Americans don’t want Trump’s federal troop crackdown. He’s barreling forward anyway.

Federal law enforcement officers walk into a United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Portland, Oregon, after escorting vehicles out of the facility as protesters gathered on October 6. Stephen Lam/San Francisco Chronicle/Getty Images
President Donald Trump is barreling forward with his administration’s heavy-handed efforts across the United States, in rather ominous and drastic ways.

In recent days alone, his administration has tried to skirt a Trump-nominated judge’s ruling against his use of the National Guard in Portland, Oregon. He’s attacked Democrats in speeches to military leaders and troops, even pitting generals and admirals against the blue side. He’s pressed forward with a Guard deployment to Chicago that the mayor and Illinois’s governor have rejected – and even said Wednesday that the mayor and governor should be “in jail.” And he’s now floating invoking the Insurrection Act, which hasn’t been used in decades and would give him more freedom in deploying the military domestically.

All of this despite no evidence of an actual insurrection or really even extraordinary levels of crime or violence in the cities at issue. The Trump-nominated judge said over the weekend that the record showed the Portland protests “were not significantly violent.”

We seem to be reaching an inflection point, where Trump charges ahead despite the courts, despite the facts on the ground, and despite longstanding norms that guard against the politicization of the military.

But in this moment, it’s also worth emphasizing: He’s charging forward despite public opinion, too.

While many wagered at the start that Americans really just wanted to stomp out crime and didn’t care about the details, the public has actually taken a pretty dim view of Trump’s gambit.

And if anything, their skepticism appears to be growing.

The public is now broadly opposed
The first thing to note is that Americans seem to oppose Trump’s use of the Guard by sightly widening margins.

A CBS News-YouGov poll this weekend showed they opposed Trump’s decision to deploy the Guard to US cities, 58%-42%. A recent Quinnipiac University poll showed they disapproved of Trump’s use of the Guard and federal law enforcement to reduce crime, 55%-42%. And NPR-Ipsos polling in recent weeks showed fewer than 4 in 10 Americans supported Trump’s decisions to deploy the Guard to Washington, DC, and Memphis, Tennessee.

These numbers are significant because early polling suggested Americans were more evenly split on Trump’s initial deployment of the military to Los Angeles over the summer.

Those early polls also suggested Americans were broadly open to the concept of using the Guard to help police combat crime, at least as long as local officials didn’t object. (An August AP-NORC poll showed Americans said 55%-37% that it was acceptable for the military and National Guard to support local police.)

But the new data suggest Americans are now broadly opposed to using the Guard at all, irrespective of local input.