Deploy National Guard to Chicago? Trump says he has ‘the right to do anything I want to do.’

President Donald Trump during a Cabinet meeting in the Cabinet Room of the White House in Washington, on Tuesday, Aug. 26, 2025. Vice President JD Vance is in foreground. (Doug Mills/The New York Times)

By Chris Cameron

President Donald Trump declared earlier this week that he had unlimited power as president to deploy the National Guard in any state, after musing whether people would call him a dictator for doing so.

In a televised Cabinet meeting Tuesday that lasted more than three hours, Trump attacked Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, a Democrat who has pushed back against a threat by the president to deploy troops in Chicago in an expansion of the crackdown on crime he is conducting in Washington.

“You have a guy in Illinois, the governor of Illinois, saying that crime has been much better in Chicago recently and Trump is a dictator,” Trump said. “Most people are saying, ‘If you call him a dictator, if he stops crime, he can be whatever he wants’ — I am not a dictator, by the way.”

About half an hour later, Trump said that he “would have much more respect for Pritzker” if the governor approved a National Guard deployment in his state.

“Not that I don’t have — I would — the right to do anything I want to do,” Trump said. “I’m the president of the United States. If I think our country is in danger — and it is in danger in these cities — I can do it.”

Referring to Pritzker, Trump continued: “No problem going in and solving, you know, his difficulties. But it would be nice if they’d call and they say, ‘Would you do it?’”

Pritzker, responding on social media, said: “No, Donald. You can’t do whatever you want.”

It is unclear whether Trump will send the guard into Chicago, where he may have limited ability to deploy the show of force as he did in Washington, a federal district where the president controls the local National Guard. In Los Angeles, when he deployed the guard in June to quell protests against his immigration crackdown, he invoked an obscure statute letting presidents call the guard into federal service during a rebellion against the authority of the federal government.

But in recent days he has spoken of deploying the guard in other cities led by Democrats, including Chicago, Baltimore, San Francisco and New York. And his remark Tuesday is his latest assertion of his maximalist view of presidential power. During his reelection campaign last year, Trump said that he wouldn’t be a dictator “except for Day 1.”

Trump has also attacked the counterweights to his own authority in government, particularly focusing on Democratic governors and cities governed by Democratic mayors. The president has not suggested sending troops to cities with higher crime in states that lean Republican.

Trump has long been preoccupied with Chicago, characterizing it as dangerous and ravaged by crime. Although high crime rates have persisted for decades in Chicago, violent crime there has dropped since the pandemic, and murders are down by 50% since 2021. Over the past year, crime has fallen in nearly every major category tracked by the Chicago Police Department.