Since returning to office, U.S. President Donald Trump has set out on a warpath against American cities. His administration has dispatched thousands of masked and armed agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to descend on urban centers across the country and deployed the National Guard to Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., Memphis, and Portland. It has clawed back billions of dollars already allocated for municipal infrastructure, throwing long-planned energy and transportation projects into disarray. And it has withheld and threatened to eliminate federal funding for local housing, homelessness, food, energy, and health programs.

Attacks on national hubs of population, innovation, productivity, and creativity have little precedent in the United States. But they are hardly novel. Illiberal leaders worldwide target cities because they often act as strongholds of democracy: fertile ground for popular opposition figures and movements, alternative centers of political power, and examples of the cosmopolitan pluralism against which authoritarians inveigh. As Trump consolidates executive power and seeks to bend opposition forces to his will, American cities are becoming both the locus of federal pressure and a powerful force of resistance.

By 2050, the United Nations projects that nearly seven out of every ten people will live in cities; some 80 percent of Americans already do. Urban areas are not only the backdrop of crucial political battles. They are also increasingly part of the contestations themselves. Mayors around the globe have found themselves in the cross hairs of illiberal leaders and elected autocrats in their countries. Pushback from local leaders has protected individual rights and the norms and systems of democracy within their jurisdictions and prevented elected authoritarians from fully consolidating their rule. Leaders of American cities should know that they, too, have the power to alter the course of illiberal consolidation.

ALL POLITICS IS LOCAL

In fully consolidated autocracies such as China and Russia, cities are assets to national leaders. Led by regime-aligned mayors, they account for a large percentage of economic growth and tax revenue and house the ruling party’s coterie of oligarchs. The elected illiberal autocrats on the rise today, however, cannot count on cities to share their values or priorities. Mayors can present a political threat to those leaders as they attempt to consolidate their rule.

Mayors’ intimate connection with their constituents is one reason why. Surveys consistently find that people around the world trust local leaders more than national ones, regardless of the health of the democracies in which they live. Gallup polls dating back to the 1970s have repeatedly found that nearly 70 percent of Americans trust their local officials, even as trust in the federal government has steadily fallen to a five-decade low, from 70 percent in 1972 to 38 percent today. Data from the research agency Eurofound similarly show that the local governments of EU countries are substantially more popular than the national governments. The dynamic appears to be global: a 2024 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development survey of 30 countries found higher levels of trust in local governments than in national governments.

It is no surprise, then, that mayors often challenge illiberal leaders and candidates in national elections. Ekrem Imamoglu, the mayor of Istanbul popular for his programs that serve low-income women and children, was nominated by the Turkish opposition Republican People’s Party to run against strongman President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in the 2028 elections. In Poland, Warsaw Mayor Rafal Trzaskowski ran for president in 2020 and 2025 against candidates backed by the Law and Justice party, which had been systematically dismantling Poland’s checks and balances, including its independent media and judiciary, since rising to power in 2015.

Cities birthed democracy, and they still protect it.

National governments often mobilize their machinery to thwart these challenges. Days before Imamoglu’s nomination, Istanbul University revoked the mayor’s diploma, making him ineligible by Turkish law to contest the presidency. Then prosecutors charged Imamoglu with 142 offenses, including criminal organization, espionage, and extortion, which carry a total jail term of........

© Foreign Affairs