President Donald Trump may have his eyes set on a new target for his military takeover of American cities, and this time it’s in a Republican-led state.
While speaking to reporters in the Oval Office, Trump floated the possibility of expanding his largely baseless military crackdown.
“We’re making a determination now,” Trump said. “Do we go to Chicago, or do we go to a place like New Orleans, where we have a great governor, Jeff Landry, who wants us to straighten out a very nice section of this country that’s become quite, you know, quite tough, quite bad?”
“So we’re going to be going to maybe Louisiana,” Trump added.
Louisiana is one state that could probably use help getting its crime rate down—if only Trump were interested in doing it the legal way. Instead, his administration has cut more than $800 million in Justice Department grants to crime-prevention programs.
In 2024, New Orleans had a homicide rate of 34.7 murders per 100,000 residents, while the rate in Washington D.C., where Trump instituted a federal crackdown earlier this summer, was 27.3 per 100,000 residents, according to a report from the Rochester Institute of Technology.
The rest of Louisiana isn’t in the clear, either. In 2024, Baton Rouge had a murder rate of 36 people per 100,000, and Shreveport, which is in House Speaker Mike Johnson’s district, landed at #25 on Newsweek’s recent list of the 30 U.S. cities (with at least 100,000 residents) that had the highest number of violent crimes against people.
Still, Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry had approved sending some of his state’s National Guard troops to Washington D.C. to assist in Trump’s so-called crackdown on crime in the capital, despite the fact that his own state has far higher crime rates.
Trump’s reference to a pliant Landry was likely a dig at Illinois Governor JB Pritzker, who has consistently hit back at the president’s advances to send the military to Chicago. “I want to go into Chicago,” Trump pouted Wednesday, during the same press conference. “And I have this incompetent governor who doesn’t want us.”
So far, Trump’s use of National Guard troops to counter crime has been focused on Democratic cities. On Tuesday, a federal judge ruled that Trump’s decision to deploy the National Guard in Los Angeles had blatantly violated the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act, an act prohibiting the use of the U.S. military to execute domestic law.
While the decision apparently infuriated the president, who has claimed he has “the right to do anything” he wants, Trump appears reluctant to help anyone who isn’t willing to beg him for it.
The post Trump Says His Military Crackdown May Hit Another City Before Chicago appeared first on New Republic.
