President Donald Trump said he will probably have to send troops back to the blue cities when crime once again gets out of hand. (Joe Raedle / Getty Images)
By Joe Saunders December 31, 2025 at 6:14pm
In the face of stubborn Democratic resistance and a divided Supreme Court decision last week, President Donald Trump is stepping back from National Guard deployments in three liberal-dominated cities.
In a post Wednesday on Truth Social, Trump announced he is ending the Guard’s presence in three liberal cities — Chicago, Los Angeles, and Portland, Oregon.
But the announcement came with a warning that the Guard deployments could resume “perhaps in a much different and stronger form.”
President Trump announces that he will be removing the National Guard from Chicago, Los Angeles, and Portland. pic.twitter.com/SxxC7YE0Pc
— Breaking911 (@Breaking911) December 31, 2025
“We are removing the National Guard from Chicago, Los Angeles and Portland, despite the fact that CRIME has been greatly reduced by having these great Patriots in those cities, and ONLY by that fact,” Trump wrote.
Trump did not mention last week’s Supreme Court decision, in which the justices declined to go along with the administration’s request for an emergency ruling that would have overturned a lower court decision that had blocked a Guard deployment to Chicago. Conservative Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Neil Gorsuch publicly dissented in the case, as Fox News reported.
However, the tone of Trump’s post made it clear that it was not a decision he welcomed making — and his public belittling of the Democratic officials involved drove that point home.
“It is hard to believe that these Democrat Mayors and Governors, all of whom are greatly incompetent, would want us to leave, especially considering the great progress that has been made???” Trump wrote.
Considering the fact that the Guard deployments have been one of the most contentious issues in Trump’s contentious first year, though, it’s impossible that Trump is actually surprised at the Democratic resistance.
As USA Today noted in a Dec. 11 report, the number of federalized Guard troops in Los Angeles had dwindled from 4,000 over the summer to about 100 halfway through this month.
Illinois Guard troops deployed to Chicago were not engaged in “Federal Protection Mission operational activities,” according to military officials quoted in the report.
In Portland, about 100 Guard troops remained under federal control in mid-December, according to USA Today.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom and Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker are both in the running for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2028 and have made their resistance to Trump part of their nascent campaigns.
Newsom challenged Trump’s deployment of the Guard in L.A. even as rioters were running loose in his state’s largest city.
Pritzker, a man who deployed the Illinois National Guard to Chicago in 2024 to protect the Democratic National Convention, is essentially on record as being a hypocrite when it comes to the Guard, and tends to stage his photo op moments far from Chicago’s more dangerous neighborhoods.
Portland, meanwhile, has been the scene of violent anti-government activity by the so-called antifa movement for so long — in years when the White House was in Republican hands or when a Democrat was president — that it has become a virtual byword for leftist violence in the United States.
The fact that some courts won’t recognize it doesn’t change that reality.
So Trump can’t be truly surprised at Democratic intransigence.
And while he might be, temporarily at least, dismayed at the Supreme Court’s decision, which helped neither Trump’s administration nor the vulnerable residents of the cities he’s trying to protect, his Truth Social post made it clear that he isn’t done with the issue.
“We will come back, perhaps in a much different and stronger form, when crimes begin to soar again. – Only a question of time!” he wrote.
Joe has spent more than 30 years as a reporter, copy editor and metro desk editor in newsrooms in Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Florida. He’s been with Liftable Media since 2015.
Joe has spent more than 30 years as a reporter, copy editor and metro editor in newsrooms in Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Florida. He’s been with Liftable Media since 2015. Largely a product of Catholic schools, who discovered Ayn Rand in college, Joe is a lifelong newspaperman who learned enough about the trade to be skeptical of every word ever written. He was also lucky enough to have a job that didn’t need a printing press to do it.
Birthplace
Philadelphia
Nationality
American
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