In recent months, Americans have already seen National Guard troops deployed to Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., at Donald Trump’s direction. Soon, we’ll also see deployments in Memphis and — if the president has his way — in Portland, Oregon, and Chicago.
Evidently, some cities in Louisiana are joining the growing club. The New York Times reported:
Gov. Jeff Landry of Louisiana has asked the Trump administration to deploy as many as 1,000 National Guard troops in his state, embracing the president’s push to use troops to fight crime. In a letter to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Monday, the Republican governor asked for the troops from Louisiana to help with ‘ongoing public safety concerns regarding high crime rates.’
The written appeal roughly coincided with the GOP governor’s appearance on Fox News, where Landry used the White House-approved phrasing “Department of War” (instead of Department of Defense), adding that he wants to see troops deployed “here in Louisiana into our cities like New Orleans.”
The governor neglected to mention some good news that would negate his political gambit: The Associated Press reported that New Orleans is seeing “a particularly steep drop in 2025 that has put it on pace to have its lowest number of killings in more than five decades.”
What’s more, Landry, a former Republican member of Congress, said in his Pentagon request that his plan is to build on “the proven success” of deployments to Memphis, which seems like an odd thing to say since there haven’t been any troop operations in the Tennessee city yet.
Complicating matters still more, governors don’t need the Trump administration’s approval to deploy Guard troops. Landry, by virtue of his job description, is currently the commander in chief of the Louisiana National Guard, which means he already has the authority to mobilize his own Guard troops, at his discretion, without Hegseth’s or Donald Trump’s intervention. Indeed, New Mexico’s Democratic governor, Michelle Lujan Grisham, deployed her state’s Guard troops to Albuquerque earlier this year — though not in a way the White House prefers — and the efforts appear to have made a significant difference locally. In Louisiana, however, the Republican governor is looking to partner with the administration on a model in which troops would be federally funded but controlled by Landry over the next 12 months. The Pentagon seems likely to approve the request.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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