As part of his authoritarian aspirations, President Donald Trump says he is sending the federal National Guard into Memphis in a supposed effort to tamp down high levels of violent crime in the city. But this is just a pretext.
Trump’s ongoing military occupation of Washington, D.C., makes this clear. Using the same justification for sending federal troops into Memphis, the president unleashed the National Guard on the nation’s capital because the city, as Trump put it, is a “filthy and crime-ridden embarrassment.”
In an interview on Fox News’ “Fox & Friends” on Friday, the president made similar comments about Memphis: “We’re going to Memphis. Memphis is deeply troubled. The mayor is happy, he’s a Democrat, and the governor of Tennessee,” Trump said. “Deeply troubled. We’re going to fix that just like Washington.”
(It’s worth noting that Trump is clearly lying about the mayor’s position here. On Saturday, Memphis Mayor Paul Young told CNN that he didn’t hear of the final decision to deploy the National Guard there until he heard the president say so on TV the day before.)
But as with Memphis, crime is not the real reason Trump sent the National Guard into D.C., a city, as reported by the U.S. Justice Department, that saw a 30-year low in violent crime in 2024.