President Trump’s Military Games | New Yorker

Donald Trump does not do much to himself, so it is worth paying attention to in the rare cases where the president expresses regret. Such moments involve Trump’s decision not to call up federal forces when protests broke out in Minneapolis, Portland, Seattle and elsewhere in the summer of 2020 after George Floyd killed George Floyd. Trump later told the authors Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker. In the campaign ahead of the 2024 election, Trump was also overly bound to deal with “crime nests” cities like Chicago and New York. “The governor or mayor must ask you to come in,” he told the Iowa audience. “Next time, I won’t wait.”

He didn’t. The recent outbreak of protests against immigrant attacks in Los Angeles has provided Trump with a chance to play. He announced on June 8: “We will be full of troops.” The day before, the president bypassed the state’s Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom and sent the California National Guard federal government directing two thousand troops to Los Angeles. This number later increased to more than 4,000. This was the first time the president mobilized the guards without the governor’s acquiescence, when Lyndon Johnson occupied the Alabama National Guard from segregationist Governor George Wallace and directed troops to protect civil rights leaders as they marched from Selma into Montgomery. Ominously, Trump’s orders – appointing the president to convene the Guard in a “number of rebellion or rebellion against the authority of the U.S. government” under the presidency of the 1903 law – are not limited to California or existing protests. It authorizes deployment to locations where protests “whether they happen or may happen”.

On June 9, Trump followed closely by ordering the deployment of 700 Marines to strengthen the California State defender. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth posted on X, speaking out loud about the political part. California promptly sued to prevent federal takeover. “There is no invasion. There is no rebellion,” said the state’s Attorney General Rob Bonta, who added that Trump “trying to create chaos and crisis for his political purposes.” The president rejected that exaggerated claim, proving Bonta’s point of view. “If we don’t do this work, that place will be burning,” he insisted.

Lawyers will debate themselves whether Trump’s actions are legally allowed. California believes that the acquisition violates laws regarding guards (the amendment to the regulations, “orders for these purposes shall be issued by the governor of the state”) and represents an unconstitutional invasion of state sovereignty. U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer agreed. “Trump’s move to propose a law,” Breyer wrote, “threatening serious harm to the balance of power between the federal and state governments, setting a dangerous precedent for future domestic military activities. ”A panel of appeals boards quickly put the ruling on hold.

This is not just analyzing technical regulations. Trump’s actions have a profound question about the risks of inciting the military in domestic law enforcement and whether Trump always attracts a strong man, more inclined to his abuse of the military with his own political satisfaction than his second term. Indeed, when the defenders arrived in Los Angeles, heavy artillery was unloaded during Trump’s long-standing military parade on June 14, in honor of the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the Army, which coincided with his seventy-ninth birthday. axis Helps in sampling the hardware: twenty-eight M1A1 ABRAMS tanks, twenty-eight M2 Bradley tanks, four Paladin howitzers, eight CH-47 CH-47 CH-47 Chinook helicopters, 16 AH-64 AH-64 APACHE THICOPERS and 16 Apache Thricopters and 16 UH-60 UH-60 UH-60 Black Hawk Hawk Helicopers.

While tanks roll along the Constitutional Avenue and the legal battle, the real world risk is that Trump will seize the threat of judiciary frustration to take a more important step to invoke the Uprising Act. Currently, the guards and Marines are limited in their capabilities. The POSSE COMITATUS Act prevents the military from exercising domestic law enforcement powers. Invoking the Uprising Act will enable the government to use the military more actively to conduct raids, arrest and engage in other law enforcement activities against civilians. For years, Trump has been eager to use the Insurrection Act. He was spoken to him with a calm head in the first semester, but he, Hegs and Attorney General Pam Bondi have been coherent in recent days about whether he will release it now. Under the prescribed law, the president alone can determine that the conditions for a “rebellion” are sufficient to use the army and how long that power should last.

The Insurgency Act was last cited in 1992, when President George HW Bush responded to the riots in Los Angeles after four white policemen were innocent of beating Rodney King. But in this case, the state’s Republican governor and the city’s Democratic mayor are seeking federal intervention. According to former Defense Secretary Mark Esper, Trump, a Black Lives Matter protester at Lafayette Square in 2020, said: “Can’t you just shoot them? The Uprising Act in his hands is a terrible prospect.

The founder of the country caused harassment under the abuse of George III, who understood the dangers of an unchecked CEO and a twin in a standing army. The author of the Declaration of Independence complained that the King “maintained his supervisor without the consent of our Legislature, in peacetime, with the consent of our Legislature.” “He influenced the independence of the army and superiority of civil power.” As representatives of the Constitutional Convention debated how to allocate control over the army, James Madison raised a warning that should resonate today. “The means of defense against foreign dangers have always been a tool of tyranny at home,” he warned. It is no exaggeration to suggest that tyranny at home is what Trump pursues, or that what happened on the streets of Los Angeles may just be the beginning. ♦