Autocracy 101: Martial law by any other name . . .

 President Trump directed the Defense Department to take a larger role in domestic law enforcement, including by “quelling civil disturbances,” as he threatens to broaden deployments of the National Guard in cities run by his political enemies, reported The New York Times.

The executive order, released by the White House on Monday morning, also formalizes the creation of specially trained National Guard units in the District of Columbia and all 50 states that can be mobilized quickly for “ensuring the public safety and order.”

The Pentagon did not immediately respond to questions about the order, which came two weeks after Mr. Trump declared a “crime emergency” in the District of Columbia and deployed National Guard troops to the nation’s capital, over the objections of local officials who have said crime in the city is at its lowest level in decades.

In a statement, the White House said the president was ordering “common-sense measures to ensure long-term safety of our nation’s capital.”

The statement said the executive order would increase “participation across agencies” in enabling more specially trained personnel to deliver on Mr. Trump’s campaign promise and “constitutional obligation to make D.C. safe and beautiful again.”

Mr. Trump has mused openly about expanding the deployments to other cities, particularly Democratic strongholds like New York, Chicago and Baltimore, saying crime there is out of control. On Monday, Mr. Trump said he could “solve” crime in Chicago in a week, though he hedged about whether he planned to move ahead with sending troops there.

While Guard troops have been temporarily mobilized by governors in the past to respond to natural disasters and occasionally for civil unrest, the order appears to carve out a much larger domestic role for the National Guard.

According to government documents, Guard troops can be mobilized for duty within a state or territory by a governor in response to “a crisis or a natural disaster, or in support of special events when local, tribal and state capabilities are overwhelmed, exhausted or unavailable.” The president can also federalize the Guard himself, as Mr. Trump did in deploying members of the California National Guard to Los Angeles in June — over the objections of the state’s governor.

Monday’s order appears to create a force of Guard soldiers that could be called out by the White House regardless of whether state and local law enforcement are available and able to handle civil disturbances, raising significant legal questions.

“Quelling civil disturbances is the responsibility of state and local law enforcement except in the most extreme instances,” said Elizabeth Goitein, a senior director at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University’s law school. “Having soldiers police protests, as this order envisions, threatens fundamental liberties and public safety, and it violates a centuries-old principle against involving the military in domestic law enforcement.”

Under an 1878 law called the Posse Comitatus Act, it is normally illegal to use federal troops on domestic soil for policing purposes. But Mr. Trump, in federalizing the California Guard, invoked a statute, Section 12406 of Title 10 of the U.S. Code, that allows him to call National Guard members and units into federal service under certain circumstances, including during a rebellion against the authority of the federal government.

In California, where Mr. Trump deployed roughly 4,000 members of the National Guard to Los Angeles, citing protests over immigration raids, state officials opened a legal challenge to the deployment, which a federal judge had ruled to be illegal before an appeals court blocked the ruling.

The order also directs a task force in Washington led by a White House adviser, Stephen Miller, to create an online portal for “Americans with law enforcement or other relevant backgrounds and experience” to apply to join federal agents in enforcing Mr. Trump’s “crime emergency” order in the District of Columbia.

As of Sunday, there were 2,274 Guard troops deployed to Washington. Only 934 of those troops are part of the D.C. National Guard. The rest have been mobilized from units in Louisiana, Mississippi, Ohio, South Carolina, Tennessee and West Virginia.

On Sunday, Guard soldiers in Washington who were previously unarmed began carrying their service weapons while on patrol, a task that is outside traditional norms for Guard troops on domestic missions. According to a report published by the Congressional Research Service in April, the typical jobs given to U.S. military personnel who have been mobilized to assist civil authorities include transporting supplies, clearing or constructing roads, and controlling traffic during missions such as border security, natural disaster response and public health emergencies.

