Poll: Most Americans say military should be apolitical and face only ‘external threats’

Most Americans believe the president should only deploy service members to face external threats and that troops and their leaders should steer clear of politics, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll released on Wednesday.

The poll, which surveyed both Republicans and Democrats and ran over a five-day period starting last week, is the latest sign of public discomfort over President Donald Trump’s deployments of National Guard — and some active-duty troops earlier this summer — to police American cities whose elected leaders are Democrats.

Seventy-two percent of Democrats believed the military should only be used to combat threats outside of the U.S., according to the poll. They were joined in that view by a slim majority of Republicans at 51% who shared the same belief. Among all adults in the poll, including those without a party affiliation, 58% told the pollster that Trump should only deploy the military against external threats.

Trump deployed federalized National Guard troops and active-duty Marines to Los Angeles starting over the summer. Since then, the administration has been ramping up troop deployments to American cities, drawing ire and immediate lawsuits from the Democratic leaders who run them.

In Chicago, some 500 National Guard troops from Texas and Illinois arrived in the area on Wednesday over the objections — and lawsuits — of Gov. JB Pritzker and Mayor Brandon Johnson. Trump went a step farther Wednesday, posting that Pritzker and Johnson “should be in jail for failing to protect” Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents.

In Oregon, the White House won a partial court victory Wednesday in its effort to deploy that state’s guard to Portland. A federal judge allowed the administration to federalize state troops over the governor’s objection, but ruled they could not be deployed until a lawsuit on their status proceeds next week.

In Washington D.C., guard troops remain on duty after the administration deployed troops there in August. They have largely been photographed picking up trash around the city. The deployment also wrought a lawsuit from the city.

The Reuters/Ipsos poll was conducted after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth called an unprecedented meeting of hundreds of generals and admirals in Quantico, Virginia, last week where Trump suggested that the military use American cities as “training grounds.” He also told the senior leaders that the military faces “a war from within.”

Top Stories This Week

Respondents were asked whether the president should be able to send troops into a state even if the governor objects, which resulted in a divided response largely along partisan lines. Nearly 80% of Democrats believe the president should not deploy troops over the state leaders’ objections, while 70% of Republicans said that he should be able to do so, according to the poll. Forty-eight percent of all adults polled said that the president should not be able to send troops into states over the governor’s protests.

A vast majority of Americans — both Democrats at 93%; Republicans at 78%; and all adults at 83% — believed that the military should remain politically neutral, a long-standing norm that Trump has challenged in various speeches in recent months. He has given rally-style speeches at Fort Bragg, North Carolina and, last weekend, Naval Station Norfolk, where troops cheered and jeered at partisan rhetoric and jokes aimed at politicians the president has clashed with.

Trump has suggested multiple times this week that he was willing to invoke the Insurrection Act, a centuries-old law that gives the president power to deploy the military domestically under specific circumstances, such as “any insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination or conspiracy” that “hinders the execution of the laws.” It is the principal exception to the Posse Comitatus Act, a law that forbids active-duty troops from being deployed as domestic law enforcers.