When Donald Trump recently addressed a meeting of America’s military leaders, he described for them a new purpose: fighting the “war from within.” What is this war from within? Trump sees American cities where Democratic Party mayors hold leadership to be dangerous and an enemy of the people. What characterizes this war? Civil disobedience and unrest, unauthorized immigration, and “woke” culture. Trump sees this enemy as hard to identify because they don’t wear uniforms like foreign armies. Instead, they practice what he calls “domestic terrorism,” leading to social unrest and urban decay. In Trump’s mind, they are an existential threat to the nation.
During his speech to 800 of America’s top military leaders, given at the Quantico Marine Corps Base in Northern Virginia, Trump declared that the armed forces were his weapon of choice to unleash on perceived domestic threats. He stated, “We’re under invasion from within. No different than a foreign enemy, but more difficult in many ways because they don’t wear uniforms.”
Who leads the enemies from within? The former Democratic U.S. presidents, Biden and Obama, the former Democratic Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, Vice President Harris, former Republican Representative Liz Cheney, and a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley, along with America’s broadcast networks and international news services, Democratic Party election volunteers, protesters, gun control and right to choose advocates, people working for the federal government, critics of the Supreme Court, illegal immigrants, undocumented people, gender delusionists, criminals, drug dealers and “a lot of bad people.”
Are these legitimate enemies of the American republic, and, therefore, can the President unleash the military upon them? Not according to the U.S. Constitution, which clearly separates the role of the army from internal law enforcement and the safeguarding of democratic norms and civilian governance.
Trump’s workaround is the Insurrection Act, first conceived when George Washington was President, but not turned into law until the second term of Thomas Jefferson. Since its enactment in 1807, it has been used in 1831 to put down a slave rebellion, and more notably at the start of the Civil War in 1861, when Abraham Lincoln invoked it to raise a militia to combat the secession of southern states.
In the 20th century, Eisenhower invoked it to uphold civil rights for African Americans in Little Rock, Arkansas. John F. Kennedy used it in 1962 at the University of Mississippi. Lyndon Johnson invoked it during the 1967 Detroit race riots, and George H.W. Bush did as well to quell the 1992 Los Angeles race riots after the acquittal of police responsible for the attack on Rodney King.
A President invokes the Insurrection Act to deprive citizens of their constitutional rights. It can only be done under specific circumstances, such as when a state is unable or unwilling to act in the face of an armed insurrection, conspiracy, domestic violence, attempted coups and acts of terrorism. Over time, reforms of the Act require a President to consult Congress and the judiciary before invoking it.
Historically, because of the Civil War and the fear that military power could override American freedoms through abuse of power, the use of the armed forces to police Americans has had limits imposed upon it. The Posse Comitatus Act, passed in 1878, prohibits the armed forces from becoming involved in civilian matters without the express consent of Congress. It forbids it from becoming a domestic police force, with the sole exception of the U.S. Coast Guard.
For Trump, the invocation of the Insurrection Act against Democratic state governors and mayors is justified because of homeless tent cities and safe havens declared for illegal immigrants and undocumented workers. If the problem doesn’t exist, then Trump invents a crisis to support using the Act, giving insurrection an entirely new meaning.
His recent use, first in Los Angeles and second in Washington, DC, has a strong political context because these are cities where Democrats govern. Trump calls these places war zones. His act to federalize state National Guards from other states and use them in cities like Portland, Oregon, and Chicago, Illinois, is being done under the pretext that these destinations are burning hellholes or out of control. None of these pretexts is true.
Instead, this use of the American military on U.S. soil, intervening in domestic governance, intrudes on elected authority and violates state autonomy. It is an attack on civil liberties, including free speech, assembly and due process. It risks escalating the political divide and may become the pretext for what is being referred to as America’s next civil war, a “soft secession” by Democratic-led states in defiance of the federal government. It is unlike the American Civil War that started in 1861 because it is taking the form of setting up a parallel government involving creating cooperative policies and agreements while restricting the federal government from imposing immigration enforcement, and climate and health-related policies. In soft secession, there is no raising of an army as in 1861, but the walls of separation are rising with America’s future unity in peril.
