting cooperation with federal immigration enforcement. But civil rights groups see the administration's confrontational blue-state approach as an attempt to intimidate both local officials and immigrant communities. (The fact that ICE last week conducted an immigration sweep directly outside a Newsom press conference bolstered the latter interpretation.)
Whatever the rationale, research by the University of California at Merced suggests the administration's enforcement approach is hurting blue cities. Using census data, the school's Community and Labor Center recently found that from May to July the number of California workers holding a private-sector job fell by about 750,000 — proportionally an even greater decline than during the 2008 Great Recession. Hispanic people and Asian Americans accounted for almost all the falloff.
Sociology professor Ed Flores, the center's faculty director, said he believes the decline is 'absolutely' tied to economic disruption flowing from 'the presence of ICE and the way that (people) are being apprehended' on the street.
New York City, too, has seen a notable drop in the labor force participation rate among Hispanic men.
Now, with the military (if not ICE) presence in LA winding down, Trump has sent hundreds of National Guard troops into Washington, DC, while also utilizing a section of federal law that allows him to temporarily seize control of the city's police department.
In his news conference last week announcing the DC moves, Trump repeatedly said he would supplement the National Guard forces, as he did in LA, with active-duty troops if he deems it necessary. And he repeatedly signaled that he is considering deploying military forces into other cities that he described as overrun by crime, including Chicago, New York, Baltimore and Oakland, California — all jurisdictions with Black mayors. 'We're not going to lose our cities over this, and this will go further,' Trump declared.
Most experts agree that Trump will confront substantial legal hurdles if he tries to replicate the DC deployment in other places. 'What they are doing in DC is not repeatable elsewhere for a number of reasons,' said Joseph Nunn, a counsel in the national security program at the Brennan Center for Justice.
Nunn said Trump can order this mission because of the DC National Guard's unique legal status. On the one hand, Nunn noted, the DC Guard is under the president's direct control, rather than the jurisdiction of a state governor. On the other, he said, the Justice Department has ruled that even when the president utilizes the DC Guard, its actions qualify as a state, not federal, deployment. That's critical because state guard deployments are not subject to the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act's ban on federal military forces engaging in domestic law enforcement.
If Trump tries to deploy the National Guard to address crime in the big cities of blue states, such as Chicago or New York, Nunn argued, he would face a catch-22. Since there's virtually no chance Democratic governors would agree to participate, Trump could only put troops on those streets by federalizing their states' National Guard or using active-duty military, Nunn said. But, he added, 'once they are working with federalized National Guard or active-duty military forces, the Posse Comitatus Act applies' — barring the use of those forces for domestic law enforcement.
Trump could seek to override the Posse Comitatus Act's ban on military involvement by invoking the Insurrection Act. The Insurrection Act has not been used to combat street crime, but the statute allows the president to domestically deploy the military against 'any insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy.'
Richard Briffault, a Columbia Law School professor who specializes in the relationships among different levels of government, agreed that invoking the Insurrection Act to justify sending the National Guard into cities over mayors' objections would shatter the generally understood limits on the law's application.
But he also believes that precedent provides no firm assurance that this Supreme Court, which has proved extremely receptive to Trump's expansive claims of presidential authority, would stop him. Trump 'could try' to win court approval of military deployments to fight crime by citing the Insurrection Act's language about ''domestic violence' and 'unlawful combinations'' and then claiming that is 'depriving the people of their right to security,' Briffault said.
Whatever the legal hurdles, more widely deploying the military on domestic missions would bring substantial consequences. Mayor Jerry Dyer of Fresno, California, who spent 18 years as the city's police commissioner, says that putting military forces onto the streets of more cities would create problems of coordination with local officials and trust with local communities. 'Whenever you start sending federal resources into local jurisdictions and actually take over the policing of that jurisdiction, it can become very disturbing to that community and quite frankly can create some neighborhood issues and ultimately a lack of trust,' said Dyer, who co-chairs the Mayors and Police Chiefs Task Force for the US Conference of Mayors.