The specialized force proposed for the Guard in Washington would be deputized to enforce federal law, according to the executive order, which also directs the creation of a standing National Guard “quick reaction force” that would be available for rapid deployment anywhere in the country. (Federal law enforcement entities already maintain a nationwide network of trained special agents who can respond in times of crisis, like the F.B.I.’s Hostage Rescue Team based in Quantico, Va., which can be rapidly deployed anywhere in the United States for counterterrorism missions, and special weapons and tactics teams at each F.B.I. field office.)

By directing Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to train a specialized D.C. National Guard unit dedicated to “ensuring public safety” in Washington, Mr. Trump is essentially requiring the city’s Guard to come up with a rapid-response-style unit that can deploy quickly when he decides the need has risen.

Military analysts say that is what the National Guard trains to do anyway — deploy quickly, although usually in the event of a natural disaster like a hurricane. Guard troops have also deployed to respond to political crises, like the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol by Mr. Trump’s supporters, and during the Black Lives Matter protests that erupted after the Minneapolis police killed George Floyd in 2020.

It is unusual, though, for National Guard troops to just live on standby waiting for the president to decide he wants to target crime in a city of his choosing. Guard troops train part time, often one weekend a month and two weeks a year, to respond to emergencies. They do not sit around waiting for the president to deploy them as a law enforcement arm.

“Most of them are not full-time soldiers; they have separate jobs,” said Pete Feaver, a political science professor at Duke University. “Maintaining a specialized force at a high amount of readiness is tantamount to mobilizing them.”

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Balko: Trump's DC police state, testing the limits of his power — and our democracy

Radley Balko writes on The Watch:

The Justice Department announced in January that violent crime in Washington, D.C. hit a 30-year low in 2024. So far this year, it’s down an addtional 26 percent. This, in other words, is a curious time for the president to declare that the nation’s capital is a violent cesspool that demands the sort of crime-fighting expertise that only a 79-year-old man who fetishizes dictators and whose entire worldview is perpetually stuck in the 1980s can provide.

The motivation for Donald Trump’s plan to “federalize” Washington, D.C., is same as his motivation for sending active-duty troops into Los Angeles, deporting people to the CECOT torture prison in El Salvador, his politicization of the Department of Justice, and nearly every other authoritarian overreach of the last six months: He is testing the limits of his power — and, by extension, of our democracy. He’s feeling out what the Supreme Court, Congress, and the public will let him get away with. And so far, he’s been able to do what he pleases.

The incident that apparently precipitated Trump’s D.C. crackdown was entirely pretextual. It wasn’t the overall amount of violent crime, it was that the wrong person had fallen victim to it. Both Trump and Elon Musk declared D.C. to be a crime-infested wasteland after photos emerged of Edward “Big Balls” Coristine, formerly of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, beaten and bloodied from an alleged carjacking. The attackers ran off when a Metro police officer arrived on the scene — which is far more protection than crime victims usually get from law enforcement.

In response, Trump raged on social media over the weekend. He immediately sent hundreds of agents from the FBI, Department of Homeland Security Investigations, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement into the city (who then responded to a fender bender as if someone had detonated a dirty bomb.)

Trump is now deploying hundreds of National Guard troops to the city too. While state National Guards report to governors, the D.C. National Guard reports to the president. The federal government also has jurisdiction over Washington. Oversight power is supposed to lie with Congress, not the president. But this Congress has essentially dissolved itself into Trump’s agenda.

These legal distinctions mean that Trump’s “federalization” of D.C. isn’t quite as extraordinary a power grab as his deployment of Marines and National Guard troops to Los Angeles in June. But as he made clear at an unhinged press conference on Monday, Trump himself is either unaware of that distinction or doesn’t acknowledge it. He vowed to send troops into Oakland, Baltimore, and New York as well.

But as with Washington and Los Angeles, violent crime in Oakland and Baltimore has fallen dramatically this year. New York, meanwhile, remains one of the safest big cities in the country, despite what the trembling cowards on Fox News may tell you.

There was no emergency in Los Angeles, either. With the aid of the right-wing media bubble, the administration exploited a couple incidents of property destruction with a surge in peaceful protests against the administration’s immigration raids to depict the city as a dystopian hellscape.

