QUANTICO, Va.—In an enormous and breathtaking assumption of presidential power, President Donald Trump declared he wants to station U.S. troops, supposedly for “training” in U.S. cities, permanently.
Trump’s announcement of the plan, advanced at a Quantico, Va., convocation of generals and admirals from around the world, called by War Secretary Pete Hegseth, produced stony silence from the audience. Without required congressional assent, Trump has returned the Defense Department to its pre-1947 name, the War Department.
The training in the cities is part of what Trump announced halfway through his rambling 73-minute address. “We’re going to make our military stronger, tougher, faster, fiercer, and more powerful than it has ever been before,” he also declared.
And the military brass better get with the program, too, he warned early on. “If you don’t like what I’m saying, you can leave the room. Of course, there goes your rank, there goes your future.”
The ACLU warned back on Constitution Day, Sept. 17, that “Alarmingly, we’re witnessing the intrusion of military force into civilian life.”
After citing the Marine occupation of downtown L.A. and the National Guard from red states patrolling D.C., the ACLU added: “The administration has signaled this is just the start, with plans to deploy more troops onto American streets in Chicago and possibly elsewhere.”
Trump’s Quantico speech went far beyond that.
Training grounds for war
“We should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military” and the Guard, Trump said. “We’re under invasion from within. No different than a foreign enemy but more difficult in many ways because they don’t wear uniforms.
“That’s going to be a major part for some of the people in this room,” Trump informed the military brass. “That’s a war, too—a war from within,” he said, repeating himself. The president later added the Pentagon’s new quick reaction force, which his administration established, will undertake that war against the American people.
Trump’s comments to the military crowd occurred just after he sent 200 “federalized” National Guards to Portland, Ore., supposedly to protect U.S. installations there—but in reality to help ICE agents round up and deport immigrants. Trump already dispatched 100 more “federalized” Illinois National Guard to Chicago for the same reason. They provocatively and ostentatiously paraded down Michigan Avenue and even boarded Chicago River cruising tour boats.
Trump singled out Chicago and Portland in his long, rambling speech. After calling Gov. J.B. Pritzker, D-Ill., “stupid, very stupid” for criticizing him, Trump said “they [Chicago] need the military desperately.
“And how about Portland?…It looks like a war zone. The liberal governor” Tina Kotek, called him, Trump said and told him, “’We don’t need you.’ I said ‘Unless they’re playing false tapes, this looks like World War II. Your place is burning down.’”
Kotek said she told Trump “in very plain language there is no insurrection or threat to public safety that necessitates military intervention in Portland or any other city in our state.” Kotek, state Attorney
General Daniel Rayfield, and the city marched into federal court in Portland on Sunday, Sept. 28, to sue to stop Trump’s troops from arriving.
Trump later added San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles to his list of sites to expect troops. He did so after bragging about how National Guard troops—from red states, though Trump didn’t say so—“cleaned up” Washington, D.C., in 12 days by arresting “1,700 career criminals.” Many of those arrests have been thrown out of court for lack of evidence, but Trump didn’t mention that.
“They’re very unsafe places” he said of those three cities, plus Chicago, and they’re all “run by radical-left Democrats,” he charged. Left unsaid: Mayors Eric Adams of New York, Karen Bass of Los Angeles, Brandon Johnson of Chicago, and Muriel Bowser of D.C. are Black.
Trump also said he would let ICE agents unleash lethal force on people who throw rocks at ICE vehicles. “You can get out of that car and do whatever the hell you want to do,” to them, he told the military crowd.
In past remarks and in an executive order the week before, Trump also made it clear that groups and their funders on the left side of the political spectrum are part of what he called the enemy within. His executive order specifically listed “antifa,” an amorphous group of individuals with no specific leaders or organization, as “domestic terrorists.”
Military rule
Trump’s speech in Quantico flies in the face of the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act. That statute says it is “unlawful to employ any part of the Army of the United States as a posse comitatus for the purpose of executing the laws” unless the Constitution—in cases of rebellion—or Congress approves of it.
Congress passed the act in the aftermath of the Civil War and the withdrawal of the last federal troops from Southern states after the end of Reconstruction the year before. Those troops helped further embitter Southern whites and intensified their repression of Black people via Jim Crow and re-enslavement—in all but legal name.
Reconstruction was not the first time U.S. cities had been occupied by federal troops. Immediately after the Union won the Battle of Gettysburg, from July 1-3, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln had to dispatch several regiments to New York City to forcibly put down rioting whites who opposed the draft—and who lynched Black people, as well. Baltimore, then intensely pro-Southern, was under military government for the whole duration of the war.
Trump tried to link his planned military occupations to actions taken by past U.S. presidents, including Lincoln and others.
One was an occupation that occurred in 1894, when pro-corporate President Grover Cleveland sent troops to occupy Chicago and—not coincidentally—break the Pullman Strike called by the American Railway Union and its president, Eugene V. Debs. Cleveland’s excuse, over the protests of Gov. John Peter Altgeld, D-Ill., was that the strikers obstructed the U.S. Mail.
That’s similar to Trump’s excuse to federalize the 100 Illinois National Guards, over protests by Democratic Gov. J.B. Pritzker and Mayor Johnson, both Trump foes. Johnson issued an executive order banning the Chicago Police Department, known for its past racism, from cooperating with ICE—which angered the president.
Unconstitutional
As for Trump’s claims of violence against ICE agents, Brad Thomson of the National Lawyers Guild’s Chicago chapter told an interviewer for Channel 32 that the guild’s attorney-observers have only seen “one-sided attacks by law enforcement” against peaceful protesters in front of the ICE detention center in Broadview.
“People are gathering, protesting, demonstrating their First Amendment rights” to free speech, said Thomson. “They’ve been met with…indiscriminate force,” including tear gas and pepper balls. News people have also been shot at, Thomson added. Those arrested, he added, included U.S. citizens.
But words, or even an executive order from a mayor or governor, may not stop a determined president from violating the Constitution or the laws.
A noted constitutional scholar, the late Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, admitted in a 1948 case involving presidential war powers that there is virtually nothing and no one who can stop a president who wants to send troops into U.S. cities.
“No one will question that this [war] power is the most dangerous one to free government in the whole catalogue of powers,” the justice wrote. “It is usually invoked in haste and excitement when calm legislative consideration of constitutional limitation is difficult.
“It is executed in a time of patriotic fervor that makes moderation unpopular,” the justice continued. “Worst of all, it is interpreted by judges under the same passions and pressures…Particularly when the war power is invoked to do things to the liberties of people” unrelated to managing a war, its use “should be scrutinized with care.”
That scrutiny—and action to reverse Trump’s attacks on constitutional democracy—falls to the mass movements.
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