“I have the right to do anything I want to do; I’m the president of the United States.” That is how Donald Trump dismissed criticism of his illegal use of federal troops domestically. And he is going about demonstrating his “authority.” Without any guardrails outside of the lower federal courts, he is remaking the United States – and in a dreadful way.
Trump is executing the Project 2025 playbook, which, among many other anti-democratic plans, calls for the use of the military against civilians. Project 2025 advocates the expansion of executive power to allow the president to deploy the military for domestic law enforcement, something that heretofore has been banned.
Apparently, the Trump administration is following Project 2025’s call for reinterpreting the Insurrection Act of 1807 to deploy the military and the National Guard. Ominously, these military units could be used to suppress protests in civilian areas. According to Mark Esper, Defense Secretary during Trump’s first term, President Trump wanted U.S. troops to shoot protesters during racial justice demonstrations in 2020.
Trump had discussed invoking the 1807 Insurrection Act to deploy active-duty troops on U.S. soil to contain the protests in reaction to George Floyd’s murder. Esper disagreed and publicly broke with him in the days after Floyd’s death, saying at a Pentagon briefing that such action “should only be used as a matter of last resort and only in the most urgent and dire of situations.” Consequently, Trump fired Esper in November 2020, two months before Trump was due to leave office.
With only yes-men and yes-women in his current Cabinet, Trump is free to operate on his well-established anti-democratic impulses. Below is an editorial by William Falk of The Week describing the current state of affairs.
As the United States descends into one-man, authoritarian rule, I sometimes wonder what Donald Trump’s collaborators really think. By collaborators, I do not mean the true MAGA cultists, who welcome his tyrannical intrusion into every aspect of American life, his military occupation of American cities, and his unrestrained use of government power to intimidate and punish opponents, critics, and immigrants. The collaborators are the once-principled Reaganites, the small-government libertarians, and the conservative commentariat who through fear or tribal allegiance are still defending or downplaying the Maximum Leader’s insistence that everyone—private companies, universities, museums, states, cities, the Fed, the Justice Department, other countries—must capitulate to his will or suffer his wrath.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio is a useful example. In 2016, Rubio compared Trump to a “third-world strongman” and warned that “many people on the Right” will have “to explain and justify how they fell into the trap of supporting Donald Trump because this is not going to end well.” Does “Little Marco” now feel this is likely to end well because he’s sold his soul? Before his own cynical conversion, JD Vance observed that Trump was “an idiot” who was “unfit for our nation’s highest office” and might turn into “America’s Hitler.” Is the sour tang of tyranny more palatable now that JD sits at the ruler’s table? And what of Sens. Ted Cruz and Lindsey Graham, the Russia hawks, the Supreme Court justices, and Republicans who once professed loyalty to free markets, free speech, and personal liberty, and celebrated America’s role as the “shining city on the hill”? Do they privately cringe over the North Korea-style groveling at Trump’s Cabinet meetings, his fawning admiration of war criminal Vladimir Putin, his assault on laws, alliances, science, data, and reality itself, and the authoritarian precedents he is setting for future presidents? Do they ever say to spouses or confidantes: “My God, he’s crazy. He’s out of control”? Their silence is their acquiescence, and makes them complicit in the damage already done, and whatever insanity is to come.
