No Kings, Just Guards: What Trump’s National Guard Deployment Tells Us About Power

Trump’s National Guard deployment ahead of No Kings Day wasn’t about security. It was meant to shape perception, silence dissent, and redraw the boundaries of public power.

Donald Trump didn’t need an excuse. He made one. The deployment of the National Guard ahead of No Kings Day wasn’t about immigration surges, border breaches, or unruly protests. It was about presence. About signaling. About reminding the country that power doesn’t always wait for justification—it asserts itself, then lets the rest of us scramble for context.

Anthropology teaches us to read beyond statements and policy justifications. We pay attention to gestures—not for what they claim to accomplish, but for what they make visible. Trump’s move isn’t about deterrence or enforcement. It’s about staging authority. There is no declared emergency, no credible security threat, no sudden need to mobilize state force. And yet, troops are being called up—not in response to unrest, but in anticipation of a story Trump wants to control.

No Kings Day, whatever its civic character or origin, carries symbolic weight. It invokes the idea that rule has limits. That power is accountable. That no person, however popular or powerful, stands above the collective will. To Trump, that’s not just inconvenient—it’s intolerable. So he meets it not with argument, but with men in uniform. It is a response designed to reframe—not by contesting the meaning of the day, but by overshadowing it.

This isn’t the first time American power has been performed this way. Uniformed presence has long functioned not just to restore order, but to impose a narrative of control. From the suppression of labor movements to the occupation of Black neighborhoods, the United States has its own archive of domestic displays of force. What Trump offers is not invention, but fluency. He taps that history and brings it forward—no longer hidden in the margins, but placed at the center of political spectacle.

He understands that control doesn’t require conflict. The image is often enough. By placing the Guard on standby, he marks territory. He transforms the ordinary functions of state power—mobility, readiness, coordination—into signs of loyalty. The uniform becomes a flag. The flag becomes a test. The test becomes a warning.

He doesn’t need confrontation to make the point. He only needs the possibility of it. That’s how intimidation works when it’s cultural, not tactical. You don’t have to deploy force. You simply surround the idea of resistance with risk. And by the time the crowd gathers—or doesn’t—the performance has already succeeded.

The spectacle doesn’t remain at the top. It filters outward. Local officials preemptively align. Journalists hedge. Protestors self-monitor. The performance of power becomes ambient—sustained not by explicit commands, but by anticipation. The message reaches the public not as decree, but as atmosphere.

This is a mode of governance that relies less on rule than on mood. Less on legality than on affect. It evokes stability while threatening disruption. It doesn’t need to detain protestors. It only needs to shift the frame—so that protest looks like provocation, and silence begins to feel like safety.

None of this is new to the structure of authoritarianism. It’s familiar precisely because it leaves institutions intact while reprogramming what they mean. Elections go on. Courts convene. But their symbolic load begins to shift. The forms remain, but the logic that animated them thins out. Authoritarian power doesn’t always destroy the stage—it rewrites the script and recasts the audience.

Trump doesn’t govern through proclamation. He governs through suggestion. A gesture here, a deployment there. And the rest follows. When troops appear where none are needed, it becomes less a question of what will happen than what people will now choose to avoid. Speech isn’t banned. It’s made marginal. Or lonely. Or dangerous. And in time, silence feels less like concession than prudence.

The Guard, in this case, doesn’t secure the republic. It secures the illusion that those in power are its defenders. That dissent is the disruption, not the warning. That the act of resisting overreach is itself the breach.

The question isn’t whether the Guard will engage. It’s what their presence already does. Who hesitates. Who watches. Who adapts. The ritual succeeds even without action. Power doesn’t always declare itself. Sometimes it shows up early, dresses in uniform, and waits for us to call it normal.

Suggested Readings

Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt, 1951.

Berlant, Lauren. Cruel Optimism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011.

Foucault, Michel. Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–78. Edited by Michel Senellart. Translated by Graham Burchell. New York: Picador, 2009.

Hall, Stuart, Chas Critcher, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke, and Brian Roberts. Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1978.

Mazzarella, William. The Mana of Mass Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017.

Mbembe, Achille. Necropolitics. Translated by Steven Corcoran. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019.

Stanley, Jason. How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them. New York: Random House, 2018.