Insurrectile Dysfunction

The White House is determined to achieve an insurrection, even if it has to red pill itself into one.

Screen capture from MSNBC

Donald Trump and Stephen Miller are trying to make “insurrection” happen. We know this because that word keeps popping casually out of their mouths.

Miller called U.S. District Court Judge Karin Immergut’s temporary restraining order against deployment of federal troops to Portland a “legal insurrection.”

Meanwhile, Trump labeled the pushback to ICE’s enforcement actions in Chicago and Portland “criminal insurrection.”

Just to be clear, what is happening in places like Portland and Chicago is nowhere near insurrection. Real insurrection looks like what we saw on January 6, 2021, when Trump refused to call in the National Guard to support local police and then pardoned over 1,500 criminals, many of whom committed violent assaults on law enforcement.

Until something rises to that level of threat and violence, Trump’s and Miller’s use of the word “insurrection” will always ring hollow. Indeed, it’s pretty clear that they are deliberately choosing to use that word in order to dilute its meaning, particularly applied to the MAGA mob who stormed the Capitol hoping to derail Congress’s election certification.

But whatever their words are, as we have learned over many years with Trump, what matters far more are their actions.

Marching toward the Insurrection Act

Leaders on the left, including former Labor Secretary Prof. Robert Reich and Gov. JB Pritzker of Illinois, are sounding the alarm about one of those coming actions. The regime, they warn, has a clear goal in mind: invocation of the Insurrection Act.

Gov. Pritzker went before the press on October 6 to inform and prepare the people of his state, and in particular the residents of Chicago and surrounding suburbs.

“The Trump administration is following a playbook: Cause chaos, create fear and confusion, make it seem that peaceful protesters are a mob by firing gas pellets and tear gas canisters at them,” he declared. “Why? To create the pretext for invoking the Insurrection Act.”

Prof. Reich laid out a four-point plan by the Trump regime to move us to a place where Trump can invoke the Act:

1. Deploy ICE into “blue cities”

2. Exaggerate the scale and severity

3. Deploy National Guard troops

4. Invoke the Insurrection Act

If you’re up on the news, you know we’re already well along the path, whether it’s the “cause chaos, create fear and confusion” playbook described by Gov. Pritzker, or whether its Trump’s step-by-step plan laid out by Prof. Reich.

Inventing the justification

The key to both is the creation of a pretext or “false flag” operation. That could lead to yet another declaration of a “national emergency” that would then justify invocation of the Insurrection Act.

There is no actual insurrection or rebellion happening, so the White House, with the help of right-wing media like the Fox Network, is inventing one out of whole cloth. Yesterday, for example, Trump told the media, “You look at Portland, and you see fires all over the place, you see fights and just violence. It is so crazy.”

Earlier, he said to reporters, “Portland is burning to the ground” and “all you have to do is look at the TV and read your newspapers.”

Let’s be very clear. This is brazen gaslighting. There are no fires. Portland is not burning to the ground. It’s not on our TV or in the newspapers as Trump claimed. And there is no violence there other than what federal authorities have themselves caused.

Trump also declared, “I don’t know what could be worse than Portland. You don’t even have stores anymore. They don’t even put glass up. They put plywood on their windows.”

This outburst demonstrates the danger of having a propagandistic network shaping the false reality of its audience. Trump had been watching Fox footage about a boarded-up, burning Portland. But it was from the Black Lives Matter protests there five years ago.

Stirring unrest and chaos

Without actual violence to quell, the feds are now trying to provoke a violent response, raiding apartment buildings at night, detaining U.S. citizens and zip-tying children.

As The Daily podcast reported yesterday, these actions, unsurprisingly, have led local residents who are fed up with ICE abuses to begin to take more spontaneous, aggressive action against agents who are conducting enforcement operations there. Crowds built over the weekend in the Brighton Park neighborhood of Chicago, where according to DHS at least, agents were chased by civilian motorists, two of whom slammed their vehicles into ICE vehicles. One motorist was shot and took herself to the hospital.

Federal agents have also begun firing tear gas and pepper balls on nonviolent protesters. Here, for example, is footage from outside the ICE facility in Broadview, Illinois, in the Chicago area.

It’s hard not to see that federal authorities keep upping the stakes and conducting themselves ever more horrifically for a reason. The goal is to cause communities to snap and fight back, giving Trump the excuse he needs to claim there is an actual rebellion against federal authority and to invoke the Insurrection Act.

It’s also clear, however, that the White House will simply manufacture a crisis if one does not organically materialize. Already, DHS is sending camera crews around on its immigration raids. It takes footage from those operations and splices it together into propaganda that falsely depicts our cities to be overrun by criminal migrant gangs.

Trump is already citing nonexistent citywide fires, conjuring images of boarded-up stores, and warning of widespread but imaginary violence. It is no leap for him to next point to DHS’s propaganda reels, as if they tell the whole scary story rather than a deliberately sensationalized one.

Plans already in the making

NBC News reported yesterday that White House officials have already held “serious discussion” about invoking the Insurrection Act, but that no final decision has yet been made, according to five sources including one senior official inside the White House:

Talk inside the White House about invoking the act has ebbed and flowed since Trump took office again in January, said the five people, who include the senior administration official, two people familiar with the discussions and two people close to the White House.

