The country is at an inflection point when it comes to President Donald Trump using the military as his domestic bully squad. A court just ruled the president’s use of the military for domestic law enforcement in Los Angeles is illegal, and Chicago is bracing for the next promised influx of military and immigration agents policing the homeland.
In the coming weeks and months, governors, mayors and — most important — judges will make decisions related to the president’s deployment of the military to Democratic-run cities, for the ostensible purpose of conducting crimefighting operations. Their choices will affect whether America continues as a liberal democracy or backslides into a wealthier, nuclear-armed version of Hungary.
Trump’s overreach is exhausting the public — a tactic familiar to authoritarians throughout history.
Though Trump boasted of his authoritarian ambitions long before even his first run for president, it wasn’t until his second administration that he fully embraced using government for what a number of critics have alleged to be extortion, utter lawlessness, destruction for its own sake and the might-makes-right ethos of fascism.
And why shouldn’t Trump feel emboldened? In a case involving his attempted self-coup, the Supreme Court granted presidents sweeping immunity for any “official acts.” He has almost completely purged the Republican Party of anything but sycophants and ambitious toadies. And he was re-elected despite facing prosecution over his fraudulent attempt to overturn the 2020 election and his conviction on felony charges related to his 2016 campaign.
Now, over eight months into this term, we live in an America fully changed from the one we inhabited on Jan. 19. Back then, the idea that armed, masked, unidentifiable men would be violently apprehending people on the streets — including American citizens and legal immigrants — and sending them without due process to far-flung places (which sometimes include foreign torture prisons) would have been unthinkable. Indeed, it’s the kind of tyrannical government operation that Second Amendment absolutists have long cited as their reason that guns shouldn’t be regulated in any way.
But here we are. Those things started happening with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, there was outrage, there were court cases — and there still are — but Americans grow more used to it by the day. And Trump escalated.
In June, the president sent thousands of Marines and National Guard troops to Los Angeles to assist with law enforcement. On Thursday, a federal judge ruled this was illegal, finding that the administration violated the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, which bars the military from executing domestic laws. U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer said the administration “systematically used armed soldiers (whose identity was often obscured by protective armor) and military vehicles to set up protective perimeters and traffic blockades, engage in crowd control and otherwise demonstrate a military presence in and around Los Angeles.”
In August, Trump saw his chance to implement a federal “takeover” of D.C.’s police force. The emergency that he claimed required unprecedented intervention was a supposed crime wave. And the “Reichstag fire” incident Trump used as a pretext to seize power was an assault on Edward Coristine, the onetime staffer for Elon Musk’s DOGE known as “Big Balls,” in an attempted carjacking in Washington — allegedly by two unarmed 15-year-olds. This has led to absurd images of bored National Guardsmen loitering outside Union Station and camouflaged troops wearing bright highway safety vests while they pick up garbage in low-crime areas of the district.
We shouldn’t blithely give up our constitutional rights even in the case of an actual national emergency, much less a fabricated crisis.
It is worth acknowledging that the presence of the U.S. military in D.C. has led to a sharp drop in violent crime — as one should expect it would. That doesn’t make the deployment an effective crimefighting tool or compliant with the Constitution. The presence of uniformed personnel trained for combat, not law enforcement, has a chilling effect on both the law-abiding and the criminally inclined. But the dynamics that facilitate crime — gangs, guns, drugs and poverty, among them — won’t be stamped out by a performative display of authority. Regardless, this is power that the federal government isn’t supposed to be able to wield in peacetime — hence the fake “emergencies.”
A recent AP-NORC poll showed most Americans think crime is a major problem, providing Trump with the rare issue for which his approval ratings are still above water. But the same poll, and several others, showed a deep dislike of Trump’s federal takeover tactics.
Now, on the day a judge ruled his California “takeover” was illegal, Trump insists “we’re going in” to Chicago. Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker is, correctly, taking Trump at his word. In a news conference Tuesday, the governor said he believed Trump is timing the planned federal infiltration of Chicago to coincide with Mexican Independence Day festivities next weekend.
“It breaks my heart to report that we have been told ICE will try to disrupt community picnics and peaceful parades. Let’s be clear — the terror and cruelty is the point, not the safety of anybody living here,” Pritzker said. He added, “I refuse to pretend that any of this is normal. ... I refuse to fall into the pundit trap that demands we sacrifice vital constitutional rights if it’s being done in the fake guise of fighting crime.”
Pritzker is right: We shouldn’t pretend or accept that this is normal. And we shouldn’t blithely give up our constitutional rights even in the case of an actual national emergency (does anyone remember the Patriot Act?), much less a fabricated crisis.
But Trump’s overreach is exhausting the public — a tactic familiar to authoritarians throughout history. And, as evidenced by the brutal mass deportations taking place every day, Americans are showing they can get used to the unthinkable disturbingly quickly.
I want to believe the idea of America — buttressed by the individual rights and limits on government power enshrined in the Constitution — is strong enough to endure a few more years of abuse at the hands of the short-fingered vulgarian. But America re-elected Trump, so I’m a bit discouraged.
This is what Ben Franklin was talking about when he said, “A republic, if you can keep it.”