Even more profound may be the implications of numbing Americans to the sight of heavily armored military forces routinely patrolling the streets of domestic cities — an image that historically has been common only in authoritarian countries. New York University historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a leading scholar of authoritarian regimes, wrote last week that the ultimate aim of Trump's domestic deployments 'is to habituate Americans to see militarized cities and crackdowns against public dissent in cities as normal and justified.' Step by step, she argued, Trump is seeking 'to disempower and delegitimize all Democratic municipal and state authorities.'
In less obvious ways, the battle that has erupted over redistricting — and the likely fight approaching over the census — constitutes another Trump-backed effort to 'disempower' large metropolitan areas.
The unusual mid-decade congressional redistricting that Texas Republicans are pursuing at Trump's behest would increase the number of Republican-leaning US House seats largely by reducing the number of districts representing the state's biggest metropolitan areas, including Dallas, Houston and Austin, which all lean Democratic.
The new map would further dilute the political influence of Texas' major metro areas, even as they have accounted for about four-fifths of the state's population and economic growth over recent years, said Steven Pedigo, director of the LBJ Urban Lab at the University of Texas' Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs.
'The growth in Texas has been driven by urban communities, but those communities are not going to be represented in these additional maps,' Pedigo said.
In that way, the new Texas map extends the strategy that Republicans there, and in other growing Sun Belt states, used in the maps they drew after the 2020 census, said John Bisognano, president of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee.
States such as Texas and Florida that added the most House seats and electoral votes after the 2020 census — and are poised to gain the most again after 2030 — are adding population primarily among non-White people and in Democratic-leaning metro areas, Bisognano noted in a recent memo. Yet both of those groups will be denied the additional House representation generated by that population growth if the Republicans controlling Sun Belt state governments continue to draw district lines that splinter metro populations and favor rural ones. 'They are subjugating (metro voters) to produce a partisan outcome that is not reflective of the people of those cities,' Bisognano said.
The calls from Trump and Vice President JD Vance to 'redo' the 2020 census, partly to exclude undocumented immigrants, could marginalize cities even more.
Even if Trump could surmount the many legal and logistical obstacles to conducting a mid-decade census, a reapportionment of House seats and electoral votes that excluded undocumented immigrants would not result in the shift of influence from blue to red states that many conservatives envision. John Robert Warren, a University of Minnesota sociologist, concluded in a 2025 paper that if unauthorized immigrants were excluded from the 2020 census, California and Texas would each lose a House seat and New York and Ohio would each gain one. 'It would make literally zero difference,' Warren said. 'If you assume Texas and Ohio go red and California and New York go blue, then it's just a wash.'
Excluding undocumented immigrants from the count, though, could offer Trump another way to squeeze urban centers. Many agricultural communities have substantial undocumented immigrant populations, but half of all undocumented immigrants live in just 37 large counties, according to estimates by the Migration Policy Institute. 'Within a state that Republicans control, by not including (undocumented people), it would be much easier to draw Republican districts because you would have a smaller minority population base to work with,' said Jeffrey Wice, a redistricting expert at New York University's law school. Not only congressional representation but also the many federal funding sources tied to population would shift toward rural areas if the census undercounts the urban population, he noted.
Wice, who formerly consulted for Democrats on redistricting, says blue states and cities can't assume Trump won't pursue any of these possibilities, no matter how far-fetched they now seem. The same is surely true on the deployment of federal force into blue places. The New Republic's Greg Sargent recently published an internal Department of Homeland Security memo that described the joint ICE-National Guard mission in Los Angeles as 'the type of operations (and resistance) we're going to be working through for years to come.' (Emphasis added.)
During World War II, the German siege of Leningrad famously lasted nearly 900 days. Big blue American cities may be counting down the hours as anxiously for the 1252 days remaining in Trump's second term.