But the debate inside the administration has shifted recently, from whether it makes sense to invoke the act to more deeply exploring how and when it might be invoked, both people close to the White House said.

Trump, you may recall, wanted to invoke the Insurrection Act during his first term when Black Lives Matter protests erupted in Washington, D.C. He was dissuaded from doing so by aides in the White House, but he now regrets having listened to those aides, says the senior official interviewed by NBC.

The current discussions revolve around how the Insurrection Act would play out in the streets of our cities, given that local officials and authorities are already uncooperative or even hostile to federal forces:

Administration officials have discussed invoking the act if local law enforcement authorities cannot or will not protect ICE and federal law enforcement agents, one of the people familiar with the discussions said.

But one concern that some officials have raised is that invoking the act could eventually lead to pitting active-duty U.S. troops against other Americans, this person said.

What happens if Trump goes ahead with it?

It is likely that Trump will soon reach a point of decision on the question of the Insurrection Act, particularly as court after court rejects his use of Title 10 to federalize and deploy troops as presidential overreach, given the actual facts on the ground.

Trump has to consider, however, that if he moves ahead and invokes the Act, he might still get shot down in the courts. True, judicial deference to the executive branch would rise to its maximum level should the Act be invoked. But judicial review does not completely evaporate. Given the verifiable truth that there is no actual rebellion or invasion anywhere, let alone one that must be put down through the use of the military acting as local police, and further given Trump’s record of making absurdly false claims to justify his actions, this may prove the rare case where the federal judiciary overrules the White House on a matter of claimed national security.

After all, if judges can’t say that Portland is not on fire and there is no actual emergency or rebellion, then this is tantamount to declaring judicial review dead.

Pockets of America have been under military occupation and temporary control before under the Insurrection Act. Its most recent invocation was at the affirmative request of California Gov. Pete Wilson during the Rodney King verdict riots in Los Angeles in 1992. Once order was restored to the city, the justification for further military enforcement of local law ended, and the troops went home.

Trump may try to argue that the Insurrection Act has no actual time limit built into it, so that even after the emergency is over the military police may remain. But such a broad interpretation of the Act may not actually fly—yes, even before this radical Supreme Court. Indeed, were this interpretation correct, any despot would simply have to wait until an emergency somewhere, invoke the Act, then never cede control back to state authorities. Our entire system of federalism would be at the whim of a would-be tyrant—just as we are seeing now. I’m not certain there are five votes to declare Trump as dictator forever, however feckless the radical majority has been to date.

It’s also important to stress that even if (and increasingly likely when) Trump invokes the Insurrection Act, this does not create “martial law.” That’s a far more extreme circumstance where the military assumes control of all government functions.

Even if Trump invokes the Act, our courts will not be military-run courts, and our local civic leaders will not be assigned by the military. We would instead face a stepped up “police state” where federal troops would have the legal right to act like local law enforcement, including arresting protestors and possibly even opposition leaders. This is something they are otherwise forbidden to do under the Posse Comitatus Act.

That’s an admittedly terrifying prospect. But based on recent internal National Guard memos, the military understands how unpopular this would be and does not want itself used like a police force for long, especially with no actual riot or rebellion happening. For its part, the public may quickly balk at the high cost of keeping soldiers stationed in our cities when we’re already paying for police who are doing their jobs just fine.

Finally, if Trump uses this power, he knows that it is one of last resort for him. This is as far as his power can go under existing law and the Constitution. If he plays the insurrection trump card too early and it fizzles out or backfires, his presumed goal of establishing a police state across multiple U.S. cities in time for the midterm elections could also falter badly.

Meanwhile, those opposed to Trump can push back. We can document the actions and abuses of ICE and other federal agents. We can continue to counter the lies about cities on fire and violence everywhere with counternarratives that call out the absurdity of Trump’s claims. Remember, judges hearing these cases live in the very cities that Trump says are on fire, and they talk to their neighbors and watch their local news. They know he’s blowing orange smoke.

We can also amplify warnings about the White House’s march toward the Insurrection Act so that the playbook is transparent and thus less effective. Already, even in the halls of Congress, there are more moderate GOP senators who are listening and adopting these warnings.

Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina recently noted, “If you look at this particular issue, I don’t see how you can argue that this comports with any sort of conservative view of states’ rights.” And Sen. Tillis told Attorney General Pam Bondi at a Judiciary Committee oversight hearing on Wednesday that the cities and states should be handling local crime themselves.

Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska is also worried about the precedent of sending the National Guard from one state to another over the objections of the receiving state’s governor. “It’s one thing if governors ask and they say, ‘Hey, I need help.’ That’s the way we’ve handled it before,” she said. “I am very apprehensive about the use of our military for policing and, more, the politicization that we’re seeing within the military.”

A final reminder: In upcoming protests, including the massive national No Kings protest set for October 18, we can remain nonviolent and refuse to take the bait of a regime which wants more fodder for Trump’s emergency decrees.

To find a No Kings protest near you, visit this site. Stay safe, stay loud, stay peaceful. — Jay