WHY ARE US TROOPS OCCUPYING AMERICAN CITIES?

Trump's homeland invasion may be a prelude to election interference

President Donald Trump speaks to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at Ben Gurion International Airport in Tel Aviv before boarding his plane to Sharm El-Sheikh on Monday. / Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images.

President Donald Trump is now doing what every American president has done since Israel came into being in 1948: using the power of his office to give the Israel leadership all the public and secret support it needs. Trump has helped free the remaining Israeli hostages from Hamas captivity and has garnered domestic and international praise in the process. What will happen next there, in brutalized and demolished Gaza after the hostages’ release—in terms of Israel’s pursuit of its own interests, the fate of remaining Hamas forces, and the future role of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—is not known. What is known is that Netanyahu has no intention of allowing Hamas to survive as a military organization and little interest, as the last two years have shown, in the fate of the surviving Palestinians in Gaza. Trump and his advisers are aware of these dynamics. The unasked question today concerns the plan for the future of the battered Palestinian survivors of the horrors of Israel’s violent response to October 7, 2023. For them the long game is far from over.

The Trump administration is playing another long game, or trying to, in the streets of US cities under Democratic Party governance, using existing presidential emergency powers to send National Guard, Army troops and ICE agents to hunt down and arrest suspected undocumented immigrants and detain and deport them, without the due process demanded by the Constitution. What’s happening now may be a trial run for the use of those forces to interfere on the behalf of the president and the Republican Party in states where the Democratic Party has a chance to win crucial seats in next fall’s Congressional elections. I’ve been told by someone with inside knowledge that planning for such action is now under way in the White House.