How Trump’s militarized crime crackdown could be backfiring on him
Analysis by
Aaron Blake
AUG 28, 2025
President Donald Trump’s extraordinary moves to
put troops on US soil appear to be following a familiar political script.
It goes like this: Trump seizes on an issue that’s one of his strengths and is also a major concern for many Americans in an effort
to try to expand his power. But despite both of those factors, he appears to go too far for most Americans.
It happened with immigration and deportations; it now appears to be happening with Trump sending troops to major American cities to combat crime.
We’ve now got
three new polls on the latter issue. They arrive as Trump threatens to send troops
to a third city, Chicago, after previously sending them to Los Angeles (in response to protests against his immigration raids) and Washington, DC, (as part of a federal crackdown that is ostensibly about crime).
All three polls show Trump’s moves to dispatch troops are unpopular, even as Americans believe he’s addressing a very real problem and seem open to less drastic measures.
An
AP-NORC poll showed 81% of Americans regarded crime in large cities as a “major problem.” But they opposed the federal government taking over local police departments – as Trump did in Washington, DC – by a wide margin, 55%-32%.
Similarly, a
Reuters-Ipsos poll showed just 36% of Americans endorsed Trump’s takeover of the DC Metropolitan Police. And Americans also opposed deploying the National Guard, 46%-38%.
And a
Quinnipiac University poll showed registered voters opposed Trump using the National Guard to combat crime in DC, 56%-41%.
The numbers echo what we saw after Trump’s first big move to dispatch troops to Los Angeles in June. Multiple polls showed his handling of the situation was
double digits underwater, even as the guard and the Marines largely just protected federal property.
There is some nuance in the new polls, and the situation doesn’t seem to have hurt Trump overall thus far.
But the surveys still point to potential trouble ahead for the president’s nascent effort to militarize US soil.
