Trump’s war on democracy

President Trump often seems to be at war with his own country. But nothing has brought the conflict closer to literal hostilities than his threat last week to deploy activeduty military forces to U.S. cities as they erupted in protest over the police killing of an African American man.

Shortly before his instantly infamous staged walk Monday from the White House to St. John’s Church along a path forcibly cleared of protesters, Trump appeared in the Rose Garden to warn states and cities that if they do not quell the unrest to his satisfaction, he will “deploy the United States military and quickly solve the problem.” Domestic deployments of activeduty armed forces — not including statebased National Guard contingents — are strictly limited by the postReconstruction Posse Comitatus Act, but presidents can use troops on American soil under a rarely used law from even earlier in the country’s history, the 1807 Insurrection Act.

Events surrounding the president’s warning suggested it was more than one of his habitual offhand provocations. Trump’s defense secretary, Mark Esper, had just advised governors to “dominate the battle space” in handling protests — a bizarre and frightening characterization of the countless American cities, suburbs and small towns that have seen demonstrations since George Floyd was asphyxiated to death on camera by a Minneapolis police officer. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley, whom Trump declared “in charge” of putting down the protests, tramped around the nation’s capital in combat fatigues. And the Pentagon announced that 1,600 troops had been repositioned around Washington, D.C.

Milley and Esper, the nation’s top civilian and uniformed defense officials, along with Attorney General Bill Barr and National Security Adviser Robert O’Brien, joined Trump’s trudge across Lafayette Square after activeduty military police, National Guard members, U.S. Park Police, the Secret Service and others cleared peaceful protesters with the aid of irritant gas, stun grenades, rubber bullets, horses, shields and batons. The episode had the sickening feel of a trial run for an administration advertising its readiness to use the military and law enforcement against civilians exercising their constitutional rights.

The backlash within and beyond the military was apparently fierce enough to persuade Esper and Milley to call a partial retreat. The defense secretary announced that he does not support invoking the Insurrection Act, while the Joint Chiefs chairman issued a memo noting that the Constitution “gives Americans the right to freedom of speech and peaceful assembly. We in uniform ... remain committed to our national values and principles embedded in the Constitution.”

Esper’s predecessor and Trump’s first defense secretary, Jim Mattis, was less circumspect, noting that the “small number of lawbreakers” using the disorder to commit looting and violence should not distract from the much larger legitimate demonstrations. “When I joined the military ... I swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution. Never did I dream that troops taking that same oath would be ordered under any circumstance to violate the constitutional rights of their fellow citizens — much less to provide a bizarre photo op for the elected commanderinchief, with military leadership standing alongside.”

And yet Trump has been misusing the military for domestic political purposes since well before Mattis’ exit, needlessly deploying the largest activeduty force to the U.S.Mexico border in nearly a century, turning the capital’s Fourth of July celebration into a military parade and undermining the services’ justice system.

Most invocations of the Insurrection Act — including the most recent, during the 1992 Los Angeles riots — have been at the request of state officials, but Gavin Newsom and other governors have already rejected the prospect of a military response to the protests. Presidential deployments over state objections have taken place rarely and with a legitimate federal interest, including to suppress the Ku Klux Klan after the Civil War and to desegregate schools during the civil rights era.

Now the president is brandishing the armed forces not to deter violent racists but to suppress protests against racism; not to enforce the Constitution but to trample it. That portends lasting harm to the military as an institution and the country it is sworn to defend.

Erin Schaff / New York Times Activeduty military police were among the armed forces that cleared those near the White House peacefully protesting police violence last week.