The important thing Trump learned from Los Angeles is that the federal courts failed to intervene. While the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit ruled that a president’s decision to federalize the National Guard over the objections of a state governor is reviewable by federal courts, the court also took at face value Trump’s claim that the protests presented a threat to immigration enforcement.

There’s little evidence that this was true. But more importantly, that was never the real reason Trump cracked down on the city. As Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, Trump himself, and internal documents made clear, the real reason was to intimidate protesters, terrify immigrant communities and their advocates, and “liberate” blue cities and states from the “socialists” elected to office. It was a projection of power.

If this were all truly motivated by Trump’s deep commitment to fighting crime, he wouldn’t have cut security funding to D.C. by 44 percent. (I’m dubious of the link between such funding and crime rates, but the important thing here is that Trump thinks they’re linked.) If it were truly about crime, he wouldn’t have released a convicted triple murder on the streets of Orlando. If it were truly about crime, he wouldn’t have hired a man who told his fellow January 6th protesters to kill the Capitol police to a top-level position at the Justice Department. It this were about crime, Trump would have said something — anything — about the shooter who fired 150 rounds into the Center for Disease Control building in Atlanta.

This is about projecting power. Trump has long disparaged cities with large Black populations and Black leadership. New York, D.C., Baltimore, Oakland, and Los Angeles are all cities with large Black populations who are run by Black Democrats. The front-runner to be the new mayor of New York is a Muslim Democratic socialist. Trump isn’t planning to “protect” the residents of these cities from crime. He’s planning to impose his will on them.

The crackdown in D.C. comes 10 days after the New Republic reported on a Pentagon memo authored by Phil Hegseth, the Defense Secretary’s brother, laying out the administration’s plans to deploy active-duty troops around the country to aid in immigration enforcement “for years to come.” The Washington Post then reported just today that the Pentagon has developed a plan for a “reaction force” of National Guard troops Trump can deploy to any city on a moment’s notice.

These policies would end once and for all this country’s centuries-old tradition of keeping the military out of routine domestic law enforcement, it would eradicate one of the cornerstone principles that drove the American Revolution, and it could well end with U.S. soldiers firing their guns at U.S. citizens. (If you’re wondering what — other than being the brother of the least qualified person ever to lead a Cabinet-level agency — makes Phil Hegseth qualified to plan and implement a policy that would fundamentally alter the relationship between America and its military, the answer is apparently that he once started a podcasting company.)

Tough-on-crime politicians have long used Washington, D.C., and its residents as political pawns rather than real Americans with real constitutional rights. When Richard Nixon was pushing a crime bill that would make the D.C. the test city for his crime policies in 1970, his Justice Department suppressed statistics showing that crime in the city had been falling for five months. They needed people to fear the capital to get the bill through Congress. The bill passed, but D.C.’s progressive police chief at the time refused to implement policies like no-knock raids, preventative detention, and aggressive crackdowns on protest. Crime would continue to fall in D.C. even as it rose in the rest of the country.

In 1989, in his first televised speech as president, George H.W. Bush held up a bag of crack cocaine that he claimed had been seized by the Drug Enforcement Administration in Lafayette Park, just a few blocks from the White House. It had not. It hadn’t even been “seized.” Undercover agents from the DEA had persuaded a small-time, 18-year-old drug dealer to sell them crack at the park so they could give it to the White House for Bush to use in his speech. In other words, the DEA arranged for an illegal drug sale near the White House that otherwise wouldn’t have happened solely so Bush could say an illegal drug sale had just taken place near the White House.

Demonizing Washington, D.C., then, is an old tactic from an old playbook. But the threat today is uniquely authoritarian and dangerous. The Nixon and Bush administrations were pushing policies that were wrongheaded, counterproductive, and in a few cases unconstitutional. But they weren’t attacks on democracy.

This most certainly is.

