Endgame of troop buildup unclear

Trump's deployments in L.A., D.C. have left Americans divided about what his aim is.

- JENNY JARVIE

ANDREW HARNIK Getty Images NATIONAL GUARD troops chat with a visitor in Union Station in Washington.

Over the weekend, President Trump shared a doctored Al image of himself as Lt. Col. Bill Kilgore, the crazed cavalry commander in the 1979 Vietnam War film "Apocalypse Now," crouched in a black Stetson hat in front of a flaming Chicago skyline abuzz with black helicopters.

"I love the smell of deportations in the morning,'" Trump wrote on Truth Social. “Chicago about to find out why it’s called the Department of WAR.”

Trump has long promised to deploy the National Guard to America's major urban hubs. But his unprecedented push this summer to deploy military convoys into Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. — and drumbeat of threats to send yet more into cities from Baltimore to San Francisco — has left Americans divided on whether his administration is trying to protect people in Democrat-controlled cities or wage war on them.

When Trump first sent troops into L.A. in June, he argued federal immigration agents needed protection from locals who tried to obstruct them from fulfilling their mission. In August, he deployed the National Guard to Washington, D.C., seizing on instances of violent crime to claim a public emergency.

And now he has paired the issues of crime and immigration as he threatens Chicago, deploying militaristic imagery and rhetoric that break longstanding American norms.