Trump’s Military Occupations of U.S. Cities Cost Taxpayers $473-M: The Intercept

President Donald Trump’s military occupations of U.S. cities have cost nearly half a billion dollars, according to an expert estimate provided exclusively to Nick Turse of The Intercept.

Trump recently said he could “send the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines — I could send anybody I wanted” into urban America, while threatening to invoke the Insurrection Act. (Photo: U.S. National Guard / DVIDS)

The current $473 million price tag includes $172 million spent in Los Angeles, where troops arrived in June; almost $270 million for the occupation of Washington, D.C., which began in August; nearly $15 million for Portland, Oregon, which was announced in September; more than $3 million for Memphis, Tennessee; and almost $13 million for Chicago, which both began last month.

The National Priorities Project, a nonpartisan research group, tallied these totals from open-source information and costs-per-day estimates supplied to The Intercept by the office of Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.).

The skyrocketing price of Trump’s occupations comes as the president threatens to deploy additional troops to more American cities to quell dissent and turn America into a full-blown police state.

Trump recently said he could “send the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines — I could send anybody I wanted” into urban America, while threatening to invoke the Insurrection Act, one of the executive branch’s most potent, oldest, and rarely used emergency powers.

He has specifically threatened to surge troops into Baltimore, New York City, Oakland, St. Louis, San Francisco, and Seattle.