President Donald Trump teased a dangerous escalation on Monday afternoon, threatening to invoke the Insurrection Act to send military forces to U.S. cities, should pesky judges and state leaders continue to thwart his ambitions to assault and occupy blue states.
“We have an Insurrection Act for a reason,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office. “If I had to enact it, I’d do it, if people were being killed and courts were holding us up, or governors or mayors were holding us up.”
His comments make clear the shape of Trump’s authoritarian plans to dispatch the military to American cities.
Trump noted that he did not see an immediate need to invoke the federal law. His comments, though, make clear the shape of his authoritarian plans to dispatch the military to liberal American cities after a federal judge blocked him from sending troops to Portland, Oregon.
Like so many of the Trump regime’s power grabs, the threat is both shocking and predictable.
He Badly Wants to Use It
Trump’s interest in the Insurrection Act is hardly new. He toyed with invoking the law in his first term.
He was itching to use it to send in the military to crush the 2020 George Floyd uprisings but faced opposition at the time from then-Defense Secretary Mark Esper. No such problem for the president with loyalist goon Pete Hegseth in the so-called secretary of war position.
And Trump allies called on the president to invoke the law to illegally hold onto power after the 2020 election. During his 2024 presidential campaign, Trump vowed to use the Insurrection Act to suppress unrest and dissent.
In his second term, Trump’s aides and advisers have been clearly setting up a justification for invoking the law — softening up MAGA adherents to accept yet another shockingly dictatorial move from the president.
It’s no accident, after all, that members of Trump’s Cabinet have repeatedly used the term “insurrection” and “insurrectionists” to describe the protesters standing up to U.S. Immigration and Custom Enforcement’s Gestapo-style operations. And Stephen Miller, the ghoulish architect of Trump’s deportation machine, described the Oregon judge’s ruling as “legal insurrection.”
Like an incantation, they call the notion of insurrection into being to justify the Insurrection Act’s invocation when no such justification exists in material reality.
“The Trump administration is following a playbook: cause chaos, create fear and confusion, make it seem like peaceful protesters are a mob by firing gas pellets and tear gas canisters at them,” JB Pritzker, the Democratic governor of Illinois, where Trump’s storm troopers already wreaking havoc in Chicago, said on Monday. “Why? To create the pretext for invoking the Insurrection Act so that he can send the military to our city.”
Ripe for Abuse
Then there is the law itself, which could not be better tailored for abuse by exactly the kind of brazen authoritarian like Trump. Legal experts have long warned that the two-century-old statute is dangerously broad and in desperate need of updating for the exact reasons it’s such an appealing tool for Trump.
First, the law gives extraordinary discretion to the president alone to declare a domestic “insurrection” is underway and deploy U.S. military forces against the American people. And it’s one of the few key exceptions to the Posse Comitatus Act barring federal military forces from engaging in civilian law enforcement operations.
If there is “a reason” we have an Insurrection Act, as Trump said on Monday, then it is a historic one, with little bearing on current conditions. With its roots in the 1792 Militia Act and first enacted in 1807, the Insurrection Act “has not been meaningfully updated in over 150 years, is dangerously overbroad and ripe for abuse,” wrote Joseph Nunn of the Brennan Center for Justice.
The language of the law is vague — a gift to a president with dictatorial aims. It grants the federal executive power to deploy troops to suppress “any insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy” in a state that “opposes or obstructs the execution of the laws of the United States or impedes the course of justice under those laws.”
“Nothing in the text of the Insurrection Act defines ‘insurrection,’ ‘rebellion,’ ‘domestic violence,’ or any of the other key terms used in setting forth the prerequisites for deployment,” noted Nunn. “Absent statutory guidance, the Supreme Court decided early on that this question is for the president alone to decide.”
“Create the Pretext”
Concern that Trump will invoke the Insurrection Act to take control of Democratic-led cities is by no means far-fetched. Our cities are already occupied by a federal army of thugs — ICE — directed to kidnap and cage our neighbors atop regular police violence. And Trump has already federalized and deployed National Guard troops in Los Angeles and Washington, overreaches that are already facing their own legal challenges.
Things can, of course, get much worse. Invoking the Insurrection Act would not, however, be a flip switch moving us from a functional democracy into fascism; rather, it would be an expansion of already existent fascist action, and another tool that the president can use to continue to crackdown on dissent.
It’s tempting to urge protesters to avoid giving Trump a pretext for escalation. That would be a grave mistake.
In the face of such a threat, it is tempting to urge protesters to be placid, to avoid giving the Trump administration pretext for further escalation. That would be a grave mistake.
Even Pritzker’s statement recognized that it is the president’s regime that will “create the pretext,” regardless of how peaceful the protesters are.
In the Trumpist imagination — committed to the lie and/or delusion of a well-funded network of criminal leftists — no real pretext is required for a further collapsing of the police and military state.
By ruling that the administration’s notion of a grave threat to federal agents was unmoored from reality, Immergut, the federal judge, was saying that Trump cannot ignore facts on the ground.
Trump’s flirtations with the Insurrection Act on Monday, though, made clear that he wholly intends to do so.
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