The memo reported by the New Republic seeks to replicate what Trump did in Los Angeles in other cities. It conflates peaceful, constitutionally protected protest with international crime syndicates and Al Qaeda or ISIS. And it puts heavy pressure on the Pentagon to scrap Founding-era principles about the role of a standing army in favor of a military increasingly directed inward, against U.S. residents and citizens, to do the president’s bidding.

This is what Trump has always wanted. He has always expressed his envy of and respect for authoritarians who could sic the military on protesters and critics.

One of the healthier things about our democracy is that when politicians have advocated to get the Pentagon more active in domestic policing, the strongest resistance has tended to come from the Pentagon itself. It’s long been a core principle in U.S. military culture that soldiers should not be deployed against their fellow citizens. It’s a bright red line.

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Trump invades Washington, DC based on a big lie: Crime is ravaging the district

President Donald Trump’s unprecedented decision to take over the Metropolitan Police Department and order the National Guard to help fight crime in Washington, D.C. is based on a big lie.

The big lie: crime is ravaging the district. In reality, crime is at its lowest level in decades in the nation’s capital. In early January, federal prosecutors in Washington released a press bulletin with the subject line: “Violent crime in D.C. hits 30 year low.” And since then, it has plummeted 26%, according to the Metropolitan Police Department.

Yet Trump on Monday portrayed D.C. as a crime-infested hellscape and said Attorney General Pam Bondi would “take command of the Metropolitan Police Department as of this moment.”

In making his case, Trump ticked off recent violent incidents in Washington, including the fatal shooting of a congressional intern and the attempted carjacking of Edward Coristine, an original Department of Government Efficiency staffer known online as "Big Balls."

“Our capital city has been overtaken by violent gangs and bloodthirsty criminals, roving mobs of wild youth, drugged out maniacs and homeless people,” Trump said.

A senior law enforcement official told NBC News that an initial federal effort this weekend was chaotic. As many as 120 FBI agents, mostly from the FBI Washington Field Office, worked shifts with the Metropolitan Police Department this weekend, the official said. But agents were confused about their exact role on the streets and who they reported to at any given time.

A second federal official said that confusion continued on Monday. "No one knows who is in charge or what they're supposed to do," the official said.

Unmarked federal law enforcement vehicles are trailing patrol cars in Washington to provide support if needed, another federal official said. Some agents dismissed such efforts a waste of resources, with one jokingly calling the processions "a federal funeral."

One notable group, the D.C. police union, said it supports the takeover by the president, saying the department has been beset by "chronic mismanagement" and "staffing shortages."

“The union agrees that crime is spiraling out of control, and immediate action is necessary to restore public safety,” it said in a statement. “However, we emphasize that federal intervention must be a temporary measure, with the ultimate goal of empowering a fully staffed and supported MPD to protect our city effectively.”

Concern from former chiefs

The announcement of the federal takeover was met with alarm by Art Acevedo, a retired police chief who led departments in Houston, Austin and Miami.

“Not only is it unprecedented, it’s unwarranted,” Acevedo said. “There’s no reason for it other than the political optics sought by the administration to pretend that crime is out of control and they are the saviors.”

Trump said that he had appointed the administrator of the Drug Enforcement Administration, Terry Cole, as the head of the Metropolitan Police Department.

Cole will report to Bondi, but it is unclear whether Cole will bring in his own staff to run the various divisions of the roughly 3,500 office police department.

At her own press conference later in the day, Mayor Muriel Bowser called Trump’s actions “unsettling and unprecedented.” The attorney general of D.C., Brian Schwab, had also blasted the move and said that he was exploring legal options, but Bowser acknowledged that Trump had the authority to temporarily seize control of the police department.

She noted, however, that “nothing about our organizational chart has changed.”

Trump must notify certain members of Congress within 48 hours about the reason for taking over control of police and the estimated timeline for federal control, according to the D.C. Home Rule Act. The act also indicates that Trump can take control of the D.C. police for 30 days, unless Congress authorizes an extension.

