While campaigning in Iowa this year, Trump complained that he wasn’t able to utilize the U.S. military to shut down violence in Democratic cities and states.
Calling New York City and Chicago “crime dens,” the front-runner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination told his audience, “The next time, I’m not waiting. One of the things I did was let them run it and we’re going to show how bad a job they do,” he said. “Well, we did that. We don’t have to wait any longer.”
And according to military and legal experts, a law first crafted in the nation’s infancy would give Trump as commander in chief almost unfettered power to do so.
The Insurrection Act allows presidents to call on reserve or active-duty military units to respond to unrest in the states, an authority that is not reviewable by the courts. One of its few guardrails merely requires the president to request that the participants disperse.
Apparently the crafters of the Insurrection Act and the Congress that passed it in 1792 couldn’t foresee Trump in power.
Trump has spoken openly about his plans for the military if re-elected, to include:
- Military use at the border.
- Military use in cities struggling with violent crime.
- Military use against foreign drug cartels.
Trump already has suggested he might bring back retired Army Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, who served briefly as Trump’s national security adviser and twice pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI during its Russian influence probe before being pardoned by Trump. Flynn suggested in the aftermath of the 2020 election that Trump could seize voting machines and order the military in some states to help rerun the election.
Currently at the Pentagon, there would likely be pushback from the new chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Charles Q. Brown.
Gen. Brown was among eight members of the Joint Chiefs who signed a memo to the military in the aftermath of January 6 stating that the events that day were indeed “sedition and insurrection.”
“There are a lot of institutional checks and balances in our country that are pretty well-developed legally, and it’ll make it hard for a president to just do something randomly out of the blue,” said Michael O’Hanlon, an official at the Brookings Institution think tank, who specializes in U.S. defense strategy and the use of military force. “But Trump is good at developing a semi-logical train of thought that might lead to a place where there’s enough mayhem, there’s enough violence and legal murkiness” to call in the military.
In history, U.S. Presidents have issued 40 proclamations invoking the Insurrection Act.
Lyndon Johnson invoked it three times — in Baltimore, Chicago and Washington — following the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1968.
During the Civil Rights Era, Johnson, Kennedy and Eisenhower used the law to protect activists and students desegregating schools. Eisenhower sent the 101st Airborne to Little Rock, Arkansas, to protect Black students integrating Central High School after that state’s governor activated the National Guard to keep the students out.
The last time it was used in 1992, George H.W. Bush used it during riots following the acquittal of white police officers who beat Black motorist Rodney King.
An in-depth survey of more than 94,000 voters nationwide showed that 59% of U.S. military veterans voted for Trump in the 2020 election. In the 2022 mid-terms, 57% of veterans supported Republicans.
The rest of the story is here at the Associated Press.
