Autocracy Watch Day 4: An authoritarian uses the military for domestic control

The New York Times, NO. 4

An authoritarian uses the military for domestic control. Trump has started to.

Even democracies occasionally use their militaries on home soil. The military can keep order and protect citizens after a devastating storm. In extreme and rare circumstances, troops can enforce the law when local authorities refuse to do so, as happened in the segregated South in the 1950s and 1960s.

Authoritarians use the military much more frequently and performatively — to suppress dissent, instill fear and convey supreme power. Trump deployed the National Guard in Los Angeles to crack down on protests, despite local officials’ insistence that they had the situation under control. He attempted the same in Portland, Ore., and Chicago, before being restrained by federal courts. He has also begun to treat the military as an extension of himself, firing several high-ranking officials without good reason and summoning hundreds of leaders to Virginia to listen to overtly political speeches by him and his appointees.

The Bottom Line

President Trump’s use of the military for domestic control has been limited. But his willingness to use it as he has — and his threats to expand that use, through the invocation of the Insurrection Act and with troops beyond the National Guard — is extremely worrisome.

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