Trump’s radical view would test the military

How might Donald Trump use the U.S. military if he returned to the Oval Office? Against his political enemies, he says. 

That’s not a warning from his former defense secretary, who has documented the then-president’s interest in shooting protestors, nor from the man he appointed chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who has since called him “the most dangerous person to this country.” Those are the GOP presidential candidate’s own words.

Members of the military should think carefully now about how they would react to such orders, observers said. 

In an extraordinary escalation of rhetoric, Trump suggested the deployment of the National Guard or military against what he terms "the enemy from within," which he said included members of his political opposition. The remarks, aired during an Oct. 13 interview on Fox, mark an unprecedented departure from any major-party presidential candidate's publicly evinced view of the role of the military in domestic politics.

Trump, asked whether he anticipated Election Day unrest, dismissed concerns about his own supporters and turned his focus to the political opposition, declaring that "radical left lunatics" posed the true threat. 

His proposed solution? “It should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military, because they can’t let that happen,” he said.

The interview

Elsewhere in the Oct. 13 interview, Trump also named a former political antagonist as an “enemy from within.” When Fox’s Maria Bartiromo asked, “How are you going to guard against the bureaucrats undermining you?”, he responded:

Trump was apparently referring to his 2019 impeachment, when he was tried in the Senate for attempting to gin up political dirt by withholding military aid to Ukraine and for allegedly blocking Congressional investigations. Then-Rep. Schiff, D-California, led the House presentation of evidence. He might also have been alluding to the GOP-led Senate investigation that documented “hundreds of actions by Trump, his campaign, and his associates in the run-up to the 2016 election that involve some degree of participation by Trump or his associates in Russian activity,” as Lawfare put it.

Trump has long threatened to use state power for personal revenge—for example, to "lock up" Hillary Clinton, jail social-media CEOs, and prosecute a wide range of other people, from election workers to the federal and state prosecutors who have charged him with crimes. But by suggesting that domestic political rivals pose an existential threat akin to foreign enemies, he sets up his case for military action. It’s a well-worn tactic of authoritarians, whose language Trump apes and whose policies he admires, right down to his stated desire to become a dictator. (Only “on day one,” he said, echoing would-be autocrats’ usual promise to resume normal governance at some point.) 

And Trump has long called for using troops domestically. During his presidency, he repeatedly talked about sending the National Guard to deal with civil unrest, such as the protests following the killing of George Floyd. (Notably, he did not send in the Guard when his supporters stormed the Capitol building on Jan. 6, 2021.)

As a candidate, Trump has vowed to use the military inside America. “As he has sought a return to power, he has made clear that he intends to use the military for a range of domestic law enforcement purposes, including patrolling the border, suppressing protests that he deems to have turned into riots and even fighting crime in big cities run by Democrats,” the New York Times wrote in August.

The decline of guardrails

Such actions would not necessarily be illegal. Constitutionally, Congress may authorize the deployment of the militia “to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions.” With the 1807 Insurrection Act, lawmakers broadly delegated this authorization to the U.S. president, who may call out the troops if “any insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy” hinders the execution of state or federal law. (And the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act does not bar the use of troops for law enforcement “in cases and under circumstances expressly authorized by the Constitution or Act of Congress.”) 

But the Insurrection Act has been used to deploy troops just twice since the 1960s. 

“Why the reticence in using this law?” Elizabeth Goitein of Brennan Center wrote in 2020. “Simply, Americans don’t like the idea of armored tanks rolling into their cities. It smacks of authoritarianism; it goes against our values and our national self-concept. And so, even in cases where the Insurrection Act might provide a legal opening—for instance, in the chaotic aftermath of Hurricane Katrina—the fear of political blowback has been enough to stop presidents from exploiting it.”

Today, it’s not clear that any legal opening is even necessary, thanks to the Supreme Court’s recent decision to grant the U.S. president immunity from criminal acts in the conduct of official duties. “It’s almost impossible to conceive of any presidential use of the military as unofficial or private business,” National Defense University professor Gregory Foster wrote in a recent op-ed.

(One former acting vice chief of the National Guard said it would be easy for a president to turn Guard units into his “personal police force.” Randy Manner, a retired Army two-star, told CNN recently that if Trump found one state governor to go along, he could authorize funds to “use the National Guard almost in any way that he wants...Most Americans don’t know how very easy it would be for an unhinged president to use the military against our own citizens.”)

Far from worrying about political blowback for sounding authoritarian, Trump is making political hay of it. In 2016, a voter’s inclination toward authoritarianism was a better predictor of support for Trump’s candidacy than race, gender, or education. Four years later, a quartet of surveys found that some 18 percent of Americans were highly disposed to authoritarianism, and “a further 23 percent or so are just one step below them on the authoritarian scale,” wrote political scientist Matthew MacWilliams. “When activated by fear, authoritarian-leaning Americans are predisposed to trade civil liberties for strongman solutions to secure law and order; and they are ready to strip civil liberties from those defined as the ‘other.’”

Who does Trump call the “other”? Immigrants and minority groups, to be sure, but as of this week, also members of the opposition political party. His statements raise the prospect that U.S. troops might be deployed against Americans dubbed “the enemy” for voicing opposition to a president. 

Mark Esper, who served as defense secretary under Trump, says his former boss intends to do so. “He’s spoken about this before. If you recall a year ago or so, he spoke about a second Trump term being about retribution. So, yes, I think we should take those words seriously,” Esper told CNN this week.

What happens if he does give the order? The U.S. military, which spends the vast majority of its time contemplating and preparing for contingencies, should prepare for this one as well. Echoing scholars of authoritarianism, NDU’s Foster suggests troops and commanders contemplate their moral, ethical, and legal duties now.

MacWilliams agrees. “If he wins [the] election, the military will be asked to do things that violate their oath of office—the oath they swear to the Constitution. And what are they going to do? They need to think about it ahead of time,” he said in a recent interview. “If Trump wins, the military will decide the future of this country by the actions that it takes.”