Partisan National Guard Deployments during Trump’s Second Term

Abstract

This paper identifies a novel pattern in the second Trump administration’s National Guard deployments. The innovation lies in differentiating deployments along partisan geographic lines while pursuing the same stated objective—preserving federal functions (protecting federal personnel, facilities, and operations)—by selectively invoking the Guard’s dual legal statuses: Title 10 (federal status under presidential command) and Title 32 (state-controlled status with federal funding). Although federal function preservation is not a legally indispensable prerequisite for mobilizing the Guard, the administration nonetheless relied on that rationale in roughly twenty states.

The paper also specifies the enabling conditions. Institutionally, decades of reform in the Guard created a set of legal authorities that presidents can mix and match. Politically, contemporary polarization—especially the intensification of geographically sorted partisanship and affective polarization—made selective use of those authorities both feasible and attractive.

The argument contributes to federalism scholarship by extending accounts that characterize the first Trump administration as practicing “punitive federalism,” i.e., disciplining opposing states and cities through conditionality, cuts, or public shaming. That framework fails to capture the second administration’s deployment strategy because it simultaneously punished adversaries and rewarded allies. Under the rubric of federal function preservation, the President visibly deployed the National Guard in Democratic jurisdictions under Title 10, without state consent, placing forces under federal command. By contrast, in Republican jurisdictions he supported deployments under Title 32, keeping command with governors while covering costs with federal funds. This paper calls this coexistence and selective use of patronage and punishment “patronage-punitive federalism,” and identifies the institutional and political conditions that made it operable.

Notably, this coexistence and selective use of patronage and punishment was not confined to National Guard policy. During the first Trump administration, allocations in the Department of Transportation’s transportation-infrastructure grant programs were substantially reduced for Democratic states and cities and redirected toward Republican states and counties. In disaster response, the administration repeatedly threatened to cut off FEMA assistance to Democratic jurisdictions while touting swift support for Republican ones. Taken together, these patterns indicate that the scope of patronage-punitive federalism extends well beyond National Guard policy.

This matters because the National Guard sits at the intersection of vertical and horizontal separation of powers—federalism and the presidency—and has historically served as a guardrail against the domestic misuse of military force. Deploying it along partisan geographic lines risks instrumentalizing force for political ends and straining constitutional checks even when courts intervene only after the fact. At the same time, the Guard is a locally rooted institution, descended from community-based militias; using it as leverage to preempt or pressure state and local discretion, and to chill citizens’ freedoms, undermines community trust and the Guard’s identity. In this light, the second Trump administration’s approach amounts to a stress test of the Guard’s institutional resilience.