Flooding the streets

The policing experts interviewed by NBC News noted that crime is a nuanced problem that requires a multi-faceted solution that includes the strengthening of social services.

“To just flood the streets of D.C. with law enforcement” and “taking over D.C. local police, it seems like a half-baked idea looking for a problem,” Donell Harvin, a former homeland security and intelligence chief for Washington, D.C., said on MSNBC.

Snider, the retired NYPD officer, said local police agencies are far better equipped to address local crime than federal agencies or the National Guard.

“They know the players. They know the streets. They know where the violence occurs,” said Snider, who is an adjunct lecturer at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York and a policy director of criminal justice and civil liberties at the R Street Institute, a think tank in D.C.

“Any aid from federal agents or the National Guard should be supportive measures,” Snider added. “They shouldn’t be coming in and taking over local policing.”

Acevedo, the retired police chief, said the administration would be able to make an impact on crime by setting aside more money for local enforcement, as it has for its migrant crackdown.

“If the administration truly wanted to make a difference at the state and local level and help make communities safer, it is as simple as increasing the total federal budget dollar investment for local law enforcement to recruit, train, equip, and retain the best and the brightest to serve as peace officers,” he said.

Trump’s penchant for calling in military personnel to tackle domestic unrest is by now well-established. He did so five years ago during the George Floyd protests. And just this summer, he ordered the National Guard and active-duty Marines to Los Angeles to help quell large-scale protests sparked by ramped-up immigration raids.

But the National Guard doesn’t have arresting powers, so there is a limit to how involved they can be in fighting crime in D.C.

Retired Army Col. Jack Jacobs said National Guard troops are typically better trained than active duty soldiers to help in urban settings for things like crowd control.

“But they’re not trained to do the things that police do, which is a, patrol, and b, investigate,” Jacobs, an NBC News analyst, said in an interview. “In my view, this is mostly theater, and nothing necessarily useful will come of it.”

Questions about January 6th

Trump’s takeover of the D.C. police force comes several months after he pardoned about 1,500 people convicted of crimes, some of them violent, in the assault on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

Daniel Hodges, one of dozens of Metropolitan Police Department officers who were brutalized during the riot and whose assailants were among those pardoned by Trump upon his return to office, woke up to the news that Trump had taken over the MPD after working an overnight shift.

“It’s a big photo op. It’s not going to change anything,” Hodges said, speaking while off-duty in his personal capacity.

Hodges, who was in the National Guard for six years, said that National Guard members are not trained in local law enforcement. While D.C. had law enforcement issues that could be better addressed, Hodges said, he doesn’t think Bondi is going to have grand insight into how to deploy MPD officers.

“It’s terrible, it’s disgusting,” Hodges added, “but it’s not a surprise.”

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Martial law . . . really?

Last week, President Donald Trump met with Rudy Giuliani and disgraced former national security adviser Michael T. Flynn, among others to discuss the president declaring martial law to have an election do over in some states, reported the Washington Post.

The imposition of martial law accompanies curfews; the suspension of civil law, civil rights and habeas corpus; and the application or extension of military law or military justice to civilians. Civilians defying martial law may be subjected to military court or tribunal. 

Flynn had suggested on Newsmax that Trump could authorize the military to rerun the election. “He could order the, within the swing states, if he wanted to, he could take military capabilities, and he could place those in states and basically rerun an election in each of those states,” Flynn said.

The next day, Flynn was in the Oval Office to discuss the idea. Flynn’s attorney, Sidney Powell, who has promoted outlandishly false claims about this year’s election, including a disproved allegation that Venezuelan communists programmed U.S. voting machines to flip votes for Biden, was also at the meeting.

Officials inside the White House said Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and White House counsel Pat Cipollone pushed back “strenuously” on the idea of martial law. Two officials, who like others for this story spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private matters and conversations, said that there have been no efforts inside the White House to actually deploy the military and that the idea was quickly dismissed at the meeting.

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