Donald Trump is not much for his own behavior. Such a moment implies Trump’s decision not to call federal troops when demonstrations broke out in Minneapolis, Portland, Seattle and elsewhere in the summer of 2020, after the murder of George Floyd. “I think if I had to start again, I would have called on the army immediately,” Trump told the authors Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker. On the campaign track before the 2024 elections, Trump also deplored to be too sober to treat the cities of “crime den” like Chicago and New York. “You just have to be asked by the governor or the mayor to come,” he told an Iowa audience. “Next time, I’m not waiting.”
He didn’t do it. The recent eruption of demonstrations in Los Angeles about immigration raids offered Trump an opportunity for domination. “We are going to have troops everywhere,” he said on June 8. The day before, the president had bypassed the government Governor of the State, Gavin Newsom, to federalize the National Guard of California, leading two thousand soldiers in Los Angeles; This number was then increased to more than four thousand. It was the first time that a president has mobilized custody without the acquiescence of the governor since 1965, when Lyndon Johnson took control of the Alabama National Guard of Governor Segregated George Wallace and asked the troops to protect the leaders of civil rights while they were walking from Selma to Montgomery. Organized, the order of Trump – issued under the auspices of a 1903 law which allows the president, in situations of “rebellion or danger of rebellion against the authority of the government of the United States”, to call custody “in such a number which he deems necessary” – not limited to California or to existing demonstrations. He authorized deployment in places where demonstrations “occur or are likely to occur”.
On June 9, Trump followed this with an order to deploy seven hundred marine to strengthen Californian guard. “We have the obligation to defend federal agents of the application of laws – even if Gavin Newsom will not do it,” said the defense secretary Pete Hegseth, displaying the political part aloud. California continued to block the federal takeover. “There is no invasion. There is no rebellion,” said state prosecutor Rob Bonta. Trump, he added, “try to make chaos and the crisis on the ground for his own political ends.” The president rejected this assertion with the type of hyperbole which served to prove the bonta point. “If we haven’t done the job,” he insisted, “this place would burn.”
Lawyers will take care of whether Trump’s action is legally authorized. California argued that the takeover violates the law on the federalization of the custody (an amendment to the law provides that “the orders for these purposes will be issued through the governors of the States”) and represents an unconstitutional intrusion into the sovereignty of the State. US district judge Charles Breyer accepted. Trump’s decision to invoke Newsom’s objections, Breyer wrote: “Threat of serious injuries to the constitutional balance of powers between federal governments and states, and this establishes a precedent dangerous for future domestic military activities.” A panel of appeal of the appeal quickly made this decision pending.
This is more than the technical analysis of the statutes. Trump’s actions raise deep questions about the risks of seizing the army in domestic police, and on the question of whether Trump, always attracted by the role of the strong man, is even more inclined to his second term than in his first to abuse the army for his own political satisfaction. Indeed, while the members of the guard arrived in Los Angeles, a heavy artillery was discharged in the capital for the military parade of Trump for a long time on June 14-an event to commemorate the two hundred years and fifty of the army, which coincides easily with its seventy-nine years. Axios Usely halled a sample of the equipment: twenty-eight Abrams M1A1 tanks, twenty-eight Bradley combat vehicles, four Howitzers Paladin, eight Chinese helicopters CH-47, Black Hawk AH-64 helicopters and sixteen UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters.
While the reservoirs exceed constitution avenue and the legal battle, the real risk is that Trump again seizes the threat of being thwarted by the judiciary to take the much more consecutive measure to invoke the law on the insurrection. Currently, guard and navies are limited in what they can do; The Comitatus posse law prevents soldiers from exercising national powers of application of the law. To invoke the Insurrection Act would allow the administration to use the military in a more aggressive manner – to carry out raids, to make arrests and to engage in other activities of application of the law against the civilian population. Trump is looking forward to using the Insurrection Act for years. He was explained to the first mandate by cooler heads, but he, Hegseth, and the Attorney General, Pam Bondi, have been shy in recent days to find out if he will unleash him now. Under the expansive law, the president alone can determine when the conditions of “rebellion” are sufficient to use the army and how long this power should last.
The Insurrection Act was invoked for the last time in 1992, when President George HW Bush responded to the riots to the after four white police officers were acquitted to have beaten Rodney King. But in this case, the Republican Governor of the State and the Democratic Mayor of the City both asked for federal intervention. Trump is the man who, according to the former defense secretary, Mark Esper, said demonstrators of Black Lives Matter in Lafayette Square in 2020, “Can you not just draw them? The act of insurrection in his hands is a terrifying perspective.
The founders of the nation, having rubbed under the abuses of George III, understood the twin dangers of an uncontrolled director general and a permanent soldier. The king “kept among us, in period of peace, permanent armies without the consent of our legislatures”, complained the authors of the declaration of independence. “He affected the army independent and superior to civil power.” While the delegates to the Constitutional Convention have debated the way of allocating army control, James Madison offered a warning which should resonate today. “The defense against foreign danger,” he warned, “have always been the instruments of tyranny at home.” It is not an exaggeration to suggest that tyranny at home is what Trump is looking for, or that what is happening in the streets of Los Angeles can be just the start. ♦
