Trump’s military occupation of American cities is unpopular. The media is trying to manufacture consent for it.

Donald Trump’s military assault on America’s cities has been denounced by legal and national security experts as an “authoritarian power grab” that is “dangerous for liberty” and “an absolute seizing control of our country through our own military used against us” in an attempt to “dominate” the American people.

Trump’s power grab is also unpopular: A new Quinnipiac poll finds that Americans oppose Trump’s move to send troops to the streets of Washington, DC by a 15-point margin, with independents rejecting the move by nearly 30 points. That’s despite the fact that Quinnipiac’s poll question was biased in Trump’s favor. (More on that later.)

That poll finding might comes as a surprise to you. The nation’s media elites have been working overtime these last few weeks framing Trump’s moves not as an authoritarian effort to seize power but as a bold effort to fight crime – and insisting that the public is with Trump:

Of course, Donald Trump isn’t actually trying to fight crime. We know this for many reasons. First among them is Donald Trump’s own oft-demonstrated fondness for crime and criminals. This is a man who has been convicted of dozens of felonies, who routinely encourages his supporters to commit acts of violence on his behalf, and who has pardoned insurrectionists who beat cops with bats, drug kingpins, and murderers. Trump loves crime! A close second is that he has made his dictatorial intentions clear – repeatedly suggesting foreign autocrats like Viktor Orban and Kim Jong Un are his role models, saying things like “a lot of people are saying ‘maybe we’d like a dictator’” and claiming he has “the right to do anything I want to do,” treating the entire government, including the military, as his personal playthings, and scheming to stay in office longer than the constitution allows – and using the military to occupy territory governed by the political opposition is the kind of thing aspiring dictators do. Earlier this summer, Trump’s Secretary of Homeland Security made the Trump regime’s plans clear – They want to overthrow the democratically elected local governments they are occupying: “We are staying here to liberate the city from the socialists and the burdensome leadership that this governor and that this mayor have placed on this country and what they have tried to insert into the city.” Then there’s the fact that if Trump really cared about crime he’d focus on America’s decades-long Red State murder problem. Instead he’s targeting cities with Democratic mayors (particularly those led by Black women) for political reasons, and to indulge in one of his favorite hobbies: racism. Finally, Donald Trump lies all the damn time so if he’s saying something is about crime, it almost certainly is not.

None of that stops media propagandists from describing Trump’s actions as a crackdown on crime. But the public isn’t buying it. That brings me back to that Quinnipiac poll. Here’s the question they asked: “Do you support or oppose President Trump's decision to deploy the National Guard to Washington D.C. in an effort to reduce crime?”

See how that question is biased in favor of Trump? It offers a reason to support Trump’s move (“to reduce crime”) but omits any reason to oppose the move. Rule number one of writing a balanced poll question is that you cannot provide respondents a reason to support a position without also providing a reason to oppose it (and vice versa.) No serious polling outfit would ask, for example, “Do you support or oppose President Trump’s decision to deploy the National Guard to Washington DC in an effort to dominate the American people?” That would obviously be a biased question. Yet Quinnipiac’s question was equally biased, in Trump’s favor. And the justification Quinnipiac’s question provided is false; Trump’s actions are obviously not an effort to reduce crime. Even with this false, Trump-friendly wording, Quinnipiac found the American people solidly opposed to Trump’s actions, by a margin of 56-41. When asked more broadly about Trump’s handling of crime, only 42 percent approved while 54 percent disapproved.

Quinnipiac isn’t an outlier: Three out of four recent national polls that asked about Trump’s handling of crime found his approval on the issue underwater.

Still, pundits and media outlets insist that Trump is fighting crime (though that plainly isn’t what he’s doing) and that the issue is a political winner for him (though most Americans dislike his actions and disapprove of his handling of crime.) So many of them frame the issue the same way – Trump has set a “trap” for Democrats, who will fall into it if they dare speak out against his authoritarian military occupation of America’s cities – you’d think they were reading from the same memo. Or sharing a single brain.

The wild thing is, the “trap” claim would be dumb even if the pundits and journalists are right about how the public will view Trump’s actions.

Let’s accept, for the sake of argument, the premise that Donald Trump sending the military into American cities on the pretext of fighting crime is something the American people will agree with (although, again, polls suggest they do not.) What does it even mean to say Democrats shouldn’t fall into the trap of opposing him? Are we supposed to believe that the president of the United States sending the military into American cities would go unnoticed were it not for criticism of the action by Democrats? Of course it wouldn’t. Are we supposed to believe that the American people would notice it, but wouldn’t realize they agree with it unless Democrats oppose it? Of course not. But that’s what you have to believe in order for the pundits play-acting at political strategy to make sense.

There are things political figures can choose not to talk about in hope that they’ll go away. Tanks and troops rolling through the streets of America’s largest cities on orders from an aspiring dictator is not one of them. People are going to notice. Better that they hear criticism of it instead of just praise.

That brings me to Illinois governor JB Pritzker, whose speech this week in response to Trump’s threats to send armed military to Chicago is worth reading or watching in full:

Pritzker chief of staff Anne Caprara later posted on Bluesky “I am begging my fellow Dems to emerge from the reflexive ‘it’s a trap’ position on these issues and realize that some things are very simple: the public doesn’t like the federal government turning the military against its own citizens. The public doesn’t like the armed occupation of a city. Period.”

None of us can be sure how public opinion will play out in the future. What we do know is that what Donald Trump is doing is both wrong and dangerous. And we know the public is not currently with him. Whether they end up supporting Trump’s authoritarian use of the military against American citizens will depend in part on what they hear about it. Journalists have a choice: They can continue propagandizing for autocracy, or they can tell the truth. And Democrats have a choice: They can take advice from the likes of Chris Cillizza and cower in fear of speaking out against an unpopular president, or they can follow JB Pritzker’s lead.

Neither of those seem like tough choices to me.