What Game Is Trump Playing With His Military Deployments?

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

65% : One can only hope, as in Los Angeles, that Trump eventually loses interest -- or that he views all of it, at some point, as a political liability.
64% : The federal government will keep harassing those who dare to stand against Trump.
50% : And that is the sort of chaos Trump and his savage enablers, like Stephen Miller, have inflicted on the American public.
50% : It is always hard to know how much Trump believes these cities are actual war zones, and how much of this is mere theater to distract from a slackening economy or ongoing questions about Jeffrey Epstein.
50% : Trump also already ordered 400 Texas National Guardsmen to Illinois and Oregon, drawing fierce opposition from Democrats and praise from Texas Republicans.
50% : This is why, in part, Trump has lost in court.
50% : Speech, if Trump has his way, will be further chilled, and dissenters will be intimidated into staying quiet.
50% : Zohran Mamdani, a Muslim socialist, is on track to become mayor, and Trump can dream of no greater foil.
50% : Kathy Hochul, the Democratic governor, did deploy troops last year to stand in subway stations as a crime deterrent, and Trump will be ready to exploit that reality as a pretext for a much larger escalation.
50% : To gin up confrontations, Trump and Miller will seek to further surge ICE agents into the city next year, and protests, if peaceful, will be quite large.
50% : At that point, Trump will gladly federalize more guardsmen, perhaps dispatching the Texans that he's been so eager to wield against other states.
41% : While there's a long, disturbing history of federal troops responding to protests or even, as they've been in the years after the September 11 attacks, brandishing assault weapons in public spaces like airports and train stations, a serious impetus has at least existed, in most cases, for such deployments.
39% : Trump, Miller, and many Republicans have also begun to insist that there is an organized left-wing terrorist movement in America led by amorphous and diffuse groups like Antifa.
37% : Fifty-five years ago, National Guardsmen shot and killed four unarmed college students at Kent State University; the troops had arrived to choke off protests against the Vietnam War.
26% : Troops have marched through towns and cities for centuries, called upon, at various points, to menace civilians or violently suppress protests.
25% : In Chicago, Customs and Border Patrol agents shot and wounded a woman, though they alleged she and at least one other person rammed cars into vehicles carrying federal authorities.
20% : Miller, however, does seem to believe -- he has accused a Trump-appointed federal judge of "legal insurrection" for temporarily blocking Trump's attempts to federalize Oregon National Guardsmen to protect federal buildings there following anti-ICE protests.

*Our bias meter rating uses data science including sentiment analysis, machine learning and our proprietary algorithm for determining biases in news articles. Bias scores are on a scale of -100% to 100% with higher negative scores being more liberal and higher positive scores being more conservative, and 0% being neutral. The rating is an independent analysis and is not affiliated nor sponsored by the news source or any other organization.