One of the proudest moments of my life was the first time I ever laced up my boots, put on my uniform and raised my right hand to swear my oath to the Constitution as a member of the Illinois Army National Guard.
I cherished every day that I got to wake up and call myself a United States soldier. And it is precisely because I love our military so deeply that I refuse to let a five-time draft-dodging coward abuse it for his own gain and to our country’s detriment.
At Quantico last week, President Donald Trump —the same man who insists on rebranding the Pentagon as the "Department of War"— told top military leaders that he wants to use American cities as "training grounds" for our troops.
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Let that sink in: the commander in chief wants members of the Department of War to "train" against the same citizens they swear an oath to protect. Last month, he announced Chicago would "find out why it’s called the Department of WAR." And this week, he’s making good on his threats: Trump has now forced hundreds of National Guardsmen into Chicago.
For months, Trump has fabricated claims of chaos and crime on American streets to justify false claims that there is a "need" to deploy troops into our cities against local officials’ wishes. First to Los Angeles, then Washington, D.C. — and he isn’t stopping there, he’s also attempting to deploy troops to Portland. Over the weekend, however, a federal judge that Trump appointed blocked his efforts to deploy troops there — twice — because, in his own handpicked appointee’s words, his claims about why they are needed were "untethered to facts."
Another way to put that is that he’s lying.
In just the past week in Chicago, we’ve seen Trump’s agents detain innocent Americans, deny citizens their right to legal representation, zip-tie children, arrest elected officials, ransack apartment buildings and injure journalists. And in recent weeks, they’ve shot two people, leaving one — a father of two young children — dead, making dubious and unsubstantiated claims about why they felt the need to use lethal force.
It’s obvious what Trump is doing. He’s targeting and punishing the cities who dare push back against him — the ones who are willing to call the president what he really is: a wannabe emperor with no clothes, no courage and certainly no moral compass.
And while he’s currently targeting blue cities with his lies, if these deployments are not stopped, there will be nothing to stop him — or any future president — from doing this to anyone, anywhere, for any made-up reason.
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Let’s be clear: Ordering our troops to intimidate the very Americans they sacrifice every day to protect does nothing to make our nation safer. Policing Americans in their own communities is not the National Guard’s job. They can’t make arrests, and they’re not adequately trained to carry out police duties in urban environments. These deployments are simply another unwarranted, unwanted and unjust move from Trump straight out of the Authoritarian 101 textbook, further jeopardizing civil rights while distracting our troops from executing their core mission of keeping our families safe from the actual adversaries who wish us harm.
We know Trump’s actions aren’t about "law and order." If this 34-time convicted felon actually cared about law and order, he wouldn’t flagrantly and seemingly gleefully refuse to coordinate with state and local officials. He wouldn’t be taking our troops away from their training missions just to do his personal bidding, forcing our heroes to stand on the side of the street picking up trash instead of using their time preparing to protect our nation in case of future conflict. He wouldn’t literally defund the police by freezing and slashing federal dollars that help hire, train and equip law enforcement.
But he did. All of those things, instead of supporting and expanding proven violence and crime prevention strategies that prevent retaliatory escalation.
Trump is wasting millions of taxpayer dollars to terrorize law-abiding citizens and legal visa holders who are simply exercising their First Amendment rights. And he’s diverting federal resources and agents away from operations that investigate drug cartels and gun traffickers, from missions that identify and disrupt terrorist plots and from actions that protect our families from cyber-attacks to do it.
I drove past some of the National Guardsmen who have been mobilized on the way to work today. I felt for them. Because when they raised their right hands and took their oaths, they didn’t do so to help a draft dodger dodge not just wars but his own personal scandals, too.
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They signed up to defend Americans’ right to free speech — not to intimidate Americans from that act of speaking out. They were willing to die to defend this country — not to defend one man’s ego.
Los Angeles did not ask for this. Washington, D.C., did not ask for this. Portland did not ask for this. Chicago did not ask for this. Our servicemembers do not deserve this. And it is because I respect our military so deeply that I refuse to stay silent as it is disrespected and abused by a man who was never brave enough to serve himself. I cannot and will not let him keep giving our troops the middle finger — taking them from their families and their missions, while eroding the hard-won trust and confidence they’ve earned from the American public over generations.
These days, I may no longer be wearing my Army uniform, but it still hangs proudly in my Senate office. Now, I spend a lot of my time seated under the great, beautiful Capitol Dome rather than beneath my Black Hawk’s main rotors. But my core mission is still the same as when I was in the National Guard: to keep America as strong and safe as she should be.
If only Donald Trump cared about doing the same.
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