After a couple of wannabe carjackers punched out the DOGE operative known as “Big Balls” in DC, Trump used it as an excuse to threaten to take over the city and bring in the National Guard to police it, in a clear violation of the Posse Comitatus Act. This despite the fact that crime in Washington DC is at a 30-year low and the city already has the largest police force, per capita, of any municipality in America.

None of that matters; Trump wants to turn America into a police state, just like every other dictator does when they get ahold of a democracy. They steal from the people, enrich their cronies, break laws with impunity, and then use police agencies to terrorize the general populace, judges, and legislators into docility and submission when they object.

In fact, they told us this was their goal. They showed us. They planned it in writing.

A leaked memo from inside the Department of Homeland Security reveals what many of us feared but hoped we were wrong about: that the military is no longer a last resort in American governance. It’s now a first tool. A central player. A political weapon, just like in Russia.

And they’re not even hiding it anymore.

This isn’t some vague speculation or dystopian what-if. This isn’t a shadowy plot hatched in secrecy. The document was written, circulated, and discussed at the highest levels of DHS and the Department of Defense and it spells out, in clinical, terrifying language, a plan to normalize and expand the use of the United States military within our own country, on our own soil, against our own people.

The memo, obtained by The New Republic, outlines a coordinated strategy to embed military forces into immigration enforcement not just at the border but across American cities. It calls for replicating the recent Los Angeles deployment “for years to come.” It uses phrases like “homeland defense” and paints immigration threats as akin to al-Qaeda or ISIS. It pushes for “new ideas” on how DHS and DoD can work together on “national security” threats inside the United States.

• This isn’t about law enforcement. It’s about militarization.
• This isn’t about safety. It’s about power.
• This isn’t about stopping crime. It’s about building a political machine with boots and guns that can intimidate or even subdue any opposition.

And it’s already happening. America is rapidly turning into an authoritarian police state.

Over the past two months, Trump has done what no modern president has dared. He sent 4,000 National Guard troops — federalized, not state-controlled — into Los Angeles to back up ICE raids. He followed that with 700 active-duty Marines.

These weren’t weekend warriors. These were combat-trained infantry troops deployed to performatively surround federal buildings and “support” immigration enforcement while pro-democracy protestors filled the streets.

Marines. In American cities. In June and July. “Guarding” federal offices and intimidating demonstrators.

And now, we’ve learned that smaller units have been sent to Florida and are prepping for deployment to Texas and Louisiana. The memo wasn’t a warning. It was a blueprint. A playbook for turning the world’s most powerful military force inward and turning constitutionally protected First Amendment political dissent into a “national security threat.”

Don’t believe Trump’s PR spin or the media’s pretending this isn’t as illegal and anti-democracy as it is. Don’t let the uniforms fool you into thinking this is routine.

This is not normal.
This is not legal.
This is not American.

This memo, which Pete Hegseth and friends didn’t intend you and I would ever be able to read:

• Urges DHS to persuade top military brass to view immigration enforcement as a “homeland defense mission.”
• Seeks to embed armed, kill-trained military personnel inside ICE and CBP to “increase information sharing” and support “nationwide operational planning.”
• Frames transnational gangs and cartels as equivalent to al-Qaeda, a dangerous, dishonest leap that pretends to justify extreme, deadly force.
• And it admits, in its own words, that due to the “sensitive nature” of the meeting it documents, “minimal written policy or background” should be preserved.

Translation: They know what they’re doing is legally and morally criminal. So they’re minimizing the paper trail.

Carrie Lee, a senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund, put it bluntly:

“This speaks to the intent to use the military within the United States at a level not seen since Japanese internment.”

I’d add, also not seen since the Civil War, when Americans turned their guns on each other and 700,000 of us died. And outlawed a decade after that war with the Posse Comitatus Act. And after the Kent State massacre, we resolved, “Never again.”

Joseph Nunn at the Brennan Center warned that this could create a permanent “domestic Forever War,” a campaign of endless militarization justified by fear and manufactured crises. Soldiers — including armed, masked ICE agents answerable only to the president — terrifying civilians on their own streets and in their own homes: a military occupation of the United States of America.

And that’s exactly the point. It’s all part of the classic dictator’s playbook.

You gin up fear about migrants and minorities. You call them invaders, terrorists, cartel assassins. You blur the line between protest and insurrection. You say cities are out of control. Then you send in the troops. Not to protect, but to occupy. And you call it “national security.”

This isn’t just Trumpism. This is textbook authoritarianism in the mold of Putin’s Russia and Orbán’s Hungary. It embodies the early stages of all the horror stories of 1930s Europe.

And let’s not forget the power grab embedded in all this. When Trump federalized the California National Guard, he did it against the will of Gov. Gavin Newsom.

The state fought back in court. A federal judge ruled in California’s favor, but the administration appealed, and for now, the troops can remain under federal control.

That’s not just a skirmish over jurisdiction. That’s an open attack on the sovereignty of states, the Ninth and Tenth Amendments to the Constitution. That’s a president saying, “Your Guard is my army now.”

This moment is a test. Of our Constitution. Of our institutions. Of our will.

Because if we let this stand — if we normalize Marines in our cities, Guard troops on our streets, soldiers surveilling residential communities — then we’ve already surrendered.

What happens when the next protest erupts? What happens when a city pushes back against federal immigration policy? What happens when a journalist, a mayor, or a movement becomes “too disruptive”?

Do we really think they’ll hesitate to send in the troops again?

And what kind of soldier will say no, when DHS and DoD have spent months telling them they’re defending the “homeland” against “enemy cells” within?

The line between foreign combat and domestic suppression is being erased. On purpose. By design.

The Founders of this country were obsessed with avoiding a standing army for precisely this reason.

It’s why they wrote the Second Amendment into the Constitution requiring a “well regulated militia” at the state level and that same Constitution, in Article 1, Section 7 bars Congress from appropriating money for the Army for any period longer than two years. (“The Congress shall have Power To … raise and support Armies, but no Appropriation of Money to that Use shall be for a longer Term than two Years;”)

They had seen what happened when monarchs used soldiers to police dissent. They knew the threat; not just to liberty, but to the very idea of a democratic republic. They wanted to keep the military on a very, very short leash.

So they built guardrails. Laws. Norms. Civilian command. Posse Comitatus. State control over Guard units. Strict separation between military and police roles.

All of that is being unraveled right now.

You may not see it in the headlines. But if you read the memos — and watch the deployments — you’ll see it plain as day.

The military is no longer on the sidelines.

It’s here.

And unless we act — loudly, urgently, relentlessly — it will become a permanent force in American civic life. Not a protector of freedom, but a tool of control, just like in Orbán’s Hungary or Putin’s Russia.

We are not at war with ourselves, at least yet. But our democracy is under siege.

And the troops have already landed.