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A calculated pattern is emerging in Donald Trump’s planned National Guard deployments: After wobbling on sending the military into Chicago earlier this month, his administration has pivoted toward targeting blue cities in deep red states.

Memphis and New Orleans — the two cities Trump has announced he plans to target next — are both Democratic cities in Republican-controlled states, and both also have Black mayors — a seeming prerequisite thus far for the cities that this hard-right administration is targeting.

Moreover, both cities answer to Republican governors who have indicated their support for Trump’s idea of using military boots on the ground in a domestic law enforcement capacity, despite the fact that crime rates in both cities, while still high, have declined significantly since the peaks of the pandemic years. In New Orleans, murders are down by more than a quarter over the past year, and other violent crimes have also declined by double-digit amounts.

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Tennessee’s Gov. Bill Lee says he has been discussing a troop deployment with the Trump administration for months, while Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry has waxed poetic about sending the military into domestic crime-plagued “war zones.”

By contrast, the leadership of the cities impacted are less than enthused: Memphis Mayor Paul Young has expressed his displeasure with this development, and New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell has maintained a studied silence on the topic. Both mayors know that their political wiggle room is limited in states where solid majorities of voters go Republican and where state legislators have long looked for ways to rein in the power of blue cities to go their own way on economic, social, climate change, and other policy areas.

In Tennessee, GOP legislators have used their super-majority power to create new city and county legislative districts aimed at blunting the........

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