Members of the National Guard walk near the White House on the National Mall after U.S. President Donald Trump deployed the National Guard and ordered an increased presence of federal law enforcement to assist in crime prevention, in Washington, D.C., U.S., August 21, 2025. REUTERS/Al Drago
As President Donald Trump threatens to use his authority to deploy more National Guard units to various U.S. cities, one expert on authoritarian regimes is sounding the alarm that Trump could end up irreparably damaging the U.S. military's reputation as a result.
While speaking to MSNBC host Jason Johnson, New York University professor and author Ruth Ben-Ghiat said Trump's use of the military to perform domestic law enforcement duties was a page out of the playbook of some of the world's most notorious far-right dictators. She argued that Trump was attempting to condition the population to seeing the military on their streets on an everyday basis.
"Part of this is, of course, intimidation. And the optics of it are very important to this administration," she said. "They want Americans — starting with [Los Angeles, California], where you had actual Marines as well as National Guard there — they want Americans to become habituated to the idea of state security forces and military being used to police civilians."
According to Ben-Ghiat, other authoritarian regimes in the past that have used the military as a state security force have seen the military lose the trust and support of the U.S. population as it becomes more closely associated with the current regime. She pointed to Chile under far-right dictator Agosto Pinochet as one example, and said that the National Guard (which is typically made up of civilians on temporary duty as first responders following a natural disaster) could soon face the same fate.
"The state security forces and the military end up losing their integrity," she explained. "And instead of being used like the National Guard to help Americans, or like the military to guard us from foreign adversaries, they become the adversary to the people, and they lose all of their integrity and their soul and their honor, and people come to hate them and that is a bad outcome for these forces."
Fox News reported last week that Trump is using his Title 32 authority (which doesn't go against the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878) to deploy the National Guard to 19 different states by the end of September, as part of a mission to assist U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. He has also threatened to have the military occupy U.S. cities like Chicago and New York City similar to Washington D.C.
Former Army Major General Randy Manner (Ret.) told CNN earlier on Monday that Trump's use of the National Guard in this way, while technically legal, was nonetheless "abhorrent" in how he was selectively sending the military to Democratic-run cities in blue states. Manner compared the president's deployment of "specialized units" of guardsmen to "Germany in the 1930s."
Watch Ben-Ghiat's segment below, or by clicking this link.