Gov. JB Pritzker (D-IL) repeated his claim that President Donald Trump‘s push to use the National Guard to combat crime is actually meant to set a pattern of military intervention ahead of the 2026 midterm elections.
“It’s about his authoritarian need to control,” Pritzker said Tuesday on MSNBC. “That whole endeavor is really about making sure that he can effectuate the rest of his agenda for the remaining two years of his four-year term.”
“We need to push back on the idea that troops can come into our cities,” he said.
Trump and members of his administration threatened to send the National Guard to Chicago without the governor’s request. Trump administration officials later walked back the threat and said they would focus on officials who ask for their help.
After Trump administration officials said they would not send troops to the country’s third-largest city, Pritzker said Trump’s real goal is to “normalize” the use of the military in civilian areas ahead of next year’s federal elections. He told CBS News last month that Trump’s move was an effort to “stop the elections in 2026 or, frankly, take control of those elections.”
“He’ll just claim that there’s some problem with an election, and then he’s got troops on the ground that can take control if, in fact, he’s allowed to do this,” Pritzker said.
Trump has deployed or threatened to deploy the National Guard to several cities since returning to the presidency in January.
Without the request of Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA), he sent troops to Los Angeles during immigration protests in June, a move that was later shot down as illegal in court. Last month, Trump deployed the District of Columbia National Guard and put the district’s local police department under federal control over perceived high crime in Washington.
Other officials have also expressed concern that Trump may use crime as a justification for troops to be deployed in the 2026 midterm elections.
“Increasingly, there is concern that Trump’s ultimate goal with these deployments involves the 2026 election,“ Joyce Vance, the former U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Alabama, wrote in a blog post on Substack published earlier this year.
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“This law is not a total inoculation from interference by a president who wants to violate citizens’ voting rights, but it’s one important part of a package of legal protections and strategies we’ll be exploring between now and the election, so we can develop a well-rounded awareness of our rights as Americans and voters,” Vance continued.
Trump has said that “crime will be the big subject of the midterms and will be the big subject of the next election.”