MAGA politicians are begging President Donald Trump to deploy the National Guard to more U.S. cities.
In the past three months, Trump has sent thousands of troops to both Los Angeles and D.C., while threatening to do the same to more cities, including Chicago and Baltimore.
While the deployments to those largely Democratic-run cities have been met with protests, some Red State politicians, like Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry, would welcome a military takeover on their own turf.
“We will take President Donald Trump’s help from New Orleans to Shreveport!” Landry wrote on X last week.
Shreveport, situated in the northwest corner of the state, is the third-largest city in Louisiana by population.
Landry’s post was in response to comments Trump made earlier the same day, weighing which city he wants to send the National Guard next.
“Do we go to Chicago or do we go to a place like New Orleans, where we have a great Governor, Jeff Landry, who wants us to come in?” Trump said last week while speaking to reporters in the Oval Office.
Another Louisiana Republican, House Speaker Mike Johnson, also welcomes a military presence in the Bayou State.
“New Orleans, like most Democrat-run cities, has a high crime rate, so it would be helpful,” Johnson said on Monday in an interview with The Associated Press.
Louisiana Republican Senator John Kennedy agreed, saying he’d be “delighted to bring in the National Guard.”
“We need all the help we can get,” he added.
Preliminary police data released on Aug. 30 shows the overall crime has dropped 20 percent in New Orleans since last August.
But not all Louisiana politicians are in support of a National Guard deployment.
“Militarizing the streets of New Orleans is not the solution for our public safety. Period,” congressman Troy Carter, a Democrat whose district includes New Orleans, wrote in a letter to Trump on Thursday.
Meanwhile, Democratic lawmakers in Baltimore and Chicago are railing against Trump’s threats.
“Depending on what happens, when it happens, if it happens, we’ve looked at what kind of legal actions we could take,” Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott said in an interview with WYPR last week, after a social media scuffle between Trump and Maryland’s Democratic Governor Wes Moore ended with the president threatening a military takeover of Baltimore. “We’ll just be prepared to do whatever we need to do in that moment,” said Scott.
Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker also called out Trump last week for his suggestion that politicians should be begging him for help.
“When did we become a country where it’s OK for the U.S. president to insist on national television that a state should call him to beg for anything, especially something we don’t want?” Pritzker told reporters last week.
