Earlier this month, President Donald Trump threatened to unleash the armed forces on more American cities during a rambling address to top military brass. He told the hundreds of generals and admirals gathered to hear him that some of them would be called upon to take a primary role at a time when his administration has launched occupations of American cities, deployed tens of thousands of troops across the United States, created a framework for targeting domestic enemies, cast his political rivals as subhuman, and asserted his right to wage secret war and summarily execute those he deems terrorists.

Trump used that bizarre speech to take aim at cities he claimed “are run by the radical left Democrats,” including Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, and San Francisco. “We’re going to straighten them out one by one. And this is going to be a major part for some of the people in this room,” he said. “That’s a war too. It’s a war from within.” He then added: “We should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military.”

Trump has, of course, already deployed the armed forces inside the United States in an unprecedented fashion during the first year of his second term in office. As September began, a federal judge found that his decision to occupy Los Angeles with members of California’s National Guard—under so-called Title 10 or federalized status—against the wishes of California Gov. Gavin Newsom was illegal. But just weeks later, Trump followed up by ordering the military occupation of Portland, Oregon, over Gov. Tina Kotek’s objections.

“I am directing Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, to provide all necessary Troops to protect War ravaged Portland and any of our ICE Facilities under siege from attack by Antifa, and other domestic terrorists,” Trump wrote on Truth Social late last month. And he “authoriz[ed] Full Force, if necessary.”

“When military troops police civilians, we have an intolerable threat to individual liberty and the foundational values of this country.”

When a different federal judge blocked him from deploying Oregon National Guardsmen to the city, he ordered in guard members from California and Texas. That judge then promptly blocked his effort to circumvent her order, citing the lack of a legal basis for sending troops into Portland. In response, Trump threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act—an 1807 law that grants the president emergency powers to deploy troops on US soil—to “get around” the court rulings blocking his military occupation efforts. “I think that’s all insurrection, really criminal insurrection,” he claimed, in confused remarks from the Oval Office.

Experts say that his increasing use of the armed forces within the United States represents an extraordinary violation of the Posse Comitatus Act. That bedrock 19th-century law banning the use of federal troops to execute domestic law enforcement has long been seen as fundamental to America’s democratic tradition. However, the president’s deployments continue to nudge this country ever closer to becoming a genuine police state. They come amid a raft of other Trump administration authoritarian measures designed to undermine the Constitution and weaken democracy. Those include attacks on birthright citizenship and free speech, as well as the exercise of expansive unilateral powers like deporting people without due process and rolling back energy regulations, citing wartime and emergency powers.

US District Judge Charles Breyer ruled last month that Trump’s deployment of federal troops to Los Angeles, which began in June, was illegal and harkened back to Britain’s use of soldiers for law enforcement purposes in colonial America. He warned that Trump clearly intends to transform the National Guard into a presidential police force.

“Congress spoke clearly in 1878 when it passed the Posse Comitatus Act, prohibiting the use of the US military to execute domestic law,” Breyer wrote in his 52-page opinion. “Nearly 140 years later, Defendants—President Trump, Secretary of Defense Hegseth, and the Department of Defense—deployed the National Guard and Marines to Los Angeles, ostensibly to quell a rebellion and ensure that federal immigration law was enforced… Yet there was no rebellion, nor was civilian law enforcement unable to respond to the protests and enforce the law.”

The judge ruled that the Pentagon had systematically used armed soldiers to perform police functions in California in violation of Posse Comitatus and planned to do so elsewhere in America. As he put it, “President Trump and Secretary Hegseth have stated their intention to call National Guard troops into federal service in other cities across the country… thus creating a national police force with the President as its chief.”

In the face of that scathing opinion, the president has nonetheless ramped up his urban military occupations, while threatening to launch yet more of them. “Now we’re in Memphis… and we’re going to Chicago,” Trump told a large crowd of sailors in Norfolk, Virginia, during a celebration of the Navy’s 250th anniversary earlier this month. “And so we send in the National Guard, we… send in whatever’s necessary. People don’t care.”

As October began, Trump had already deployed an unprecedented roughly 35,000 federal troops within the United States, according to my reporting at The Intercept. Those forces, drawn from the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, and National Guard, have been or will soon be deployed under Title 10 authority, or federal control, in at least seven states—Arizona, California, Florida, Illinois, New Mexico, Oregon, and Texas—to aid and enforce the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant agenda, while further militarizing America. Other guardsmen, being sent to cities across the country ranging from Memphis to New Orleans, are serving under Title 32 status, which means they will officially be under state control, a measure Trump uses in states with Republican governors.

National Guard forces deployed to Washington, DC as part of Trump’s federal takeover of the district in August are operating under the same Title 32 status. But with no governor to report to, the DC National Guard’s chain of command runs from its commanding general directly to the secretary of the Army, then to Pete Hegseth, and finally to Trump himself.

In September, a long-threatened occupation of Chicago began with an Immigration and Customs Enforcement operation targeting immigrants in that city, dubbed “

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