In Brief:
- Democratic mayors have reacted in different ways to the Trump administration’s attacks on cities.
- Some are less outspoken than they were in the first administration as they look to protect federal funding.
- Others have sought to rally opposition to National Guard deployments and aid cuts.
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President Donald Trump spends a lot of time lashing out at big cities led by Democratic mayors. He’s described Portland; Chicago; and Washington, D.C., as dystopian hellscapes riven by violence and criminality. Rhetorically this is not so different from what Trump did during his first term, when his tweets and public remarks were punctuated by attacks on leaders from Baltimore to San Francisco to Atlanta.
But the attacks have a bit more bite to them now. Trump has deployed National Guard troops to Portland, Chicago and Washington, ostensibly to crack down on crime and to aid Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers in arresting undocumented immigrants. He’s said cities should be used as military training grounds. The administration has also held back certain grants from cities, and with congressional help, canceled millions in funding for urban projects that were geared toward social equity goals.
The response from Democratic mayors has changed in a different way. During the first Trump term, big-city mayors tended to be outspoken about policies they thought were harmful. They made frequent displays of solidarity with marginalized groups that Trump targeted through actions like the short-lived Muslim travel ban. The loosely defined sanctuary city movement, in which cities declined to use local police resources to aid immigration officials in the absence of an arrest warrant, actually seemed to gain steam as Trump railed against it. Mayors vowed to carry on efforts to reduce carbon emissions after Trump withdrew the U.S. from the Paris Agreement on climate action.
Some of that is still happening. But the way Democratic mayors are positioning themselves in relation to Trump is a shade less combative now, and a good deal more varied from place to place.
In Portland, which has endured an exceptional degree of Trump’s rhetoric about urban disorder, Mayor Keith Wilson has penned op-ed pieces in national publications that dispute Trump’s characterization of the city and criticize his immigration enforcement actions there. In Washington, by contrast, Mayor Muriel Bowser has been relatively conciliatory, even saying she “appreciates” a surge of federal law enforcement officers and National Guard troops. Philadelphia Mayor Cherelle Parker has been conspicuously quiet about Trump, recently going so far as to end certain minority contracting goals in accord with Trump-backed efforts to block affirmative action and diversity, equity and inclusion policies. Mayor John Whitmire of Houston, who has ticked off fellow Democrats in his city for a range of policy positions, has called standing up to Trump “counterproductive.”
“I think now you’re seeing us be a bit more judicious, primarily because almost every city has things that are legitimately harming them,” says Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas. Kansas City dedicates “real staff time” to reviewing every executive order and memo from a cabinet secretary in the Trump administration, Lucas says. It also has investigated alternate funding streams for certain programs under threat of federal cuts, like homelessness services, and dedicated time to researching case law for potential legal challenges to administration policies. Also, Lucas does fewer national interviews than he did during the first term (and not just, he jokes, because he’s less popular after six years in office).
“I’m not trying to poke the bear,” he says.
Other cities have been, well, poked by the bear, and don’t have the option of flying under the radar. Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson, who Trump has said should be “jailed” alongside Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, has continued to describe the administration’s tactics as “fascism.” In Portland, Wilson says he won’t do cable news interviews unless they’re conducted in Portland, so reporters can see the conditions for themselves. “We have to stop pretending that ‘dueling narratives’ is an acceptable form of political discourse when one is truth and the other fiction,” he says. He says his op-eds, in Time and Newsweek, were “a small but important part of our larger efforts to correctly characterize the reality on the ground and prevail in court.” (A federal judge blocked the administration from sending National Guard troops to the city earlier this month, though the administration has appealed the decision.)
The patchwork of approaches comes as cities are trying to suss out how much power the Trump administration has, or how much it wants to try to use, and what exactly it’s seeking to achieve with its National Guard deployments and funding pullbacks. The recent elections, which were good for big-city Democrats, have changed the dynamics somewhat. The administration appears to be less on the offensive in its dealings with cities than it was a few months ago. Even Zohran Mamdani, the socialist candidate whose successful campaign for New York City mayor was as vocally anti-Trump as any in the country, is reportedly scheduled for a White House meeting on Friday.
What role will mayors play in Democrats’ national political strategy heading into the 2026 midterms? If you ask mayors, they say their role should be more prominent, given their records of delivering tangible services to constituents. (Of course, governors say this too.) The varied approaches could reflect the ideological diversity within the party that Democratic leaders are trying to emphasize in the wake of the recent election, which saw victories for progressives as well as moderates.
Kathy Sheehan, the outgoing mayor of Albany, N.Y., says she describes Albany as a sanctuary city even though it doesn’t appear on the Trump administration’s official list of sanctuary jurisdictions. During the recent government shutdown, Sheehan says she was able to deliver a detailed message about how many local families were affected by the loss of food assistance, and the spinoff impacts on local food providers. She described the pause in Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits as an effort on the part of the Trump administration to “use food as a weapon.”
“One of the things that mayors do a really good job of is telling stories and really being able to humanize what I believe Democrats stand for,” Sheehan says. “It’s just about being really specific.”
