While politicians and judges debate the legality of Texas National Guard troops’ presence in Illinois, columnists and creators are wondering: “Are we in a civil war?”
Here’s some background to that terrifying question: About 200 Texas troops arrived in Illinois Oct. 8 after they were called by President Trump to assist in protecting federal agents carrying out his deportation efforts, Gov. Greg Abbott told Fox News.
The escalating tension has sparked legal battles and personal insults, with Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker calling Abbott a “tool of Donald Trump” and “his lackey” and Abbott calling Pritzker “a joke.”
As Chicagoans and local reporters debunk inaccurate claims about rising violent crime in the country’s third largest city, Trump has maintained a …different narrative.
“There’s no place in the world, including you can go to Afghanistan. You can go to places that you would think of. They don’t even come close to this,” Trump said last month (sic). “Chicago is a hellhole right now.”
Appearing on Jimmy Kimmel’s late night show, Pritzker joked: “We’ve seen people being forced to eat hot dogs with ketchup on them, and our deep dish pizza, well, has gone shallow.”
“There’s no hellscape that I’d rather be in,” he added.
Amid the satire and mockery were very real threats: Trump has suggested jailing both Gov. Pritzker and Chicago’s mayor, Brandon Johnson, over their alleged failure to protect the ICE agents on the ground.
In addition to creators and commentators on TikTok, opinion columnists from The New York Times and the San Francisco Chronicle to Roll Call have grappled with the question of an impending actual civil war.
“When you combine all this performative military activity with Trump’s gambit of punishing blue states in the latest government shutdown farce, it’s hard not to hear a not-so-faint declaration of war,” wrote Jack Ohman in the Chronicle. “Throw in Trump’s open musing about invoking the Insurrection Act, which is specifically designed to stop a foreign invasion or extreme internal unrest, and we’re not just whistling ‘Dixie,’ we’re cosplaying it.”
New York Times columnist Thomas Edsall wrote last Tuesday: “Over the past four weeks, (Trump) has initiated what amounts to a unique form of partisan civil war designed to amass power in a nominal democracy and defang, decimate, and defund the opposition.”
For his part, Pritzker has called the presence of National Guard troops “Trump’s invasion.”
Things aren’t going smoothly for Trump’s effort, however. An ABC News photo of Texas National Guard members earned ridicule on social media, after Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth recently lamented “fat troops” in a speech to military leadership. But it wasn’t just the guard members’ physical appearance at issue. Commenters also pointed out that one member carried his rifle in an unsafe way.
“He’s got that barrel sweeping any and everyone to his left…which means all his own fellow troops,” Reddit user Hayduke_2030 wrote.
After the criticism of the troops in the photo, the Texas Military Department said to Task & Purpose that “a small group” of the guardsmen in Illinois were replaced after they failed to meet standards.
“Soldiers and Airmen are required to meet service-specific height, weight, and physical fitness standards at all times,” the National Guard Bureau said in a statement.
On Thursday, a federal judge also issued a two-week block on the troops’ deployment while finding that the Trump administration misrepresented the facts in Chicago in order to justify National Guard presence, as the San Antonio Express-News first reported.
“Not even the Founding Father most ardently in favor of a strong federal government believed that one state’s militia could be sent to another state for the purposes of political retribution,” Judge April Perry, a former prosecutor and a Biden appointee, wrote in a fiery 51-page ruling. She said that Trump’s decision to bring in the military last week was “likely to lead to civil unrest.”
The White House appealed Perry’s ruling, but the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals said Saturday that the Texas troops did not have to return to their home state while waiting for the decision on the appeal.
Even other Republican leaders have criticized what they see as an overstepping by Trump, including fellow Republican Gov. Kevin Stitt of Oklahoma.
“Oklahomans would lose their mind if Pritzker in Illinois sent troops down to Oklahoma during the Biden administration,” Stitt said in an interview with the New York Times on Thursday.
According to Texas Monthly, Abbott’s change of heart on federal interference (see: Jade Helm) could come down to a much simpler political motivation: getting back at Pritzker for helping harbor Texas Democrats in August during their quorum break over congressional redistricting maps.
“Pritzker embarrassed Abbott and resisted Trump’s gerrymandering efforts, so now Abbott is embarrassing Pritzker by sending troops to his state with Trump’s blessing,” Christopher Hooks wrote. “In practice, the soldiers, who are most likely none too happy to be called away from their normal lives, will probably mill aimlessly around the Bean until the headlines thin out and someone tells them to come home, and we should all hope it gets no more serious than that.”
Let’s pray he’s right.
